28 ms·

Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec

• r0h1n 12y ago
  The entire letter reads like an allegory about the politics, insecurities, coverups, overinflated egos and outright lies that are commonplace in large companies. Only reinforces my desire to stay clear of big co. "careers".
  • dalek_cannes 12y ago
    You can hardly be blamed. This quote just on page 3: My manager did not communicate to her management chain the positive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “You’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”.
    • xienze 12y ago
      To be perfectly fair, in any job this is what you're supposed to do -- make your boss look good, who makes his boss look good, etc. That's how you get promoted. "Make me look good" doesn't mean "do stuff and I'll take all the credit" -- at least not with a good manager. It's about meeting/exceeding your goals, which helps your boss meet/exceed his goals, etc. and makes the organization stronger. That said, this is not something you would plainly state to your direct report...
      • wpietri 12y ago
        > To be perfectly fair, in any job this is what you're supposed to do -- make your boss look good [...] I find this sentiment horrifying. When I hire people, I don't want them to spend one second thinking about how to make me look good. I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues. Admittedly, give that so many companies are dysfunctional feudal empires, it is often good career advice. But I still find it horrifying.
        • xienze 12y ago
          > I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues. Don't you think all those things make you look good if you are the hiring manager? Conversely, if the employee you hired fails to perform those duties, you look bad. Again, "making your boss look good" is NOT supposed to mean "do specific things for your boss that will impress his boss", it's supposed to mean that the employee meets or exceeds the expectations of the job which _in turn_ makes the hiring manager look good because his group is meeting or exceeding their goals, and so on up the line.
          • wpietri 12y ago
            If those are equivalent to making me look good, then focusing on those should be sufficient. No need to bring my ego into it. But of course, they're not. This whole mess at Amazon is an issue only because Kivin Varghese chose to do the right thing by his customer instead of making his manager look good. And look where it got him: screwed over and sued. Regarding your claim that "make your boss look good" really means "do the assigned job well": I don't believe you. If that's what it meant, we could say, "do the assigned job well". What it actually means is exactly what it says. The reason that people say and mean that is that in organizations driven by power and appearance, making your boss look good is indeed a road to success.
      • mangamadaiyan 12y ago
        No, you do what you're hired to do. That and "making your boss look good" can be (and often are) at cross-purposes at MegaCorps.
    • hawkice 12y ago
      Compare/Contrast: I worked at a startup where I was the only direct report to someone who spent the overwhelming majority of his day watching videos of women exercising (file this under "things I wouldn't have to know if we didn't have an open floor plan"). I spoke to _his_ boss (who sat two seats down from me, because it's a startup), who said the reason I had to go through those ridiculous hoops and charades and end up with an unusual workload was because the guy I reported to had been there a long time and, ya know, he deserved his fancy title and direct report. Don't get me wrong, dysfunction at large companies is disproportionately large most of the time. But man, even smaller bits of nonsense can be extremely frustrating when you see them up close.
      • hga 12y ago
        The thing about startups is that very few of them can afford this sort of dead weight. Perhaps for a little while, but it's one of the things that results in so high a fraction of them failing. Which has been true in two I've been in that suffered from this.
• mgraczyk 12y ago
  Off topic: Why does Scribd have a perfectly functional mobile site that allows me to read half the PDF before rudely graying out my screen and insisting that I download their app to finish? I was reading with my phone rotated to landscape so at first I couldn't even see the pop up, the PDF just went gray. I call that borderline psychological abuse. At the very least I'm going to subconsciously associate the Scribd brand with that horrible experience.
  • balazsdavid987 12y ago
    The same here. Very, very frustrating.
  • lelandbatey 12y ago
    For years I've been avoiding Scribd. They are like experts exchange or quora: doing anything they can to get you to sign up and become beholden to their well furnished cage. Many times I've been in search of an odd PDF, found it on Scribd, only to have 99% of it unreadable. I hate Scribd.
  • vidarh 12y ago
    I've always associated them with horrible experience. I groan whenever I see Scribd instead of just a link to the PDFs. I have a good PDF viewer, thank you. In fact, I have several.
    • kefka 12y ago
      Scribd is "Hacker News" quality. They're one of the HN venture capital funded companies. Puts a different spin on it, doesn't it?
      • StavrosK 12y ago
        Not really. It's still a sucky site that's worse than what we had before.
      • km3k 12y ago
        You must have a much lower expectation of "Hacker News" quality than I do. Has scribd ever had a good user experience? I've come across them once in a while for years and never liked it at all.
• empressplay 12y ago
  All the ethics principles in the world won't help you if you rock the boat in a company entrenched in nepotism and communal ass-covering. Everyone's happy to do the right thing if their ass (or their buddy's) isn't on the line.
• kvargs 12y ago
  More here: http://day0001.tumblr.com http://day0001.tumblr.com
  • LukeB_UK 12y ago
    Writing a tumblr in 3rd person and as a press release just feels wierd.
    • dontworryboutit 12y ago
      I'm more concerned with how this article helps my inner thigh gap? what kind of $#*! tumblr is this? i came here for pictures of fruit and ITG, son!
  • spellingtree 12y ago
    Typo: "principles" not "principals"
  • donutello 12y ago
    Principles
• kvargs 12y ago
  Follow @kvargs on twitter for more detail
  • GrinningFool 12y ago
    Wow. I didn't realize it was a whole publicity campaign by kvargs. Puts a different light on it.
  • wpietri 12y ago
    For future reference, it's better do say something like, "Hi, HN. I'm the author and am glad to answer questions. You can also follow me on twitter at @kvargs for future details." We definitely like participation, but it took me a while to realize that you are the author, and that kvargs is your Twitter account.
• awjr 12y ago
  Have to say some of the behaviour does appear to come across as psychotic within the upper echelons of Amazon. I'm guessing to get high up in Amazon you have to play quite a vicious game?
• mrtree 12y ago
  This is a GIANT, epic scale burn to Munira Rahemtulla.
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
• colinbartlett 12y ago
  Regardless of whatever happened, the letter comes off like the whining ramblings of a former employee. This all refers back to a 2012 lawsuit: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/kindle-ad-team-member-sues-amazon-alleges-internal-retaliation/ http://www.geekwire.com/2012/kindle-ad-team-member-sues-amaz...
  • duncan_bayne 12y ago
    Really? I only wish most documents I read were that clear and well reasoned.
  • zephod 12y ago
    I thought it was well-written, calm and thorough, carefully backing up each point and not descending into hyperbole. It's a difficult line to walk and I think this letter does a professional job.
    • colinbartlett 12y ago
      I am sorry for sounding dismissive. I read through 20 pages and all of it looked like someone having email disagreements with their coworkers. I'll read some of the commentary and try to understand the moral issues here better.
