- SEATTLE — On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.
They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.
At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
Bezos' response is equally rough. The quote that gets me specifically is this:
He is definitely aware of the hostile conditions, but is taking the same approach to his business as JK Simmons' character in Whiplash.“I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay. I know I would leave such a company.”
Crocodile tears. Bezos hasn't said the first fuckin' thing about the Tom Joads his culture is creating. That's cuz the guys in the warehouses don't get mentioned in the tech press. The NYT? Well, everybody is talking about that. Amazon's abuse of its employees has been a known quantity since it was six guys in a garage.
There's an anecdote in The Everything Store about a guy working so hard, with so many long hours, that he didn't get to return to his car for a month. It ended up being towed. It took the guy six months to figure this out because Amazon was working him hard enough that he had nowhere to be except at Amazon for about eight months. Guy is a friend of a friend. I met him at a party, then hung out with him at a couple more. I first heard that story in 2003. He was still working at Amazon. They laid him off in 2005, though. Why? Because Amazon. I've known maybe four people who have worked at Amazon. They aren't just negative towards the company. They aren't simply down. They're oddly shattered by the experience. I get the sense that working at Amazon is corrosive to one's soul.
Came here to post this from The Everything Store.
Evidence of this friction usually emerged during the question-and-answer sessions at the company’s regular all-hands meetings, held for many years at Seattle’s oldest playhouse, the Moore Theater. Employees would stand up and pose direct questions to the executive team, and often they inquired about the enormous workload and frenetic pace. During one memorable meeting, a female employee pointedly asked Bezos when Amazon was going to establish a better work-life balance. He didn’t take that well. "The reason we are here is to get stuff done, that is the top priority," he answered bluntly. "That is the DNA of Amazon. If you can’t excel and put everything into it, this might not be the place for you."
"Jeff didn’t believe in work-life balance," says Kim Rachmeler. "He believed in work-life harmony. I guess the idea is you might be able to do everything all at once."
Everything I've read about Bezos indicates that he's a star-spangled asshole. All entrepreneurs have their quirks and well-mannered women rarely make history and all that but Bezos seems to be a special kind of jerk. That, combined with the fact that his grand innovation is "lower margins" makes me extremely bearish on Amazon. I'm hopeful Jet eats their goddamn lunch because the only thing protecting Amazon so far is that nobody else positioned themselves to survive as a profit-averse organization when it was possible to do so. Any organization that makes you cheer on Walmart is unabashedly evil.
I feel like Bezos' major innovation is "if you are fanatical enough about customer service, you can get away with just about anything". Hopefully that's starting to change though. I know Seattle has had enough with that company, this type of graffiti (grabbed a pic earlier this year) is becoming more and more common.
Edited to add: The r/seattle sub is chock full of amazon employees, you can tell by how posts about gentrification are treated. The response to this article is pretty interesting. Warning - it's reddit. Leaving hubski happy place, click at your own risk, ect ect.
I don't think Amazon is fanatical about customer service. I think he does everything he can to obscure the vendor. The same people who recommend the Walmart documentary buy everything Prime. Because they never have to look at the human cost of Amazon's policies and procedures, they get to put on a happy face.
I was referring to their principle of "customer obsession" . They hide some of their shady stuff, sure. But they also make their service incredibly helpful and convenient. People don't want to hear that that convenience comes at a price, so it's harder to spread the word about the human cost behind those services.
I get that. I guess what I'm saying is the way they fuckin' sling boxes across fences with anger and abandon and then get all pissy with you when you imply that maybe you wouldn't have bought "1-day" if you knew it actually meant "3 days and 2 tries later and also fuck you" from customer service... well, they aren't really all that "customer obsessed." They're more "make the customer forget about everything but Amazon so that you can treat them like shit without them noticing."
I don't believe it applies to Amazon as a whole. I will say big tech companies are big, and there are small teams there that aren't so bad. I have a friend who works for IMDB who is in heaven. So to give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe his individual team isn't that bad. That doesn't change the fact that the majority of the company treats employees like they are disposable. They know they have a high burnout rate, they just don't care. I have one friend who likes it there. I've met maybe 15 or so who hated it, and one of my friends had his career almost ruined.
Am I the only one that would love to work there, under those conditions, for a year or two? It may kill me but there are a couple things that specifically turn me on: 1. Being expected and being surrounded by people who are expected to be better than they are. 2. Being surrounded by people in general who aren't simply skating by, doing the minimum required to not be noticed. That's right. The people at my old job who pissed me off weren't the people who were doing their job to the minimum passable standard. It was the ones who were more focused on getting the minimum amount done so management wouldn't notice their existence, which often was completely unrelated to whether the task at hand got done. 3. Actually being part of something that does something instead of something that sells shit that no one needs (or wants)
You are grossly underestimating the loss of agency. You wouldn't be busting ass on a project of your own invention, towards your own goals, as a key member of a team dedicated to something miraculous. You'd be a replaceable cog doing a tiny thing as part of a big system that doesn't give the first fuck about you. Amazon doesn't expect you "to be better" than you are. They expect you to surrender your life to their goals. As far as "being part of something that does something" you aren't serious, are you? The only non anti-competitive innovations Amazon has ever come up with are a talking bluetooth speaker and a phone that sold worse than the Zune. Even the Kindle is a shitshow and I own 3; if it weren't for Amazon's anti-trust-worthy ecosystem that thing would be a bigger joke than the Nook.
I don't disagree with a single thing you're saying. I will point out that just getting the fucking subtitle files to work with some anime that you can't even buy in Plex is such a headache that I understand why people put up with Apple TV. I mean, I shouldn't have to get command line just to read english. And that's Amazon's big play - I can go from "looking at this book" to "reading this book" in two clicks.
I just want to point out that I'm not one of those assholes who feel entitled to media through torrents. I bought Stoner for the introduction that wasn't in the ePub I torrented. I like physical media. I like having a a handsome bookshelf and DVD collection. I'm also poor so I buy a lot of stuff from Goodwill and no one but Goodwill benefits from that. You're not accusing me of being an entitled cunt who's excusing stealing but I'm in the parking lot of the grocery store and it's pouring so I'm typing this on my phone while waiting for the rain to let up. And those kids who want to rationalize stealing generally piss me off. Alright I'm about to get wet.
Yeah, I like to buy fire when I can. Except Kindle Fire. To reframe the argument, sometimes I buy fire that burns me. I don't like spending money to get burned. I'd rather learn upfront with no investment which fire warms me, then pay the person who ignited that fire out of gratitude. That's what I try to do.
The anime that I can't get to behave in Plex? I stole the shit out of it. And will continue to do so. So long as the industry fails to provide me with a reasonable way to consume media, I will consume it unreasonably. That's my larger point - Amazon "works" on a kindle standpoint because they've got a seamless ecosystem. On movies? Total shitshow. Music? Total, total shitshow. Neither shitshow compares to my Patlabor adventures, however, or the fact that I needed to download subtitles for Genesis Climber Mospeada from Russia because in the US it's just Series III of Robotech. And yeah - I rented that shit on Netflix back when discs made sense... but fuckin' Apple managed to disable my DVD player with Yosemite so really, a plague on both their houses. I totally feel entitled to media through torrents, and I make a substantial living generating media. Why? because if you can't figure out a reasonable way to sell it to me, I'm going to steal it. That's basic fucking economics.