This is something you learn the hard way about neoliberal meritocracy…“They only hire the best and you fight to get there, you’re the best until you inevitably aren’t at your best…and once you aren’t at your best even for a moment of weakness, then you are not the best…and you never were”. This is why everyone needs protection from a work culture that burns through people.
This is why everyone needs protection from a work culture that burns through people.
You are all welcome to Europe for that. Come on over.
You don’t want us……
I dunno, if they create a braindrain, I’m okay with that.
They don’t need to leave the US to create a brain drain. It’s happening naturally haha
Maybe, but you got to give the honest people a chance to prove themselves
Europe’s going through a pretty big racist anti-immigrant phase, so probably not the best of ideas.
Who’s downvoting this??? It’s literally true. Listen to any debate of european legislatures on immigration and they will just say the things the American right has dogwhistles for.
Very true. But we are still fighting and willing to get out in the streets.
Not worse than America yet though.
That’s why Europeans are so famously tolerant of the Romani, right?
🤷♂️ “Europeans”.
I’m tolerant of Romani. Everyone I know is as well. My extended family even employs this lady to do some cleaning chores so she can support her family back in Romania.
There’s always gonna be racist jerks. Shall we talk about the racism against black and Spanish people in America right now?
It’s better in Europe. I didn’t say it’s perfect.
the US is literally throwing brown ppl into cages without due process. there’s no comparison. anyone trying to equate the two has lost the plot.
Agreed.
deleted by creator
For now anyway. Europe is not immune to fascism.
Definitely not, but we still have much more favorable worker laws.
definitely. we have to fight, and HARD, to not fall into what America is becoming.
Hear hear 📣
It doesn’t seem like Europe is very open to American immigrants these days….
Weeell, I guess there’s the disclaimer:
We’re/I’m open to Americans who are progressive and have common sense and respect people’s equal worth and value. Let’s make the world a better place together.
I’m fully on board, but emigrating to any European nation is hard. Gotta have a very in-demand skill, be relatively young, and already be sponsored by a European employer; or, alternatively, have “fuck you” money to pay your way in.
I feel you.
No thanks, I don’t want to see this side of the ocean get ruined too
Actually we’re managing that on our own soon, I think. 🫣
those aren’t the ppl that want to come here.
deleted by creator
Right, I’ll just conjure up a work visa for my bullshit job, sell my house and belongings, and leave my family and friends behind. Super easy, barely an inconvenience.
🤷♂️ Just saying you’re welcome to come afaic. 🙂
Hawkernews being unhinged capitalists as always:
aeternum: 18h
Sad.
And perhaps a controversial take but consider the counterfactual: Should it be illegal to fire employees that recent took mental health leave? Get a bad review or put on a PIP? It’s already becoming a common strategy to immediately take mental health/sick leave.
0xbadc0de5: 3h
This is sad and tragic but ultimately I don’t think Mongo bares any responsibility here. If her partner left her while she was having a prolonged mental health crisis, would her partner be to blame for her suicide? I would argue: no.
You’re just an expendable cog to the money machine to techbros.
This is sad and tragic but ultimately I don’t think Mongo bares any responsibility here
Annie was on leave receiving intensive mental health treatment when MongoDB demanded her immediate return to work. She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. Instead, MongoDB terminated her health insurance and then fired her in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the New York State and City Human Rights Laws. Shortly afterward, Annie took her own life.
Yeah demanding she return to work is the part where they bare responsibility.
The frustrating part about being an American is tying work to healthcare.
Work being tied to healthcare only makes sense if the entire country would work like a corporation… Oh wait…
In my experience, when you bring up FMLA, then you’re going to be fired.
Its a well-intentioned protection, but not enough legal teeth. Corporations have learned how to work around it.
This problem will continue to get worse until workers gain power in our society. Mass unionization or socialist revolution would solve the problem; both are very unlikely.