  • donkeyd 12y ago
    A dutch whistle-blower commited suicide, because he was slandered while trying to bring out similar problems at his company. Afterwards, his findings were brought to the major public which created a big stir and caused for in-depth investigation. It takes a lot of guts to speak up on a huge company like Amazon, this should be valued. It shouldn't be dismissed with "well, it's a former employee, so of course he's not happy.."
    • Macha 12y ago
      > "well, it's a former employee, so of course he's not happy.." Of course, if he was an employee at the time of filing the lawsuit (the act of filing it would presumably get him sacked immediately afterwards), it would be dismissed with "Well he doesn't feel that strongly about it if he kept working there"
• Fede_V 12y ago
  Apparently this guy already frivolously sued another company in the past. Edit: I now believe I was wrong, but leaving this up here anyway.
  • MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
    His company won - they violated the NDA and misappropriated trade secrets, why would that lawsuit have been frivolous?
    • Fede_V 12y ago
      You are right, that was unwarranted. I just have an instant knee-jerk reaction when I see people with multiple lawsuits.
      • moogleii 12y ago
        You should look into that.
  • CalRobert 12y ago
    What about this is frivolous? Maybe he's just more willing to stick his neck out than others are. We need more people willing to do this and less fawning over tech companies.
    • marincounty 12y ago
      Totally agree! I have found very few individuals will speak up, or do anything when their career, or money is involved. Oh sure they will speak online, but actually calling out a superior, or questioning a professor in school; they shrink into their seats. I haven't figured out if they are scared, or just in denal. I often wonder if I would have been one of those people who administered the high voltage in the Milgram experiment, but I don't lose sleep over it because I walked away from too many jobs, and ripped apart a Professor or two. That said--I'm not successful and have a spotty work history.
• MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
  In Germany, you would be laughed out of court for trying to enforce an 18-month noncompete clause, at least if its too broad - that would be equal to an occupational ban. Is this really standard practice in the US?
  • LukeB_UK 12y ago
    Why would you ever accept an 18 month non-compete in the first place?
    • skrebbel 12y ago
      Because you're young and enthusiastic, because the job sounds awesome and because you don't want to employ a lawyer every time you apply for a job? Sure, it's a bit naieve not to read a job offer carefully enough, but on the other hand you'd kind of assume a company as large as Amazon, employing so many knowledge workers, would not offer their applicants extortion rackets disguised as job contracts to begin with.
    • k__ 12y ago
      Well, if it's the only work you really like to do OR if it's the only job that pays 100k a year?
    • andyjdavis 12y ago
      A few reasons off the top of my head: 1) Most people accept them because they never actually read their contracts fully. 2) They are told that it is a non-negotiable condition of employment and they really want the position. 3) They are aware that non-competes are unenforceable in their jurisdiction (assuming they are in a jurisdiction where non-competes don't stand up in court). 4) They assume the company is unlikely to spend the money required on lawyers to actually come after them if they violate the non-compete in the future.
      • LukeB_UK 12y ago
        1) This makes sense as an answer, I don't understand why people wouldn't read the contract for something that they rely on for their livelihood though. 2) Something like that should be a dealbreaker. No matter how much you want the job, it's effectively saying that you can never leave. 3) In the case of the letter here, he tries to negotiate it after he was fired. If he knew it was unenforceable, then he could have quite simply said so. 4) On their part this is a stupid assumption. You should always assume that a company is willing to back up their threats. Especially a company the size of Amazon. This isn't to attack your answer, just to put my views on those points.
• dkarapetyan 12y ago
  This is dramatic but nothing unusual at a large company like amazon. This shouldn't really be on the front page.
  • perfunctory 12y ago
    Are you saying that when dramatic stuff becomes usual, it's not as dramatic any more?
    • dkarapetyan 12y ago
      I'm saying this is more like gossip and less like something that is intellectually interesting.
      • dalek_cannes 12y ago
        Incorrect. This is a prevalent yet still poorly understood phenomenon that has an impact not just on those in the tech sector (as many of us on HN are), but also on society at large. Philosophers and activists have repeatedly tried to explain this type of behaviour, but we still have no answer. I find it very curious.
        • seren 12y ago
          I have not followed the course because a lack of available free time but I am sure it is really interesting, a relevant to the Amazon case : Unethical Decision Making in Organizations [0] [0] https://www.coursera.org/course/unethicaldecision https://www.coursera.org/course/unethicaldecision
      • gtirloni 12y ago
        I get your point but this whole story is very interesting for anyone that has not been desensitized by widespread corrupt and unethical behavior. We should never unlearn how to feel outraged at bad things.
  • hga 12y ago
    If you're sending Amazon money, as a retail customer, or very much relevant to HN, using AWS, it matter a great deal how honest they are.
• tomp 12y ago
  Interesting and pretty damning. Some key excerpts: > Amazon gave me their final offer: 4 weeks of severance for 18 months of adhering to the broad non-compete that would not allow me to earn a living in my field, and further explained that if I didn't accept their final offer, Amazon would sue me for tens of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses. Employee complained, was fired, Amazon insists s/he can't work for another 1 1/2 years (I know that's legal in the US, but it's still asshole-ish behaviour). > What we found was that there were tens of thousands of Kindle e-ink owners, the vast majority who hadn’t even seen the promotion details (as customers had to click on the ad to see the details), were qualifying for the $10 Gift card because every day, there are thousands of customers who own a Kindle and already have Discover set as their 1-click default card, that buy a digital good on Amazon in the ordinary course of their activity. > Meanwhile the promotion continued to run and within a few more days we had gone over the $500,000 budget. Discover Card pays $500 000 for a campaign that gives $10 to each user who switches default 1-click card to Discover. Amazon gives $10 mostly to users who already have Discover as default. Munira, the manager, lies to Discover about that. > Munira was forced to admit under oath in deposition [...] that she falsified her educational record on her resume to Amazon and all her previous employers - claiming to have earned a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford when in fact she earned no degrees at all. Munira is a liar/cheater, and still employed at Amazon.
  • narsil 12y ago
    The PIP being used to prevent transferring is pretty underhanded as well.
    • sedachv 12y ago
      Not surprising. Happened to someone I know at Google.
      • jagreer 12y ago
        happens all the time at google :(
  • MrBuddyCasino 12y ago
• nl 12y ago
  major launch partners paid $1.2MM each to be part of the launch Woah! I had no idea Amazon was making that much from advertising on the Kindles at launch (although I guess it's a little unclear what they are paying for there). I wonder how many launch partners they had?
  • us0r 12y ago
    Me either. Apparently they have a nice advertising business in general. "I literally was sickened by what we were doing to Discover Card, one of Amazon’s largest customers spending over $13MM per year in advertising with the company."
• mmmpopcorn 12y ago
  Am I the only one who went and made some popcorn and then kept reading?
