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The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nea

The side of Amazon that works in offices and makes good money also has a reputation as a bad place to work, compared to other major tech companies. See the "Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk" article from the NYT a few years back. https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-... Anecdotally, as you say, that does seem to depend a lot on your department--good local management can make a lot of difference--but you don't see anywhere near that many horror stories coming out of Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc. It does seem that Amazon, as a company, is less concerned about the welfare of its white-collar employees. And if they don't mind abusing their highly paid, highly skilled knowledge workers, I would be amazed if they gave a single fuck about their unskilled laborers.

sharkweek 8y ago
I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works for Amazon corporate. None of them love working at Amazon, and only a few like it there, but most are pretty miserable. I think the stock performance is keeping most of them there with how Amazon’s vesting schedule tends to be heavily backloaded. One guy did comment that he loves the scale of the things he’s working on, which I guess I get, but he always complains about the overall culture.
Applejinx 8y ago
That's the way to get the warehouse workers to comply. Arguably it's BETTER (certainly more effective) if it's that way all the way up the chain, because you'll get buy-in if the lower rungs see that the upper rungs of the latter are pushing themselves just as hard or harder. If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expects of himself, that would be the final piece of the puzzle. I would suggest that's not impossible: it'd fit the pattern. At that point the question you ask isn't 'is this fair or are the people getting exploited'. Instead you ask 'are all these people crazy? Do we need to have some kind of intervention?' The key point here is that you can't assume the situation is designed to abuse lowly workers and coddle management. I think a key innovation at Amazon is, everyone cries at work and/or dies in harness, no exceptions. It's fair to talk about whether that's acceptable. From all the horror stories, and from my understanding of business, they manage to extend the abuse as high up as possible, and it might go a lot higher than you think. The goal is to make a company full of desperate, last-ditch warriors that try to destroy all competition to their last dying frothing breaths: again, no exceptions. Should all society work like this? I think that's debatable, but allow an Amazon to do it and they'll steadily kill everything else, and that's the intention.
- tboyd47 8y ago
  This matches a recent experience of mine working on a dev team at a large tech company. We joked about ADD or "Abuse-Driven Development," because we would always hear our bosses say, "X needs to be in tomorrow or I'm going to get screamed at," "Okay, which of these is going to be a bigger beating if it's missing," "I live and die by this product," "It's my ass that's on the line for this," etc. Not only that, but they would brag about how little they were being paid and how late they worked every day. We would get emails from them after 1AM regularly. I never encountered any behavior like that at any other company.
camtarn 8y ago
Yep. It seems to be a US thing, incidentally. I worked at Amazon in Edinburgh for eight years, and it was pretty nice. Not perfect, certainly, but there was definitely a lot more respect for work-life balance, and a lot less pressure to perform or be fired. One of our UK folks moved to the Seattle office, and noticed a serious difference in culture: much more pressure, more expectation that you would work any number of extra hours to get things done by the deadline, much higher rates of burnout and turnover. For what it's worth, in eight years I never saw anybody cry at their desk.
ams6110 8y ago
Microsoft in the past had a pretty notorious employee performance system called "stack ranking" where basically no matter how well you did your job you could get classified as a "bottom performer" because a certain percentage had to be ranked lowest. It was a contributor to poor morale and employee stress. Many sales-oriented companies (Oracle?) will have similar performance metrics, e.g. next-to-impossible sales goals, etc. Amazon is not the only company to have a high-pressure work environment.
- pinewurst 8y ago
  As a Seattle-ite, I know people at Amazon and at Microsoft. The Amazon stories are pretty consistent in their awfulness. The people doing more clerical/support stuff seem to have a better time than especially engineers. People usually bail in less than a year, even those who are indentured for moving expenses. There was an especially sad case where a new Amazon employee moved in next door after relocating his family from another part of the country - initially enthused, but it all went to hell and they fled. Microsoft is much more a hodgepodge. Certainly from the top down it's become so much better post-Ballmer. Actual experiences depend on your group even more so than Amazon, but at least the top is pretty benevolent. I know creative people who truly love their Microsoft lives (and I'm envious), but I've had the occasional interviews with them, all dysfunctional in unpleasant ways (e.g. having someone blow cigarette smoke in your face while making a personally dismissive statement). I keep trying because they are in fact a decent employer in the greater scheme of things.

sharkweek 8y ago

I live in Seattle and thus a notable percentage of my social circle works for Amazon corporate. None of them love working at Amazon, and only a few like it there, but most are pretty miserable. I think the stock performance is keeping most of them there with how Amazon’s vesting schedule tends to be heavily backloaded. One guy did comment that he loves the scale of the things he’s working on, which I guess I get, but he always complains about the overall culture.