All that is left is violence; may a thousand Luigi’s bloom.
this must be an american thing.
it really is wild how toothless american labor is
Land of the free (to be exploited by a rich white minority)
“American Labor” once threw bombs at police and fought actual battles with the National Guard, it’s been a long war and the capitalists have used every means in the last 100 years to bring labor to where it is today. We live under the most sophisticated police surveillance state with a global military with what seems like endless resources. It’s not so much labor has no teeth but we are gripped at the throat by capital. We can fight back, we still have the means.
so, let’s just say that theoretically there came to be one of those unicorn morale billionaires. someone who came from nothing but eventually came to learn how this whole fucked system came about, then exploited it themselves to grab as much $ as they can (ie. just yoinked $ from the stock market during a crash…about as morale as making $ you didnt work for gets) but they didn’t let it corrupt them nor get distracted by the bread & circus.
an actual proper robinhood type, that just has effectively infinite $ to throw into the Great Game, how would this person go about affecting as much pro-labor change in the ol’ USA?
to me, the most impactful area appears to be media control. murdoch as his fingers in damn near everything, the propagandas grip undeniable once you finally become aware of it. various other far right/lib billionaires either outright own or otherwise heavily influence damn near every media company, to include NPR. the only mainstream outlet that even remotely acknowledges/covers the genocide in palestine (though still refuses to call it a genocide) is AP news.
Yes we have no mandatory paid breaks. If you get a holiday you are lucky. We have no medical protection. Few states have mandatory accrual of some days off or sick day. It’s horrible here.
Mandatory paid breaks are definitely a thing here. CA is 10 minutes every 4 hours. FMLA and workers comp cover medical protection. I can’t remember the last time I even pretended to consider a job without holiday pay and vacation, though i agree they should be mandatory and not optional. Where exactly are you working with conditions like you describe?
Supposedly theres a general mass strike planned for 2028. I’ll be participating as a UAW member.
Over 2 years away? What will that even do?
This is always what bothered me about being American.
We protest on convenient days because most people can’t be bothered on work days.
Without work, we lose our job. Without job, no healthcare or house or food or any kind of assistance. No unions to really speak of and no safety net. System has us by the balls.
They say 36 hours without food causes total upheaval, it seems like that is what will be necessary for an acute change.
It’s been in planning for awhile, but mostly the wait is for getting more workplaces in the US unionized to participate. Imo, we would need to convince key industries that could actually shut down the United States, it would be like: airline pilots/stewardesses, truck drivers, railroad workers, teachers, natural gas/electric workers, and health care workers. I don’t know how progress is going, but even just 3 of those groups would be enough to cause a halt in what’s, best case scenario, a more fragile administration.
deleted by creator
Keep the cogs placated.
My body is ready.
The sad thing is what is expected now: the manager who made this decision will get fired, if we’re lucky. But their bosses who set the policy, incentives and company culture to do this will apologize profusely, initiate some corporate training and proceed to change nothing. And neither will any other company.
All over database software, that functions alright as is.
The state of things feels pretty depressing to me. It feels like accountability at the highest levels is vanishing, especially when I see people like Bezos, Zuck or Musk (or more local leaders outside of my online habits) pursue completely irrational things, with zero consequence. It’s not getting any better; it’s getting so bad even the impact the economy and quality-of-life is getting hard to ignore.
I actually think the expected reality is worse:
The family will likely settle out of court. MongoDB will admit to no wrongdoing and the settlement will be sealed and there will be an NDA signed by the family, essentially making it impossible for future employees to get the help they need.
If the family really, really cares about their daughter’s legacy, they need to hold out until MongoDB is willing to admit to wrongdoing, even if it means they don’t see a penny.
Mongo’s strategy will be no different than any other corporate: circle the wagons, put out some “empathetic” release, then get back to maximizing revenue.
I’m sure this happens to thousands of people every year in America. It’s good that awareness is being spread about our dystopian hellscape
Happened to me. Went on leave specifically for mental health issues caused by work. Fired first day of leave.
I’m glad you’re still with us, friend. Hope everything’s alright.