• RomanPushkin 12y ago
  TLDR?
  • halviti 12y ago
    go back to reddit.
  • DanBC 12y ago
    Roughly two parts: "I was doing good quality work; that was recognised by my boss; something happened and I complained, and the escalated my complaints; after that my bosses reversed their previous position; I asked to transfer to a different department; they found out and stopped the transfer; I left the company and they tried to enforce a ridiculous non-compete thus I was forced to sue" "The bad thing: a credit card company had a big promotion with specific rules. We mis-reported the success of that promotion which cost the advertiser a lot of money. I raised it internally, and escalated it, but nothing was done."
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  • machrider 12y ago
    Amazon does actually sue former employees occasionally: http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-sues-employee-taking-google-cloud-job-new-test-non-compete-laws/ http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-sues-employee-taking-goo... Everyone likes to point out how unenforceable they are, but can you afford to take Amazon on in court?
• logicchains 12y ago
  So they basically tricked Discover out of something like $400,000? I wonder what Discover thinks of this...
  • davidw 12y ago
    Yes, I wonder if there was ever a lawsuit from them, or they managed to resolve it with Amazon, or what.
    • moe 12y ago
      Pardon my cynicism but according to the letter Discover spends $13MM a year at Amazon. Thus 500k more or less works out to ~4% of their budget. My hunch is this will at most be a subject of chuckle between Bezos and David Nelms (Discover CEO) on the Golf course. Bezos might roll some heads, install some "supervision", give them a discount on a future campaign... Advertising budgets are not an exact science anyway. And Amazon is still the largest online retail site in the world - where else would Discover go to spend their Ad dollars?
      • Someone1234 12y ago
        Although right now Amazon are pushing Chase, not Discover instead. They have a "5% cash back" banner on the homepage (Chase Freedom card), and are also running the $10 gift card if you switch 1-click to Chase and buy something. You have a Chase card on your account and visit Amazon on any mobile device. Could be related to this incident, could just be coincidence.
      • apetresc 12y ago
        That's what I would have guessed too, that $500K is basically a rounding error to a company like Discover. However, he includes an e-mail from Discovery in the letter, which says "I cannot express my disappointment on how this has been handled, nor can I stress enough how incredibly important it is that we get this resolved as quickly as possible." It may not be a huge hit to Discovery's bottom line at the end of the day, but somewhere in there is a promo department for whom $500K is a significant chunk of their yearly budget.
• monochr 12y ago
  > Munira had falsified her educational record on her resume to Amazon and all her former employers - claiming to have both a Bachelors and Masters in Computer Science from Stanford when in fact she had earned no degrees at all. There is more detail on this issue and Munira’s pattern of ethical lapses and misleading and deceptive practices later in this letter. Why is this person still employed, let alone have any responsibility?
  • dalek_cannes 12y ago
    Ongoing internal investigation? Or -- and forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach this subject -- because her being a gender/ethnic minority in her line of work makes Amazon reluctant to terminate her?
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      I agree. If well played, she could probably unleash a social justice hell on Amazon, and with current media climate it wouldn't even matter if it was fabricated or not.
    • peakdarkpattern 12y ago
      Oh, come on.
    • deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
    • antimagic 12y ago
      Employers being reluctant to fire an employee because the employee is a member of a minority is pretty much a myth - particularly in jurisdictions such as the US where employees generally do not have much by way of job security. At best it will just make the employer double-check to make sure they have dotted the Is and crossed the Ts before pulling the trigger. Also, forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach the subject, but people expressing a fear that minorities are receiving unjust benefits are often racist? See what I did there?
• xiaoma 12y ago
  >"Amazon gave me their final offer: 4 weeks of severance for 18 months of adhering to the broad non-compete that would not allow me to earn a living in my field, and further explained that if I didn’t accept their final offer, Amazon would sue me for tens of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses." It's because of stories like this that I'd never work at Amazon. They have a history of suing their own employees soon after parting ways.
  • valarauca1 12y ago
    Suing you over blog post and OSS contributions also if you don't get approval from higher up concerning the content of these publications.
    • ethanhunt_ 12y ago
      Source?
      • gonzi25 12y ago
        Employee Handbook. A lot of the big tech companies have something similar but it's pretty bad at Amazon. You cannot write any code in your personal time and submit it without being approved. I mean anywhere, homework questions or telling a person how to write a bash script that copies a file each day.
      • potatolicious 12y ago
        Haven't heard of any lawsuits but gonzi25 is correct: all code you write for anyone else is subject to approval, including open source. Amazon ostensibly "supports" open source contributions, but all open source work (inside or outside of work time) must be approved by a committee that evaluates OSS projects to ensure they do not compete or conflict with Amazon. In reality though, since nobody wants to be the one that signed off on an open source project that later becomes a pain or a competitor, the committee veers extremely conservative in approvals (read: they don't really approve much). So the net result is that, as an Amazon employee, your ability to work on open source in your own time is severely diminished.
• chj 12y ago
  Since no one else asked -- isn't this confidential?
  • gtirloni 12y ago
    It's written at the bottom of every page "Confidential". Sorry, didn't get your point.
    • corin_ 12y ago
      I think his point is: who released it to the public?
      • seren 12y ago
        Since the document is signed by "Kivin Varghese" and it was posted by user "kvargs", it might be a hint the leaker is actually the author.
        • chj 12y ago
          If so, isn't he ruining his own career? Who is going to hire him now?
          • jeremycole 12y ago
            Well, he wrote it, he marked it confidential, he is free to release it under different terms.
          • wpietri 12y ago
            If I were looking for somebody of his background, I definitely would talk to him. Obviously, a whistleblower like this is dedicated, passionate, and energetic. The question is whether they do this because of real dedication to the customer and good business practices, or whether they're just the sort of person that likes blowing shit up when they find a good excuse. Some of the top-performing people on my teams have been seen as "difficult". But I don't particularly want to hire obedient people. I want to hire people who will tell me I'm wrong when I'm wrong.
• provendio 12y ago
  Someone will get into trouble for leaking that...
• sidcool 12y ago
  Saddest statement in the entire write up: >My manager did not communicate to her management chain the positive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “You’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”
• jmomo 12y ago
  I wonder if Michael Woodford (Olympus scandal) would be interested in having this brought to his attention.
• oskarth 12y ago
  What I didn’t know at the time was the the HR Business manager was a good personal friend of Munira, and in what seems to be a betrayal of trust, informed my manager that I was trying to get a transfer. At my next 1:1 meeting Munira explained “You think you’re going to get a transfer out of my group? I’m putting you into a Performance Improvement Plan which prevents transfers for 12 months”. This reads like it came from a dystopian MegaCorp sci-fi story. Is this for real?
  • cbovis 12y ago
    Nope just the reality of the world we live in, some people are just happy to be selfish assholes.
