An assistant brain surgeon who makes six figures a year has spoken out about why she left the operating room to work in an Amazon warehouse.
Helen Xu, 31, from south Brisbane, started working as an assistant surgeon at a Queensland hospital in 2018.
But when Covid hit in 2020, Ms Xu was working tirelessly almost every day, with shifts lasting up to 30 hours.
As she had no children or elderly relatives at home to risk spreading the disease to, Ms Xu said she was part of the staff who were heavily relied on to pick up extra shifts.
Exhausted and unable to spend quality time with friends and family, Ms. Xu finally gave up her career in medicine in September 2021.
In desperate need of change, Ms Xu said Amazon strangely came onto the scene as an option because she was always impressed with how quickly they delivered her packages during the lockdown.
He saw a job posting for the company and by October 2021 he was already stocking shelves for the delivery giant.
“For the last few months working in the hospital, I wasn’t sure when I would be able to get enough rest,” she told Daily Mail Australia.
Helen Xu, 31, from South Brisbane, started working as an assistant surgeon at a Queensland hospital in 2018. She joined the Amazon team in September 2021.
She said that during the pandemic, exceptional circumstances at her hospital meant she was on call every day.
“There was a lot of pressure for those who didn’t have children or elderly people at home to come,” he said.
‘I also didn’t want to tell my friends and family about any possible contact I’d had with sick people, so I didn’t have much of a social life.’
Ms Xu said the job was so demanding that she was called in almost every day and sometimes only had half a day off to rest between consecutive shifts.
After starting her job as an occasional Amazon warehouse associate, the 31-year-old found herself preparing customer orders, loading boxes onto trucks and stacking shelves.
Ms. Xu had never worked anywhere like Amazon before, but said her previous job didn’t give her a social life or even enough time to get a decent rest.
In the years since, Ms. Xu has risen through Amazon’s ranks and is now a full-time operations shift manager.
“I’d never worked on anything like this before, but I’d often order things from Amazon and think ‘why do they deliver so much faster than other companies?'” he said.
Entry-level surgeon assistant jobs have a base salary of $113,792, according to Salary Expert.
The hourly rate for an Amazon warehouse associate is about $32, and when she started, Ms. Xu worked four to five shifts a week.
“I suppose that when you analyze medicine, the salary is higher and definitely there will be salary discrepancies between now and then, but in terms of how long I have (now) for me, it works,” he said.
Ms Xu rents in Brisbane and says she can support herself financially on her new career path.
She added that the culture at Amazon was very different from the high-pressure environment she experienced at the hospital.
“It’s very different and that’s part of the reason I ended up staying, because the work culture is super inclusive,” she said.
‘Your background or experience is not judged.
“It really opened my mind as to how inclusive the environment is.”
As for her time as a surgical assistant, Ms. Xu said she has no plans to return to the hospital anytime soon.
This comes amid a massive hiring spree at Amazon, with 600 seasonal positions available ahead of the holiday rush.
Applications are open in Sydney, Melbourne, Perth, Brisbane, Adelaide, Newcastle, Gold Coast, Gosford and Geelong.