Slashdot Mirror
Debate Over Amazon Working Conditions Goes Back Years
Nerval's Lobster writes: This weekend, The New York Times published a lengthy report about working conditions for white-collar workers at Amazon. Describing the e-commerce giant as a "bruising workplace," the report paints a picture of a Darwinian environment. But criticism of Amazon's working conditions actually goes back years. In The Everything Store, a book-length account of Amazon by Bloomberg BusinessWeek reporter Brad Stone, the Amazon of yesteryear is indeed described as an aggressive place in which Bezos pushed employees relentlessly. So is Amazon a terrible place to work? On Quora and Glassdoor, current employees suggest that the company presents its workers with interesting challenges, and that the culture is fast-paced. While there are complaints about the hours and workload, many don't seem Amazon-specific: The world is filled with tech pros struggling to achieve work-life balance in the face of incredible goals on tight deadlines. Many cite issues with the company's frugality—its lack of perks vis-à-vis Google or Microsoft. After the report was published Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to employees that reads in part: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day. But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
If you don't like the working conditions then form your own business and work for yourself. It's that simple.
It's nice how complex problems have such simple answers. "If you don't like how much you pay in rent, then buy a house". "If you don't like your low pay, then get a job making more money". "If you can't hold down a job because your car keeps breaking down, then buy a new car".
The answer is easy, implementation, not so much.
I work on cutting edge, genuinely innovative stuff that solves important real world problems (water network monitoring and leak location). I'd never want to work in an environment like this though. It's unnecessary, the company benefits at my expense.
I'm disabled so probably couldn't do it anyway, and wouldn't want to work in an environment that excludes people who work the way I do (at a sensible pace, good work life balance).
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
They are in full damage control mode... top executives are writing pieces stating that they have never been asked to work on weekends... on Saturday?
As a former employee, this article really changed my view of the NY Times. I guess I expected more from such a well-known, established news source. But, this lengthy "expose" was clearly written by two authors with an agenda, and to what end? Readership?
I loved my time at Amazon.com. Yes, it was challenging. My time there forced me to grow as an engineer when I knew I was at risk of stagnation. But, I worked very reasonable hours (~7am-4pm, by choice to avoid traffic) and only very rarely (once very few months on average, typically leading up to Black Friday before all our deployments were locked down) worked nights of weekends. I traveled twice for Amazon - and had no trouble expensing the flight, hotel, meals, and transportation to/from the airport. I never saw anyone cry at their desk. Everyone who worked there was very civil.
I left for opportunity more than anything - an opportunity to both advance my career and be closer to my family on the east coast.
But yeah, I really have to wonder why the NY Times is busting Amazon's balls. I feel like a dope for not being more suspicious of them before now.
But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR. You can also email me directly at jeff@amazon.com. Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
. . . but probably best to do so anonymously, or with someone else's email account. We all know how large companies love whistle blowers.
I can't tell if the OP is being sarcastic or not. Just like poor people just need to stop being so poor.
http://www.newyorker.com/humor...
SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Saying that he was “horrified” by a New York Times article recounting callous behavior on the part of Amazon executives, company founder Jeff Bezos warned today that any employees found lacking in empathy would be instantly purged.
In an e-mail to all Amazon employees issued late Sunday evening, Bezos said that the company would begin grading its workers on empathy, and that the ten per cent found to be least empathic would be “immediately culled from the herd.”
To achieve this goal, Amazon said that it would introduce a new internal reporting system called EmpathyTrack, which will enable employees to secretly report on their colleagues’ lack of humanity.
The system will allow Amazon employees to grade their co-workers on a scale from a hundred (nicest) to zero (pure evil), resulting in empathy-based data that will be transmitted directly to Bezos.
Then, through a new program called Next Day Purging, any employee found lacking in empathy will be removed from the company within twenty-four hours of Bezos’s termination order. “We can’t be the greatest retailer in the world unless we are also the kindest,” Bezos wrote in his e-mail. “So my message to all Amazonians is loud and clear: be kind or taste my wrath. Love, Jeff.”