  • a3n 12y ago
    Petty, bullying and evil people live in the world. If they spend most of their days at work, they're going to make their work petty, bullying and evil. They say that money doesn't change people, it just reveals who they are. More generally, circumstances will often allow someone to express who they really are.
  • potatolicious 12y ago
    When I was working at Amazon, I once had dinner with a couple of HR reps who noted that this exact behavior is extremely common. PIPs aren't just used at Amazon to tie people down, it's also used as pre-firing. To my knowledge almost no one gets off a PIP after being put on one, and management will go out of their way to have you "fail" to accomplish to the terms of the Performance Improvement Plan, and thereby give legal cover for your firing. I personally know someone who was the victim of this exact mechanism - one of the smartest people I've ever worked with and who has been well-liked everywhere else and even well-liked within the company. PIPs are a disgusting, spineless tool used by disgusting, spineless people. Side note but somewhat related: I've worked at a lot of companies, Amazon is the only one where I can't help but resist writing a snippy note when their recruiters come knocking. It would take a supernatural amount of force for me to consider working there ever again.
    • CSMastermind 12y ago
• aetherspawn 12y ago
  Remember kids. Anyone who will steal for your company, will steal from your company.
  • narag 12y ago
    So true. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23238531 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23238531 That's old news. Gov. party treasurer is jailed for stealing from. The party believed he was stealing for.
• usaphp 12y ago
  If Munira has never attended Stanford, then why is her alumni card exist on Stanford website? : http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/mfp/cgi-bin/mfpalumni/may_view2.php?id=95 http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/mfp/cgi-bin/mfpalumni/may_view...
  • dagw 12y ago
    No one is claiming that she never attended Standford, they're claiming she never earned a degree from Stanford.
    • apetresc 12y ago
      Well, "alumni" implies you graduated, implies you earned a degree. The correct answer is that that "Alumni card" is for the MFP (Mayfield Fellows Program), a nine-month program within Stanford that gives you some entrepreneurship experience. The alumni card is for that program, not Stanford itself.
      • hga 12y ago
        No, or at least MIT counts me as an alumni despite $$$ preventing me from graduating. That said, I only claim to have attended and done well, not graduated.
      • hullo 12y ago
        That is definitely the general assumption as it's most often true, but university alumni associations don't hold to that, nor do dictionaries.
• adam-a 12y ago
  > Munira is a liar/cheater, > Why is this person still employed, let alone have any responsibility? It should be remembered that this is an accusation, and potentially fabricated or editorialised. It's probably ruined this woman's career by now and doesn't justify a witchunt or personal abuse. The author, having been fired, has a very good reason to seek revenge, and we shouldn't take his word as gospel.
  • mgkimsal 12y ago
    While true, everything posited so far seems reasonable - there do not seem to be anything unbelievable. The addition of multiple emails adds to that reasonableness. Yes, of course he's possibly forging those emails too, but doing this so publicly means this person has a lot more to lose than anyone else. He's hoping this all goes to court - I'm not sure too many people would bluff this far - I think he's got a lot more truth on his side. That said, I tend to side with underdogs, and have been in a couple similar situations at large companies - nothing this severe, but none of the behavior seems beyond the pale for mid and sr execs at a large company (sad to say). I've worked with some really good ones too, but just because someone has risen to an SVP position doesn't mean they can't also act unethically (or even illegally).
  • tankenmate 12y ago
    Given that he isn't employed he is likely his lawyer to take this case on contingency; which means there is at least some truth to what is being said. Remember he is quoting, in places, discovery transcripts; lying to a court is hardly something one does, let alone on a whim. Going public is a double edged sword, if someone is willing to stick their head this far above the parapet there must be something going on. I'd say both parties have some explaining to do, and a fair amount of it. The evidence is compelling, I wonder if the other parties have evidence that is as compelling?
  • kevingadd 12y ago
    The accusations are supported by Munira's comments in deposition, along with her emails. It'd be pretty hard to fabricate all of that. It's not as if they're unsubstantiated accusations. Even if a significant portion of the document is completely fabricated, the bits based on emails & deposition are pretty damning.
• deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
• gnu8 12y ago
  Haha, why would anyone ever agree to an unfunded non-compete clause? If you're required not to work for 18 months, you need to be paid for 18 months. Any of you who accept an unfunded non-compete clause are suckers and any of you who try to trick your employees into agreeing to them are ass pirates.
  • danielweber 12y ago
    I've rejected employment offers because of non-compete clauses. But not everyone is in a position to do so.
    • adventured 12y ago
      In this case, the person claimed they had multiple, high quality / high paying alternatives when they took the Amazon job. Makes it that much bizarre the person chose to accept such a non-compete.
      • johnward 12y ago
        I'd bet the others had similar non-competes. However, Amazon is becoming notorious for trying to enforce them.
        • wpietri 12y ago
          Given that those offers were in California, they probably didn't. Excepting certain rare circumstances, non-competes are unenforceable here. And thank goodness. One of the reasons the tech industry in California is booming is the large talent pool available to employers.
          • fiatmoney 12y ago
            A company can sue you in, e.g., WA state court, and get a judgment based on WA law, that is enforceable in CA. If you are subject to a noncompete & moving to a state where they aren't enforced, the smart thing to do is to get a summary judgment in that state. Otherwise jurisdiction is a matter of who shoots first.
• jnsaff2 12y ago
  The further I read the more it reminds me The Gervais Principle. http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/ http://www.ribbonfarm.com/the-gervais-principle/
• lhnz 12y ago
  This reflects very poorly on Amazon. They should promote those that speak out about fraud that they witness and not fire them. If people like Munira Rahemtulla and Paul Kotas are still employed, it suggests to me that advertisers should be very wary about the nature of their advertising relationships with Amazon and whether they're getting good value for their money.
• jan_g 12y ago
  Interesting read. I've had my share of office politics in my career so far and it still baffles me how often it happens that people who add little or no value to the company become so entrenched and powerful. It's like the upper management and/or owners are blind to what happens within the company, despite the clues and complaints from the staff. Meanwhile, best people leave the company.
  • mercer 12y ago
    From what I've seen, these people who adding little value and yet climbing the ladder are often people who could add value, but instead use all their energy to play the advancement game. Which makes it all the worse, in my opinion.
  • hga 12y ago
    Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu... Those who focus on their position in the bureaucracy will almost always beat those who focus on the ostensible goals of it. Although in this case there were conflicting goals....
    • TeMPOraL 12y ago
      Replace "bureaucracy" with "democracy" and you'll see the number one reason why politics in US and Europe sucks so much.
      • hga 12y ago
        By "democracy" you mean "republic", and it's long been known, and was remarked upon by our Founders, that they only work with a moral people. Which we are clearly no longer. We're steadily transitioning into other forms like empire and oligarchy because of that.
