Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is urging his employees to read a New York Times report that described the company’s “bruising workplace”. The story, which mentions employees crying at their desks, included references to an evaluation process that encourages employees to criticize co-workers.
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Bezos says that is not the Amazon he knows and that anyone working in such a company would be insane to stay. That’s at least, how The New York Times described it, and even if Bezos claims to not recognize the environment, over 100 current and former Amazonians who spoke to The New York Times did.
I want the company I’m dealing with to treat the human beings who work there with respect, not force them into a climate of fear.
“I think that a lot of companies in the tech sector and around the country are looking at their policies on maternity leave and paternity leave and evaluating them”.
Bo Olson, former marketing executive at Amazon, said: “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face”. He told any employees that feel they have been treated callously to contact HR, or email him directly, NYT notes.
Nick Ciubotariu, Amazon’s head of infrastructure development, also responded to the negative article against Amazon. It wouldn’t be the first time that a company grows and over time adopts a culture that a founder didn’t intend and doesn’t very much like.
His biggest complaints: The article cherry picks anecdotes to fit a biased narrative; goes out of its way to paint the company as an outlier when many of its practices are industry standard; and that the Amazon described in the piece may have existed in the past, but is nothing like the company today. No one makes me answer emails at night. What people mean by this isn’t that the best programmers write 10 times as many lines of code. “You can also email me directly…Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero”, referring to anecdotes of employees being pushed out or fired for adjusting their hours to take care of children, taking time off to grieve, and for illness. It should be noted that Amazon’s boss, Jeff Bezos, has responded strongly to reports that it is his company’s intention “to create a souless dystopian workplace where no fun is had and laughter heard”, or that it is a workspace where employees frequently cry. I worked on Christmas nearly every year I was there.
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“The investment is very high now in serialised TV, and the amount of time you have to tell a story is much greater”. He merely said he wouldn’t work at a company like it and he didn’t recognize it. But he didn’t really say anything was wrong. The article describes a cutthroat employee review process, quizzes on company principles and strict management practices that penalize workers with family tragedies or health problems. “Hopefully, you’re having fun working with a bunch of brilliant teammates, helping invent the future, and laughing along the way”.