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Posting anonymously for obvious reasons. I am anonymizing some details too, to make people not quite identifiable.
This has been going on for a while, and it hits developers too. A friend of mine programmed there for years, on the retail side. Things weren't quite that bad for him originally, but as time went by, pressure keep adding, teams were pitted against each other, and things like family and health were seeing as secondary. Team X did all this stuff, so we have to work even longer hours to compete with them! Taking sick days was seen as letting the team down, so people worked through everything. One time a cold was worse than a cold. Going untreated, it turned to bronchitis, then pneumonia. By the time he did go to a doctor, permanent damage was done.
I wish he had quit before that, but having worked there for a while, he had an unwarranted sense of loyalty for the company. Now he can't even go on a trip without bringing medical equipment, because his lungs are shot. No amount of pay and stock options is worth that, but he didn't know the price he was paying until it was done.
I've only seen one place that created more stress, and it's a huge hedge fund that happens to be run a bit like a personality cult for his founder.
Putting the health of employees and their family first is a big thing for me now. A lax work from home policy, no fear of review trouble for too many sick days in a crunch. Coming to work sick should not be something to be proud of, but ashamed of, as the most you can accomplish is to get your team mates sick! Same thing for working long hours. A coworker of mine used to do weekend marathons, where he'd make major changes. Guess where all the bugs came from? Marathons where a lot was produced, but most of it was shit.
It's the wrong culture, and Amazon has managers working there, right now, that keep that culture running. Jeff should just fire the hell out of them, because they are doing him no favors. Stories get around, and that's why, when Amazon calls trying to hire very senior people. Many of us say no.
about 4 years ago now I guess. I thought Steve was exaggerating about Amazon, or trying to be humorous (or both), but now in hindsight I think he was probably being accurate.
The rant
"Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.
Micro-managing isn't that third thing that Amazon does better than us, by the way. I mean, yeah, they micro-manage really well, but I wouldn't list it as a strength or anything. I'm just trying to set the context here, to help you understand what happened. We're talking about a guy who in all seriousness has said on many public occasions that people should be paying him to work at Amazon. He hands out little yellow stickies with his name on them, reminding people "who runs the company" when they disagree with him. The guy is a regular... well, Steve Jobs, I guess. Except without the fashion or design sense. Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies.
So one day Jeff Bezos issued a mandate. He's doing that all the time, of course, and people scramble like ants being pounded with a rubber mallet whenever it happens. But on one occasion -- back around 2002 I think, plus or minus a year -- he issued a mandate that was so out there, so huge and eye-bulgingly ponderous, that it made all of his other mandates look like unsolicited peer bonuses."
where do you live? is it easy for you to move? do you have children and school concerns? is your spouse or significant other ready to move on a whim? are you yourself ready to pack all your shit sever your ties and try to find a new place you like as much as your current one?
what job do you work in? is it "tens of thousands" of other companies who would employ you? i guess you must be a short order cook or truck driver, careers like programming for example are niche: if you program web front ends you don't jump to OS programmer for example
do you have enough money to cushion the transition period form one job to the next? can you afford ancillary costs associated with the move?
how is the new job? the boss's personality? your work team, your work environment? job perks? business outlook of the new business sector?
if you aren't moving, how far away is the new job if you aren't moving? is the commute different (train/ car)? traffic jams? length of time commuting?
this is off of the top of my head. there are dozens more top level categories and thousands of specific concerns to each person
it is is EXTREMELY complex
you are either trolling and faking ignorance of something this obvious, or you are a genuine moron
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
The article was pretty balanced as far as content, the only hit piece nature was that all the good stuff was said upfront so you forgot it by the time you get past the stories about employee that just lost children, spouses or parents and were fired.
