5 ms·

That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the

That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the people that work on the "good" teams never seem to be terribly concerned about horrific reports, and I frequently wonder why that is. In companies I've worked for, had I heard about people crying at their desk and being forced to choose between their child's health and their job I'd want to know how the company is putting a stop to it. It seems that everyone believes that the people complaining are doing so for attention, but from the outside it seems like there's been a lot of reports that are credible - and this is the white collar stuff, not even warehouse worker things. Its hard to know: Is everyone indoctrinated? Are they addicted to the paychecks? Is the sense that there are bad things happening but its being handled properly?

whoisjuan 8y ago
That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working. By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems. The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites. This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them. They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it. All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on" So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
- taurath 8y ago
  This is a decent argument from an employee perspective, which is that its so silo'd that its basically different companies. While I find it pretty horrifying when awful things happen in places with the same external name as is on my resume, I could see how people could go "not me" - thats pretty close to how the workforce works outside of amazon too.
- halbritt 8y ago
  The leadership principles in and of themselves strike me as something that is likely to lead to a toxic culture. For reference: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
  - notyourwork 8y ago
    What about them leads to a toxic work place?
    - halbritt 8y ago
      There's very much in the 14 principles about optimizing for results and very little about leading or cultivating people. Obviously, this can be interpreted in very many ways, but the impression I get from the people that work there or have worked there is that it becomes a win-at-all costs environment and that the upper tiers of management are political hell.
- jimmy1 8y ago
  Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production systems. Sometimes dysfunction happens. You live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term. Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success. (My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-002/ https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)
tomatotomato37 8y ago
That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands. Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.
whyisthewhat 8y ago
You’re talking about an organization that built market dominance on the backbreaking labor and suffering of underpaid warehouse workers. It’s just not in the corporate DNA to care. The fish rots from the head.
- chrisco255 8y ago
  I'm not familiar with this. Is there some reports on workplace injuries or something of that nature or is this hyperbole?
  - rmrfrmrf 8y ago
    https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-peak-2019-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-pe... https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-called-to-amazon-warehouses-600-times-in-three-years https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-ca...
Raphael 8y ago
Definitely addicted to paychecks. Easy to look the other way when making twice what you could in any other line of work.
illumin8 8y ago
There are a couple reasons. First, Amazon has hundreds of businesses and almost 700,000 employees globally now. Every business has different culture and managers. You are not going to find a consistent good/bad/indifferent experience here, because it's highly varied. I can guarantee you a seasonal worker in a fulfillment center has a vastly different day to day experience from a software development engineer in Seattle. The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it. Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.
kentm 8y ago
As a former employee, it’s more that there’s only so much you can do in that situation. I didn’t have any ability to impact the situation other than advocating for good practices, helping people I know manage their careers, and giving truthful feedback for managers (being able to since I wasn’t in a “bad” team). I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience. If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?
darkpuma 8y ago
I heard reports of people crying at their desks at Amazon, but I never witnessed that. They cried in the bathrooms.

whoisjuan 8y ago

That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working. By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems. The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites. This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them. They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it. All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on" So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.

taurath 8y ago
This is a decent argument from an employee perspective, which is that its so silo'd that its basically different companies. While I find it pretty horrifying when awful things happen in places with the same external name as is on my resume, I could see how people could go "not me" - thats pretty close to how the workforce works outside of amazon too.
halbritt 8y ago
The leadership principles in and of themselves strike me as something that is likely to lead to a toxic culture. For reference: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles https://www.amazon.jobs/en/principles
- notyourwork 8y ago
  What about them leads to a toxic work place?
  - halbritt 8y ago
    There's very much in the 14 principles about optimizing for results and very little about leading or cultivating people. Obviously, this can be interpreted in very many ways, but the impression I get from the people that work there or have worked there is that it becomes a win-at-all costs environment and that the upper tiers of management are political hell.
jimmy1 8y ago
Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production systems. Sometimes dysfunction happens. You live in an imperfect world with imperfect people. In the end, sticking through and using the horrible experience to learn and grow ended up paying off long term. Bezos has corporate principles that led to his success. Many people respect that. I personally do no -- I lose respect for any man who cheats on his wife, no matter the reason, but I digress that what he does do in the business world has worked with immeasurable success. (My final random point -- I find it kind of ironic that a man who stresses so much that his leadership team have skilled writing and memos instead of powerpoints let his security team autogenerate a security bulletin about a serious docker CVE. I mean it's very obvious to me that this was written by a bot https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-002/ https://aws.amazon.com/security/security-bulletins/AWS-2019-... -- I think it's a tad tacky to be using a bot to generate your security bulletins)

tomatotomato37 8y ago

That's because the people who have bad experiences are the ones who actually have something to say. No one is going to write a medium blog post about how their last year was completely average, their boss had pros and cons, and that the most controversial event of the year was when the company switched kuerig cup brands. Edit: Also don't forget that Amazon is a fucking huge company; they literally have more employees than the population of Wyoming. We aren't surprised when someone in Wyoming has a crappy job experience, so we really shouldn't be surprised when someone in Amazon has one either.

whyisthewhat 8y ago

You’re talking about an organization that built market dominance on the backbreaking labor and suffering of underpaid warehouse workers. It’s just not in the corporate DNA to care. The fish rots from the head.

chrisco255 8y ago
I'm not familiar with this. Is there some reports on workplace injuries or something of that nature or is this hyperbole?
- rmrfrmrf 8y ago
  https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-peak-2019-2 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-describe-pe... https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-called-to-amazon-warehouses-600-times-in-three-years https://www.vice.com/en_ca/article/7xm4dy/ambulances-were-ca...

Raphael 8y ago

Definitely addicted to paychecks. Easy to look the other way when making twice what you could in any other line of work.

illumin8 8y ago

There are a couple reasons. First, Amazon has hundreds of businesses and almost 700,000 employees globally now. Every business has different culture and managers. You are not going to find a consistent good/bad/indifferent experience here, because it's highly varied. I can guarantee you a seasonal worker in a fulfillment center has a vastly different day to day experience from a software development engineer in Seattle. The second reason is that people tend to write about negative experiences more often. You see this all the time in Internet forums where people complain about products they bought. There could be millions of happy customers of a product, but the few thousand that got a defective one or had a bad experience with customer support will loudly and vocally scream about it on the Internet, which at first glance, seeing hundreds or thousands of reports of a terrible product, might seem bad, but the millions of people who used the product and had no problems with it are not going to write about it. Disclaimer: I've worked at Amazon for a few years now, and I've had 3 decent managers and one terrible one. The good thing about Amazon is that it is relatively frictionless to switch teams.

kentm 8y ago

As a former employee, it’s more that there’s only so much you can do in that situation. I didn’t have any ability to impact the situation other than advocating for good practices, helping people I know manage their careers, and giving truthful feedback for managers (being able to since I wasn’t in a “bad” team). I didn’t want to paint an unrepresentive picture for people that might prevent them from pursuing legitimately good opportunities. Ultimately, this rubs some people the wrong way because they feel it’s the same as covering up issues. I definitely saw a lot of incredulity that I, and others could even have a good experience. If it’s my truthful experience at Amazon that it was generally a good job and I didn’t see much of any of this stuff personally, what would you have me do?

darkpuma 8y ago

I heard reports of people crying at their desks at Amazon, but I never witnessed that. They cried in the bathrooms.