• mozboz 12y ago
  TL;DR: 'I was surprised to learn how online advertising works, my manager in a big corp made me sad.'
• jorgecastillo 12y ago
  I had more esteem for Amazon, after this I definitely view Amazon in a different light. I am glad the only thing I buy from Amazon is books. In a few years when I have more time & money, I'll keep this in mind and maybe go directly to the publishers. I don't forget this sort of thing. Some time ago there was an article titled 'Motorola cell phones are regularly phoning home'. Not that I was too fond of the Motorola brand before, but since then if I know a someone is buying a smartphone, I advice then not to buy Motorola. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5973282 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5973282
  • tomelders 12y ago
    I can't speak for everyone else, but I'm certainly at he point where I want an alternative to Amazon. Amazon currently has the infrastructure and resources to crush opposition, but small groups will continue to nip at their heels and one will eventually figure out how to compete effectively and at scale. I believe then that Amazon will wish it still had the good will that it has spent.
    • a3n 12y ago
      When a significant portion of your shareholder value depends on minimizing cost, especially employee cost, as opposed to unquestioned value that can't be had elsewhere, you're at some risk. If the accusations here are accurate and at all typical of attitudes, and other accounts of bullying publishers (depending on your interpretation), and their at-a-distance treatment of their warehouse employees, then their value may not be as solid as they and others think. I've been reading recently that Walmart sales are suffering, in part because the shopping experience has degraded due to strict corporate limits on employment. Sales are down, which means, all things equal in a recovering and not absolutely horrible economy, that those sales have gone elsewhere. That could happen to Amazon too. Anecdote of one, I rarely buy from Amazon anymore, even less often than my going to Walmart. In Amazon's case, stories like this make me queasy whenever I buy there. My greatest interaction with them at the moment is to browse and read reviews, and I then use that information to buy elsewhere. They're a great recommendation service, and free.
• DevX101 12y ago
  Looks like Kivin was surprised when HR told his manager that he requested to be transferred. His manager then used this information against him, by putting him into a 'performance improvement program' which blocks transfers to any other group for some period of time. Let me let Kivin and any one else working for a company in on a little secret. HR is not your friend. HR is not there to protect you and your career. HR is there to protect the company AGAINST you. To the extent that your goals and the company's do not conflict, HR can be helpful. (Need some help with your health insurance or your 401k? HR is awesome!) But if you're going to HR about an issue that could be damaging to the company, HR will gladly listen to you sharing confidential information while quietly working with the leadership to build a case against you or protect themselves. If you're caught in a situation that could potentially lead to a legal dispute with the company (serious conflict with mgmt as seen here, discrimination, etc), make sure you document EVERYTHING, put as much in writing/email as possible and tread carefully before sharing too much info with HR. They won't be in your corner when shit hits the fan.
  • lordbusiness 12y ago
    I had exactly the same revelation during a protracted encounter I had at $NAME_WITHHELD - huge admired company - after working there for several years, and coming into an ethical and legal conflict against my division director. It was made abundantly clear that the goals of HR do not align with our notions of HR being champions for the workers. I appreciate this sounds blindingly obvious and almost forehead slapping to anyone who hasn't been on the sharp end of this, but let me assure you that when you are on the sharp end, this will be driven home with fervour.
    • mgkimsal 12y ago
      Agreed - been in a similar-sounding situation (nothing as big as the Amazon story). We are referred to a 'Resources' for a reason.
    • ThrowawayPhilae 12y ago
      You know, I was sad that the most upvoted link today was this story and not the awesome picture sent by the comet probe. Do people here really think this is today's most significant event ? And I was thinking that the same story about $NAME_ALSO_WITHHELD instead of Amazon would never have made it to the front page. So I was curious if $NAME_WITHHELD and $NAME_ALSO_WITHHELD was the same company and looked into it. Took me one minute and apparently it was...
• moe 12y ago
  What a fascinating insight into the guts of a MegaCorp. Their scale (Discover alone paying $13MM/yr for ads), politics and inner workings. Very well written, too. The most interesting aspect to me, apart from the main plot, was how far detached from reality everyone is operating. Someone discovers a fatal flaw (5 second latency) in a multi-million dollar ad campaign. You'd think this is a no-brainer; file a bug with the engineering team and have this fixed, right? Instead, at Amazon, it eventually escalates into someone desperately "asking for the contact information for the person that manages latency for amazon.com". That alone is the stuff that comedy TV shows are made of. Stories like these make me feel real pity for the little engineers all the way down the food chain. The ones who had to implement and test this adserver. The ones who likely weren't happy at all with 5 second latencies either. I wonder if their voices were squelched by management in the same way, or if there's just an established culture of resignation and nobody cares anymore.
  • briholt 12y ago
    With every new team and new layer of management, the agents' incentives drifted farther away from the organization's leading into a gray zone entirely focused on self-promotion and detached from fundamental business ethics.
• swombat 12y ago
  Disclaimer: I haven't read through the entire thing (just the first 3 pages or so), but I have been on the receiving end of entirely spurious threats of lawsuit. All of this needs to be read with some measure of skepticism. However, the complaint provides a fair amount of evidence, not just claims of wrongdoing... that gives it a fair amount of credence in my eyes. If so, that is very damning of the top-down, strongly hierarchical culture that Amazon is well-known for - but I would argue it is inevitable for any company that has a very hierarchical top-down culture... You can't make up for the downsides of top-down management with pretty words and values and employee handbooks. Hierarchical, power-based management will always lead to serious ethical lapses like this.
• pja 12y ago
  "At my next 1:1 meeting Munira explained “You think you’re going to get a transfer out of my group? I’m putting you into a Performance Improvement Plan which prevents transfers for 12 months”." I remember michaelochurch making almost exactly this point about PIPs on HN in the past - that it was far too easy for them to be used a tool for employee abuse & finding yourself under a PIP was a strong signal that should move on as soon as possible, regardless of the professed reasoning behind the PIP.
  • a3n 12y ago
    A colleague once commented that these things are essentially one year notice, and you should use that time to carefully find a new job.
  • yuhong 12y ago
    michaelochurch has also talked about open allocation. I am thinking that for Amazon mixing both might make sense.
• ericd 12y ago
  Side note, but Scribd is garbage. Got to page 3 or 4 before it demands that I install their mobile app to keep reading. I don't know why people keep posting on there.
  • Elrac 12y ago
    For what that's worth, there's a separate subthread here where lots of people agree with you. The first time I encountered Scribd, I wrote them scathingly critical feedback indicating that it was infuriatingly awkward to use if not nonfunctional, worse than any existing alternative and should be nuked from orbit. Some readers have pointed out that Scribd is a venture backed by YCombinator. Don't know how significant that is.