But honestly, those stories about people being fired after loosing someone or having health problems are a pretty good reason do the order they did. It was bad enough that Bezos made the public claim in the summary above about not being the amazon he knows. But the authors make a pretty good point early on that it's exactly the type of cutthroat performance at all cost Amazon that he's built. This is what happens when you build monsters where you are encouraged to attack your coworkers, they become monsters and attack them when they are down at the worst moments in their life. Because by attacking their coworkers they can advance.
This is the Amazon Bezos has built, one without empathy where the ends justifies the means. It's the reason every other fortune 500 is abandoning the very hiring and performance metrics Bezo's champions. Bezos shouldn't be disturbed by this (if he actually is) but I do understand his need to inject PR speak about how he wants everyone to email him or HR if this occurs. Which would probably just get you fired quicker.
I can't tell if the OP is being sarcastic or not. Just like poor people just need to stop being so poor.
There's nothing wrong with being poor. Stop treating the poor like there's something wrong with them.
"A plan fiendishly clever in its intricacies"- Homer Simpson
Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long. Quote: "Amazon's work-life balance is awful."
Working for Amazon Sounds Utterly Soul Crushing.
Life in an Amazon Warehouse: Fear and Efficiency at 35 Orders Per Second
Inside Amazon's Kafkaesque performance-improvement plan
Inside Amazon's Bizarre Corporate Culture
Amazon Is a Time Thief, by an Amazon Employee.
Is Amazon an unpleasant place to work? Quote: "Based on my experience, I agree with what everyone has said about the company being a horrible place to work."
Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
Glassdoor Reviews of Amazon
Word to the wise... Yes, CEOs can listen, and do listen.
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
But honestly, those stories about people being fired after loosing someone or having health problems are a pretty good reason do the order they did.
Did we ever get the other side of those stories in particular? They sound horrible, inhuman, hard to believe. Just because a company promotes competition among workers does not mean they promote behaviors such as these. One behavior does not cause the other. Workers that feel slighted often exaggerate reality. Companies are not in a legal position to tell their side of the story regarding individual employees for a number of reasons, they can only generically respond (answering my rhetorical question above). And I am sure there are some bad bosses at Amazon, just like other huge companies. I am also sure that just like any company there are people that were let go for not doing a good job but would never admit their own performance was subpar. In these particular cases. We really don't know for sure the whole story.
Should Bezos be expected to NOT continue the style of management that helped make Amazon so successful to start with? Should employees expect the company culture to change or leave if they don't like it? There are no right or wrong answers, IMHO.
Absolutely true. Although there are practical issues with being too poor. Like being homeless or unable to eat.
Having said that, being somewhat poor is not necessarily an unhappy situation. Once you get beyond survival and have some creature comforts, it only really starts becoming a happiness problem when you are forced to deal with a large disparity.
In other words, people become unhappy with less if they are constantly shown things that other people have that they don't. This is also why many relatively richer (but still not actually "rich") people look down on poor people. There is a disparity that they have come up on top of, and they feel superior for it.
However, anyone who has things can tell you that First World problems can make you just as unhappy as being poor which seems ridiculous on the surface, but has everything to do with a feeling of *relative* inadequacy or poverty. You might have a nice home, decent education, and a relatively promising future, but if you're bullied or isolated socially, or just depressed, you could end up suicidal or even homicidal.
There are rich people who would have lived longer and happier lives if they'd been born poor.
Exactly what side would the company have?
Upper management probably never heard about this because it's the culture they've built. Employees have tools to basically feed comments on co-workers where there is a practical guarantee of anonymity without the ability to confront the accusation. Because they fire a certain percent every year regardless of quality there is this competition to see other people fail so you can succeed.
In such an environment is it surprising that the person who had a devastating personal event suddenly starts seeing negative performance reviews because other employees that may not even know them are sending in negative comments to try to secure their own position? And that managers under pressure to fire a certain percent every few months wouldn't take advantage of this because their own employees performance metric effects their performance metric?
