Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress(sfchronicle.com)
sfchronicle.com
Suicide of an Uber engineer: Widow blames job stress
http://www.sfchronicle.com/business/article/Suicide-of-an-Uber-engineer-widow-blames-job-11095807.php#photo-12784362
5 comments
Startups seem heavily incentivized to grind their employee's lives into dust while maintaining plausible deniability, though. (Plausible deniability in the form of free lunches, foosball, etc.)
So what do you do if your life got ground to dust and then you lose the job for performance? Asking for "a friend".
That's terrible. In my experience, work stress is awful enough on its own, but the knowledge that you need to provide for a spouse and perhaps a family really compounds it. You can't just quit. It feels hopeless.
Some of this may come from people overly identifying with their work roles - and when those work roles come with a mild hero complex due to rising success and the promise of riches/prestige - egos thrash around at high speeds. Part of this phenomenon is the almost manic behavior you see in some entrepreneurs/investors/leaders as they buzz around like bees to the honey.
People need to take a step back from this capitalistic bubble and remember that we are here to do jobs and that employers must respect not just time boundaries but psychological boundaries as well. We can do great work and produce tools that have real impact on the social and economic welfare in the world, but never, never, never at the cost of our wellbeing.
Very sad what happened to this fellow.