Applejinx 8y ago

That's the way to get the warehouse workers to comply. Arguably it's BETTER (certainly more effective) if it's that way all the way up the chain, because you'll get buy-in if the lower rungs see that the upper rungs of the latter are pushing themselves just as hard or harder. If Jeff Bezos cries at his desk, into his apparently meaningless kabillions of dollars, because he just CAN'T quite keep up with what he expects of himself, that would be the final piece of the puzzle. I would suggest that's not impossible: it'd fit the pattern. At that point the question you ask isn't 'is this fair or are the people getting exploited'. Instead you ask 'are all these people crazy? Do we need to have some kind of intervention?' The key point here is that you can't assume the situation is designed to abuse lowly workers and coddle management. I think a key innovation at Amazon is, everyone cries at work and/or dies in harness, no exceptions. It's fair to talk about whether that's acceptable. From all the horror stories, and from my understanding of business, they manage to extend the abuse as high up as possible, and it might go a lot higher than you think. The goal is to make a company full of desperate, last-ditch warriors that try to destroy all competition to their last dying frothing breaths: again, no exceptions. Should all society work like this? I think that's debatable, but allow an Amazon to do it and they'll steadily kill everything else, and that's the intention.

tboyd47 8y ago
This matches a recent experience of mine working on a dev team at a large tech company. We joked about ADD or "Abuse-Driven Development," because we would always hear our bosses say, "X needs to be in tomorrow or I'm going to get screamed at," "Okay, which of these is going to be a bigger beating if it's missing," "I live and die by this product," "It's my ass that's on the line for this," etc. Not only that, but they would brag about how little they were being paid and how late they worked every day. We would get emails from them after 1AM regularly. I never encountered any behavior like that at any other company.

camtarn 8y ago

Yep. It seems to be a US thing, incidentally. I worked at Amazon in Edinburgh for eight years, and it was pretty nice. Not perfect, certainly, but there was definitely a lot more respect for work-life balance, and a lot less pressure to perform or be fired. One of our UK folks moved to the Seattle office, and noticed a serious difference in culture: much more pressure, more expectation that you would work any number of extra hours to get things done by the deadline, much higher rates of burnout and turnover. For what it's worth, in eight years I never saw anybody cry at their desk.

ams6110 8y ago

Microsoft in the past had a pretty notorious employee performance system called "stack ranking" where basically no matter how well you did your job you could get classified as a "bottom performer" because a certain percentage had to be ranked lowest. It was a contributor to poor morale and employee stress. Many sales-oriented companies (Oracle?) will have similar performance metrics, e.g. next-to-impossible sales goals, etc. Amazon is not the only company to have a high-pressure work environment.

pinewurst 8y ago
As a Seattle-ite, I know people at Amazon and at Microsoft. The Amazon stories are pretty consistent in their awfulness. The people doing more clerical/support stuff seem to have a better time than especially engineers. People usually bail in less than a year, even those who are indentured for moving expenses. There was an especially sad case where a new Amazon employee moved in next door after relocating his family from another part of the country - initially enthused, but it all went to hell and they fled. Microsoft is much more a hodgepodge. Certainly from the top down it's become so much better post-Ballmer. Actual experiences depend on your group even more so than Amazon, but at least the top is pretty benevolent. I know creative people who truly love their Microsoft lives (and I'm envious), but I've had the occasional interviews with them, all dysfunctional in unpleasant ways (e.g. having someone blow cigarette smoke in your face while making a personally dismissive statement). I keep trying because they are in fact a decent employer in the greater scheme of things.