It's not really that hard to believe IMO. It's a cultural thing. As long as everyone is 20 or in upper management it's probably a great place to work.
" Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero.”
Sounds like all that's happened is that Amazon has found a new firing offense.
europe, land of free healthcare and cheap college and four weeks vacation, has much higher happiness and are richer societies
america, land of "get cancer and lose your house" and "become a slave under a crushing loan if you want an education" and "work 70 hours to barely tread water, vacation? lol" is less happy and poorer
because a true meritocracy, which conservatives apparently love, requires a level playing field, which means removing most of the problems of where you start in life: rich or poor (healthcare and education), as the determination of your fate
what conservatives policies really get us (whether they know it and not admit to it, the plutocrats, or simply don't know it, the propagandized morons) is classism: rich, you do fine. poor, die early and work your ass off and do *not* get ahead, as the fable promises
oh sure, you *should* work hard and get ahead. a proper society is a meritocracy. but since reagan the middle class is on a long term decline due to the plutocrat loving policies we get. the policies conservatives support means: if your daddy is rich, you'll get a cushy job due to connections and coast through life. impossible to fail no matter how hard you fuck up. and if your poor, work your ass off and lose everything due to one problem in life, the kind we all encounter
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
the most entitled people on this planet are conservatives: they are entitled to a society that be preserved according a mythological superior conservative past that never actually existed, and they are entitled to dictate to you how to run your private social life. "small government!" ... unless it has to do with who you marry or how you plan your births
meanwhile they get angry at entitlements like: healthcare, education, housing, clothing, food. because someone is poor. of course, if you are poor, it is 100% because of your own life failures, never what the society structures your possible life choices as: "put food on the table but be buried in a payday loan"... your poor life choices! pfffft
it's a pathological hateful creed, and it's quite pathetic so many losers can have their buttons pushed on these issues and vote for plutocrat agendas. they're just ignorant tools. just look at the hoopla over abortion and planned parenthood right now: "ignore the economy, war drums, police misconduct, social inequality, healthcare problems... some lady is going to remove a blob in her body that is just as alive as 20 year old!"
i am pro-life! they say. except if there is a war to fight or a convict to execute or they ran from a cop or they want housing, food, clothing, an education, then fuck them... but i'm pro-life, really!
perennial conservative wedge issue, used to deliver the morons to vote for the plutocrat agenda which keeps us all mired. dependable useful fools for a cause which keeps us all poor
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I emailed a friend currently working at Amazon, with links to the NYT story and the CNN/Money story. I asked him/her if that sort of thing ever happened in their group.
The reply: "It seems all true, even!"
The friend is a former boss of mine, whom I know to be honest, fair, and a really good manager, who knows my skill set well, and would have been able to match me to some opportunities. But, now, I think I'll pass on Amazon as I'm getting confirmation of the environment from someone I know.
If Bezos truly doesn't condone the bad behavior, but also believes that it isn't happening underneath him, then, he's asleep at the switch.
Berating people in meetings is actually "creating a hostile work environment", which is actionable under U.S. labor law. But, anybody mentioning this to HR would probably mark the person as "not an Amazonian" and the person would find themselves being shoved out.
This is "stack rank" management [at MS], where the lower 20% must get bad reviews even if they're top performers. In a dept of five where all the team members are stellar performers, one must be singled out as a "low performer". This was started, IIRC, at HP, and is also at Cisco. So, the group gets together and mutually selects "the goat" for the quarter. After five quarters, each employee has been "the goat".
Like a good neighbor, fsck is there
It's childishly easy to dangle "expected" over someone's neck. Then let them go when their "priorities are clearly not in line with the company's mission".
Threats are perfectly good substitutes for policy, when execution is arbitrary.
I've been working at Amazon for 6 months (after an acquisition) and I haven't yet heard of anyone asked to work on weekends.
The only major exception I've seen is on-call people - they are expected to take care of any issues that might happen at any time when they're on-call.