mental health
-
CW: This chapter details a mass shooting threat. Please read with care or skip ahead to Quitting. Another employee posted a threat to shoot up our office. They cited mental health struggles being ignored by HR, and wishing to kill their teammates. They claimed to actively possess a firearm and asked us not to come…
-
I used to talk about that night like it was a triumph. A war story. The time I solved a problem no one else could at midnight and saved the release. My team called me a hero. But something else was happening. I never really recovered from that first crunch. It eroded my boundaries around…
-
While my first official breakdown didn’t happen until years later, I had a mini episode my first year at Amazon. Our team was blocked from launching the release candidate of our application. Three bugs, nested deeply in the code, were causing a break. This launch was critical to the org and had a lot of…
-
Why did my mentor (anti-mentor) hurt me? I trusted him, I looked up to him, but he kicked down at me. It felt like he was trying to get me to quit, like over half the team did. But I couldn’t quit. I had too much riding on this job. I wondered why he humiliated…