Yo, you buyin' this? Cuz I'm really kinda not.
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.