    • ericd 12y ago
      Heh yeah, I saw that after I posted... should have looked harder, but it was 5 AM and I wanted to go to sleep. It started off pretty bad just because their tech wasn't very good, but then it seemed to be getting better as they ditched their flash based reader for HTML. Now they just seem to be actively user-hostile in the name of growing the number of app installs. Naked user coercion is much less forgivable than just sucking.
• matwood 12y ago
  More proof that the only relationship you want with Amazon is as a customer. You do not want to be an employee, a vender, or any sort of partner.
  • doughj3 12y ago
    Which raises the question: if you wouldn't want to deal with Amazon in any other way, should you really be supporting them as a customer?
    • gdulli 12y ago
      Every year Amazon looks uglier and uglier and I feel worse and worse about buying from them. I've already backed off and it's probably a matter of time before I stop altogether.
• akclr 12y ago
  Here's a link that says that he has won the litigation against Amazon http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_advocates_client_prevails_ag/ http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_a...
  • GrinningFool 12y ago
    I believe he referenced those in his letter as things they gave up on ahead of trial because they had no hope of winning them anyway.
  • teachingaway 12y ago
    I think that link says he just won parts of the lawsuit. Other parts are still ongoing.
• akclr 12y ago
  Here is link that says he has won the litigation against amazon. http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_advocates_client_prevails_ag/ http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_a...
  • thyrsus 12y ago
    From http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-varghese-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-ki... Varghese sued Amazon in 2012 following his termination after seven months on the job. Although he won part of his case in July 2013 — Amazon waived enforcement of an 18-month non-compete obligation and granted him all rights to a patent application he’d filed — the trial for the second part of the suit has been pushed back until March 2015.
• andyjohnson0 12y ago
  According to this [1] article (dated today) in Business Insider Australia, Kivin Varghese has been camping outside Amazon's HQ until it addresses his complaint. It also has a more readable explanation of who/what/when than the linked pdf. [1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-varghese-2014-11 http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-ki...
• morky 12y ago
  I find it odd that so many in the tech industry idolise Amazon so much, they are just like many other aggressive retailers such as Walmart or Tesco. Interestingly Kivin sounds like the type of person you ideally want working and managing your product but most corporations are actually staffed by people like Munira and Kotas.
  • bengali3 12y ago
    I disagree, Kivin couldn't resolve this issue, jumped ship, and pointed fingers as he fell away. My assumptions here: NCA - not relevent. This gets agreed upon in advance (cont...) complaining about this after the fact changes how professional I view the writer. Discover - Unless Kivin was the owner of this relationship, I don't believe he had enough information to go on here. Team - Priority on needing to fess up to the client immediately is different from fixing the issue. I don't think these are the same issue. Departure - Kivin entered negotiations on severeance here. Im edit: I somehow submitted incomplete response then got distracted.. added (cont..) to denote separator of edit.
    • philangist 12y ago
      It read to me like egos prevented Kivin from resolving the issue, then tried to push him out, and he decided that he wasn't going down without a fight.
    • gregd 12y ago
      How was Kivin supposed to "resolve" this issue singlehandedly? He made attempts to declare what he thought was the direct way to resolve it and it was not only batted away by management, but they backed him into a corner and wanted him to lie about the situation and how it was going to be handled. I really don't understand your perspective.
      • bengali3 12y ago
        Thank you for your reply. I guess i'm separating the person from the issue. I'm not a fan of publicly attacking and divulging information or revealing negotiations, so i'm a bit skewed. I think future employers would potentially see this individual as a liability - regardless of right/wrong. To me it seems: He couldn't build consensus within the org around his opinion (critical skill in a Senior PM role). Regardless of the underlying issue, it seems he can't rally people around his idea. That makes me think either A) the idea is no good or B) you can't rally people very well. He didn't look ahead - His actions and disagreement with his manager led to his departure. We only have one side of the story here but im guessing him and his manager didn't get along often. After departure( i get that he's bitter) he decided to release this confidential information. Even communications from Discover personnel that have nothing to do with the issue - I have an issue with that and would not trust this individual. I am not defending Amazon or Management, merely disagreeing with the notion that this is an individual you want as a Senior PM. All in all, it seems this employee/manager relationship failed big time, and I would put some blame on both sides.
• tw04 12y ago
  Well... Discover is fully aware now.
• atmosx 12y ago
  This is a prominent example of how things can go wrong in big companies. That's exactly what happens in the (so globally hated) Greek public sector. The fact that it happens at companies like Amazon (probably MS, FB, GOOG, APPL, SONY, etc. ) says a lot about politics in big corps/orgs. Unfortunately skills are not all that relevant after all in our modern liberal society.
• alexggordon 12y ago
  > Amazon gave me their final offer: 4 weeks of severance for 18 months of adhering to the broad non-compete that would not allow me to earn a living in my field, and further explained that if I didn't accept their final offer, Amazon would sue me for tens of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses. The most interesting part to me is the lack of foresight by Amazon. Obviously this is a pretty big coverup, but with a pending lawsuit, and obvious wrongdoing to Amazon's 2nd biggest ad revenue generator, I'm particularly surprised more work wasn't put into solving/covering up this issue as soon as it started blooming. I know Bezos is crazy in his desire to make Amazon the biggest giant on the block, but it doesn't take a genius (which Bezos probably is) to realize a potentially huge problem when it happens. However, the fact that this wasn't dealt with in a better way, AND Bezos ignored emails from Kivin [0], leads me to two possible conclusions. A. Bezos didn't know the full situation, and Blackburn deceived him. B. Bezos knew the full situation, but chose to side with Blackburn (I suspect Munira didn't even cross his mind) because he values Blackburn more than morality. Either of these situations show that there was a decision made by Blackburn that this could be covered up cheaper than it could be remedied--a decision I find to be Occam's Razor here. The reason I think it was Blackburn, is I think Bezos is smart enough to just remove Kivin's non-compete just to make it go away without even costing Bezos any of his precious little revenue. I tend to evaluate companies based on how they treat their employees and if Munira and Blackburn are the typical managers and VPs at Amazon, then I think really find myself not needing Amazon's services anymore. Let's hope this hasn't happened to anyone else. [0] "I’ve sent two letters to Jeff Bezos (as these are serious issues that I believe he would care about as the founder of the company and keeper of the culture)" (pg 2).
• yahya94 12y ago
  Good
• drderidder 12y ago
  This isn't the first story of bad behavior from Amazon. Another story [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6104571 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6104571] from a contract worker appeared over a year and a half ago. I haven't used them since. But I'm wondering what are some good alternatives for book purchases?
