5 ms·
I do not believe those two responses are unrelated. Amazon is a company for whome PR is a key product. While excellent customer service is key to their growth,
by MCRed 11y ago
I do not believe those two responses are unrelated. Amazon is a company for whome PR is a key product. While excellent customer service is key to their growth, their PR campaigns are key to their stock valuation. This is why they put out non-starter products like the Fire Phone and hoaxes like "Drone Delivery" and release numerous il-concieved but good for a press release products (amazon menus, amazon movie listings, the whole search engine fiasco, etc.)
Bezos takes the high road-- "Oh, we're not like that" (which to anyone who has worked there rings really hollow as Bezos is someone for whome reality is pretty plastic. He has a reality distortion field of significant power)... meanwhile thru backchannels work to discredit the employee telling the truth.
Given what I experienced there, I can believe that all the dirt they are slinging at this employee is post-hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization.
When I attempted to transfer within Amazon, I was attacked by my boss and HR, and when I resigned I was fired. (Of course, you can't fire someone who has resigned but that's a truth that is not reflected in Amazon's employee records.)
Now I'm a "disgruntled" employee who was "fired" for the "crime" of attempting to transfer departments after getting an offer from AWS, and then resigned when his transfer was blocked by his boss (something explicitly forbidden in Amazon's policy handbook, but of course such rules are there for propaganda more than anything else.)
This allows them to spin anything the former employees says as sour grapes.
BTW, as part of leaving I was made to sign a terrible agreement, under threats that I now understand to have been extortion (because they were illegal under Washington State law) that included, among other things, that I would never publicly speak ill of the company. I am doing so now because I'd be happy if they sued me- I have lots of stories to tell reporters.
- jacquesm 11y agoAre there unions active within Amazon?
- vermontdevil 11y agoNot in the US as far as I know.
- ceejayoz 11y agoThey've been pretty good at squashing them. http://time.com/956/how-amazon-crushed-the-union-movement/ http://time.com/956/how-amazon-crushed-the-union-movement/
- pinewurst 11y agoI knew someone who bragged that their job was stopping/crushing unionization of US customer service reps. It was apparently one of the strong motivators for their current offshoring of that role.
- hga 11y agoHow did they make you sign something, in a situation where you were resigning (however they internally scored it)??
- potatolicious 11y agoI've had one former employer (not Amazon) threaten to withhold my remaining paychecks if I did not sign a non-disparagement agreement upon leaving - this was on my last day. Of course, wildly illegal - but also a verbal conversation (deliberately so of course) so no hard proof it ever happened. I told the HR person that's illegal, refused to sign any exit paperwork whatsoever, and left the building. Of course, my remaining paychecks arrived without trouble, LOL. I can imagine someone less savvy or newer to the industry to easily be fooled.
- hga 11y agoYeah, that trick doesn't work for going concerns. It wasn't threatened before the 13 senior people at a startup I worked at faxed in a group resignation to the devil investors that had taken over the company, but they sure did fight trying to not give us our back pay, or all of it. But the state, Virginia in this case, takes a very dim view of such stunts (hey, on top of everything else they lose tax money), has an office staffed with no-humor people who've seen it all, and all we had to do was to wait and accept only the full amount.
- late2part 11y agoAlmost certainly they offered him a large financial inducement in exchange for A/ signing it and B/ agreeing never to say disparaging things about Amazon.
- hga 11y agoI'd use the word "induced" rather than "made" in that context. Maybe offered to forgive relocation expenses he'd otherwise be on the hook for?