I had this happen to me at a company that is now an IBM subsidiary. I took FMLA leave to get mental health help to cope with the burnout, and about a week after I got back, they took me into an office for a “quick catch-up meeting” where they told me it wasn’t working out and that I had to go. I’d worked my balls off, getting promoted directly from product support up to software engineering within a year, but apparently that didn’t indicate anything positive to them.
yup, taking fmla just signals to these jackals that you actually know your rights…and they don’t want you potentially spreading that knowledge via cultural osmosis into their company
Does it rhyme with bedcat?
I’ll just come out and say it was SevOne, although it was well before the acquisition. This was right around the time they got a huge infusion of cash from Chinese investors.
Sorry, must have been rough.
Thanks, it was. What’s sad is that, when it was just owned by Bain Capital (Mitt Romney’s company), things were actually excellent. Great benefits, great work-life balance, if you needed a break you took a break. Then the Chinese money came in and all of a sudden everything went to shit.
You … killed yourself? Is this your ghost posting?
The firing part, I mean.
Don’t worry it was clear to anyone not trying to be a smartass.
Also some people attempt suicide and either survive or die briefly before revival so it’s kind of not really the most sensitive joke.
deleted by creator
Sorry about your balls man.
The poor lil guys are so flat now. My sack looks like someone ran over silly putty with a zamboni machine.
>Capitalism doesn’t kill people
They fooled us.
And Mongo is now on the eternal shit list. As far as I’m concerned this is not merely abuse, it is premeditated murder.
Just info on the company (and that it might be hard to avoid bcs it might be a third party of an app you might be using - it’s a big list):
As of May 2025, MongoDB was the fifth most popular database software. It focuses mostly on managing large databases of unstructured, “messy” data. It’s typically used for mobile and web apps that commonly use unstructured databases. As of 2024, there were 50,000 MongoDB customers.
Disgusting. Regrettable.
Preventable.
Curious - because I’m a dumb American. What would make this preventable?
She was a person going through a mental crisis. And I can’t say at my American job, my work would never stop me from offing myself, beyond recommending a wellness app.
She asked for an extension to complete her treatment, or at the least a short period to consult with her medical providers about whether and how she might be able to return to work before the treatment was completed. Instead, MongoDB terminated her health insurance and then fired her in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act and the New York State and City Human Rights Laws. Shortly afterward, Annie took her own life.
Maybe, as a VERY FIRST STEP, don’t act in violation of human rights laws. It seems, based on what was linked in this post, that she was trying to figure out how to best move forward (not just for herself but also in reapects to her returning to work) when they cut her off.
-
Illegal to fire someone on leave, no exceptions.
-
Healthcare related leaves (employee paychecks for the time) are partially (eg 80% or everything over 3 days or whatever the country codifies) covered by the government.
-
Shaming the employer who now has a hard time to find workforce.
I thought this was the norm outside of USA.
And something that employers still exploit via ‘consensual termination’, which usually involves some kind of extra compensation, but it’s not regulated per se, just wherever a person in power is able to get the other one to agree to. Still better than no protections or warnings I guess.Oh, reev already pointed out that that practice is against the law as it is now. But healthcare shouldn’t be tied to your employer/employment status.
-
Heartbreaking. And revolting. All these companies nowadays bang on about mental health, and supporting diversity, all lip service, of course. But this is utterly despicable, I hope the company doesn’t recover from this.
At this point the AIs would be more humane managers anyway
Actually, saying please would get the ai to change their earlier response
That or it will burn more GPU trying to understand human nature.
in idiocracy the movie, the AI actually controls society in 500years. it replaced all ceos, managers, of course the stupidfication of humans occured at the same time.
Ah so it’s just like real life where the stupiditication of humanity occurred several decades before the invention of AI which then made the effects permanent
Social murder
Man, I read this as the technology being blamed, vs. her being their employee. I hope her family gets justice for this, but companies seem to be immune from consequences, so we’ll see…
mongo has always been a shit org. this is no surprise.
if you work for this shithole you should organize a labor strike because she was anyone of you.
I think I should wait to hear from MongoDb before making any judgements.