  • mazelife 12y ago
    I don't like Amazon much either, so for books I usually go with http://www.powells.com/ http://www.powells.com/
• CSMastermind 12y ago
  My experience with Amazon HR is this: my ex-girlfriend had an internship with Amazon in the summer of 2013. While there her manager friended her on Facebook then sent her some messages suggesting that if she slept with him he would make sure she got a full time offer and explicitly describing his fantasies about her. She ended sleeping with him and true to his word he got her the full time position. About a month later I found out about the whole thing and broke up with her. I submitted the transcripts of their conversations to HR. They conducted an investigation and he admitted to everything. The guy got to keep his job. They transferred him to another group and wanted her to sign a statement saying that nothing improper happened. They strongly suggested that her full time offer might be rescinded is she didn't sign the statement. She signed and has been working there the past 6 months.
  • jliptzin 12y ago
    Lorne Malvo would have handled things a bit differently
  • deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
  • emocakes 12y ago
    dude, your ex was a whore. lucky you dropped that slut
  • glifchits 12y ago
    Appalling... I'm really sorry to hear that you were involved with her, that she had such a disgusting manager, and that he nor she were reprimanded.
    • gohrt 12y ago
      Please don't blame the victim. How would you feel if you applied for a job, and worked there for three months, and then your manager told you that you'd have to have sex with him to get your job, regardless of your merit for the role?
• opendais 12y ago
  In case anyone was wondering why I bash Amazon's non-AWS technical staff... They screwed up the promotion, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and 3-5s latency for ads? :P That is the only part of this complaint I find interesting.
  • ncallaway 12y ago
    > They screwed up the promotion, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars It's really hard to say from the given context that this was definitely engineering's fault. You'll note that the various plans for resolving the issue involve updating the Terms & Conditions of the offer. That makes me think that accurate code was implemented against incorrect Terms and Conditions, rather than incorrect code was implemented against accurate Terms and Conditions.
    • opendais 12y ago
      The latency issue is, I supposed I could have stated it better.
• abalone 12y ago
  Poor guy. First, writing a letter to the board asking for their help while simultaneously threatening that you've filed it with the attorney general's office is disingenuous. While that will call attention to yourself it is unlikely to produce a positive outcome. Which seems to be a pattern at the heart of his difficulties. Second, the initial incident of 5 second latency with displaying an ad was addressed prior to launch. He was reprimanded for sounding an alarm 3 levels up without first researching a solution. Third, and most importantly, his central ethics claim re: Discover is questionable. The promotion was to give $10 to people who used Discover. Much of his claim rests on his editorializing of the aims of the promo, specifically that it would be useless and mere "subsidy" unless targeted specifically at 1-click setting conversions. But that's debatable. He's the only one saying that. He admits the promotion was not set up that way, and Amazon reports that Discover was ok with it proceeding as long as it was narrowed to Fire users and capped at the original budget. It doesn't sound like Amazon's finest hour but when you strip out the one-sided editorializing these break more towards bugs and campaign issues that occasionally arise and get addressed in the course of development / advertising, and he breaks a little bit toward a messiah complex.
  • sk5t 12y ago
    The suit and letter were not his first courses of action. IMHO his actions are reasonable and necessary, at this point, to motivate the board to consider the problem seriously.
• kohanz 12y ago
  Wow, what a terrible experience. The evidence does seem to show that this guy was just trying to do the right job and do it ethically and he was basically tarred and feathered for doing so by his superiors, who are just a rung or two below Bezos. I wonder how AMZN employees feel, reading this.
• moogleii 12y ago
  There are some odd policies here. There's the crazy non-compete clause (if those are allowed, the former company should pay for however long the clause lasts). Then there's the "Performance Improvement Plan." I don't really understand the purpose of preventing transfers. If an employee truly needs improvement, how does preventing transfers have anything to do with that? Based off other former employee anecdotes, Amazon is starting to sound like the Walmart of the internet.
  • codeonfire 12y ago
    "I don't really understand the purpose of preventing transfers." Managers look like complete shit if an employee leaves. They are judged based on their ability to control and have power over people. You have to understand, some companies have devolved so far that they behave like criminal gangs. If one drug dealer leaves his boss and goes to another boss what does that tell all the other drug dealers about the first boss?
• kvargs 12y ago
  Hi All - Kivin here - thanks for the words of support - it really helps. Yes I thought HR was at a minimum neutral. In Amazon, your HR contact is called your "HR Business Partner" which in retrospect is completely bogus. They are there to do what the exec management chain wants them to do.
  • zippergz 12y ago
    That means they are a partner to the business, not a partner to you. This is a common (not Amazon-invented) term.
• ChuckMcM 12y ago
  Good luck with the lawsuit Kivin. Sadly I didn't see anything in the letter that I would not have expected to be true at any large company. Given what you know of the company I'm pretty sure you can ignore the non-compete for now, if they want to enforce it they have to sue you, and if they sue you they have to have all of this come out in court. Which they won't, so you're fine there. Not a great resolution I know.
• rburhum 12y ago
  Sorty for the side note, but is anybody else having trouble reading this opened in a browser in an iPad? I don't understand why something as simple as scrolling through a doc has to be impossible in 2014
  • 205guy 12y ago
    iPad reader here as well. I couldn't get beyond the first page either. Another example of low quality product (or perhaps outright malicious business model) breaking the Internet.
• paulhauggis 12y ago
  This sort of behavior at Amazon does not surprise me. If you are a third-party seller, they will eventually use your own sales data to go around you, buy whatever you are selling at bulk, and put you out of business. This past September, they had major server issues, which cost sellers lots of money in sales. They refuse to admit it. As a seller, you also don't own your customers (you are given the privilege of selling to amazons customers). Which means that at any point in time, Amazon could take it all away and all of the hard work you put into pleasing the people buying your products goes to waste. They have been recently making it more and more difficult for the average user to even continue their business. So many people that have been selling for years are prevented from continuing without paperwork from distributors (which as I've seen in the past, is just a trick to find out where they can compete with you) With thaw business practices, they should have been out of business years ago.
• jotjotzzz 12y ago
  Wow, this is horrible. Munira needs to be fired. And to be honest, I lost a lot of respect for Amazon and for Jeff Bezos over this. So much so that I sold all my Amazon stocks just now.
• iblaine 12y ago
  Another result of this witch hunt is Munira Rahemtulla will forever be tied to this lawsuit whenever someone googles her name.
• downandout 12y ago
  The tl;dr version is this: Discover Card, which spends ~$15M/yr advertising with Amazon, wanted to give a $10 gift card to Kindle users that changed their default Amazon 1-Click purchase settings to use a Discover card. Instead, Amazon gave the gift cards to everyone that used Discover for a 1-click digital purchase, the vast majority of whom already had Discover as their default 1-Click purchase card. Discover's $500K budget was predictably drained in rapid fashion, and they barely got any of the actions they had agreed to pay for. The author of this letter was encouraged to hide this fact, pitch it as an overwhelming success of the campaign, and to ask Discover to expand the budget. He was fired after complaining about being uncomfortable with participating in obvious fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, and is now suing Amazon. The failures here occurred in every department. First, at a fundamental technical level, I don't understand how this could happen in the first place if it wasn't intentional. This was a simple CPA campaign. When someone changed their default card to Discover, they got a gift card. So it begins with their "ad execution team". Second, the moment the problem was discovered, they should have simply credited the campaign such that they were only charged for the actions they agreed and intended to pay for. Third, any employee actively involved in encouraging fraud, let alone fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, should be fired. Their engineering, marketing, legal, and HR teams all failed miserably on this one. I don't envision myself ever having a need to run a CPA campaign through Amazon, but based on this I would stay away from them as much as possible. They had to have multiple internal discussions about whether or not they should commit a crime against a multi-million dollar advertiser. That's certainly enough to scare me away.
  • wehadfun 12y ago
    thanks. So he didn't get caned for disrespecting the chain of command about some stupid latency issue
    • MangoDiesel 12y ago
      No, that issue seemed to get cleared up successfully. He used that to foreshadow issues with his manager and general escalation communication.
    • 12y ago
• bphogan 12y ago
  It wouldn't be called "Human Resources" if that department were on the side of the worker. They wouldn't be calling the workers "resources." My wife's studying to go into this field and that's basically what she's taught - you're in HR for the company.
• kordless 12y ago
  Nice timing on this story.
• tdsamardzhiev 12y ago
  Well that's it, I'm done with Amazon. I hope everything goes well for Kivin. As for Munira, I am ashamed of myself, but sometimes I really want certain peaple to step on a landmine.
• glifchits 12y ago
  Its very disappointing to see that this behaviour continues to exist in organizations, even with a leader like Bezos (I'll optimistically assume he practices the ethical standards he preaches). It seems like a fundamental tension in business. How can mistakes ever be admitted when shareholders react aggressively on any indication of poor management performance? Meanwhile today, in light of this news, AMZN stock is up. How disheartening.
• wrd 12y ago
  As scandalous as this letter is, the politics, intrigue, and retaliation follow to a T the description of corporate mangers' logic and ethics as written in Moral Mazes by Robert Jackall. I highly recommend it for a better understanding of why people act the way they do in a corporate context.
• khrist 12y ago
  is there any comment from amazon on this yet?
• devanti 12y ago
  Anyone know how Discover responded to this? Are they still working with Amazon?
• grellas 12y ago
  So you are an Amazon board member and you receive this letter. The letter is said to be directed to you in confidence. It is not. It is openly published on scribd for all the world to see. The letter is said to be written by an ex-executive of the company. It is not. Or, if it is, it is written in a style that has "lawyer-written" stamped all over it. The person making the claims is saying he is doing this to uphold company values but is far from disinterested. If he was fired for whistleblowing, that is wrongful and he gets large damages. Otherwise, not. So, maybe it is sincere and maybe not. But who knows? The person also waited two years to write this letter. Does this undercut its premise that its goal is to correct wrongdoing? Or was it now put out opportunistically to further some litigation goal instead? Again, who knows? Ditto for a complaint being made just now to the Washington agency responsible for fraud. Why now and not earlier if the problems were serious and pressing? Then too, the alleged victim (Discover Card) is hardly a naive consumer, knows how to defend itself, and had known enough about this to ask questions going as far back as 2012. Is there, then, less than meets the eye concerning the claims of its having been overtly cheated? Everything stated in this letter may be true and damning as it appears. I don't know what happened, nor do I know the people involved. But I do know when something is framed insincerely and this letter is framed insincerely. It may all be true but its style and timing do not ring true. This has to have another side to it, in my view, and it is wrong to take it as self-evidently true without hearing that other side. What we have now is only a one-sided story that is heavily slanted in its presentation. Certainly if I were a board member to whom this was purportedly directed, I would be highly skeptical. I would assume instead that I was not even the intended audience for the letter. And I would probably be right.
  • gohrt 12y ago
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asymmetric_warfare Way to stand up for the little $145B company. Who, by the way, have an army of lawyers and PR professionals who write everything that comes out of the corporation. Regular employees are banned from speaking on behalf of the company. Aren't you a lawyer? Are you the only lawyer who tells clients "go ahead and speak for yourself, it's not my place to help you word your thoughts effectively"? Who, pray tell, do you think writes the "Letter from Jeff Bezos" that occasionally appears on the website? The litigation goal, you may recall, is to compensate the aggrieved for losing his job over failure to join a criminal conspiracy.
• swamp40 12y ago
  What's the legality of Kivin releasing internal emails like this to the general public? I would never do something like that. Even if I was completely and horribly screwed over, I would only share information like this with my attorney.
  • srean 12y ago
    Legal or not, I cannot thank him enough for bringing it up. He did a service to all who are or will be looking for employment. It was certainly eye opening for me.
• rebootthesystem 12y ago
  It sure sounds like the wrong person was fired. I have experience with the Amazon advertising platform. Not on the Kindle side but what I'll call "Amazon main". And I can tell you it ain't pretty at all. I don't know if I should characterize this as fraud. Not sure what the legal designation might be. Here's a hypothetical example to try to explain the problem: Imagine you are selling product on Amazon. Products you manufacture. And, in order to drive sales you purchase ads on the Amazon ads platform. You only pay when someone clicks. Ads accomplish two missions: sales and ranking improvement. Ranking on Amazon is important. The closer your product is to the top of page one the more sales you'll generate. Ads can help you accomplish this. So far so good. Now imagine someone is teaching a course on how to scam Amazon buyers and make money in the process. The course teaches you to find successful listings on Amazon and, effectively, add your name to the product page as an additional seller. Amazon encourages this. It's ridiculously easy. Once you have a seller account it takes all of one minute to pick a product and list against it. But, wait, you don't actually make that product. You don't even have any in stock. How do you do this? Simple, when a customer makes a purchase you send them some crap product that is similar enough. If you do your homework your fake product will not be returned and you just made some money. Here's the problem. The legitimate product manufacturer spent thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars advertising the product on Amazon to get it well ranked and generate enough sales that the product has a good reputation (reviews, etc.). Amazon, in turn, allows ANYONE to list against ANY product and, effectively steal the time, money and effort expended by the rightful product producer in making that product a success in the Amazon ecosystem. In other words, if you just spent $100K advertising your product on Amazon they allow Joe Blow to come in and take away 25% to 50% (or whatever) of the sales you generate with that ad spend. And there's NOTHING you can do about it. Imagine Amazon spending millions of dollars to advertise their Kindle tablet during the Superbowl or the Olympics. Now imagine the TV network allowing Apple and Microsoft to display a link to their tablets FOR FREE within the Amazon Kindle ad. Crazy, right? Amazon wouldn't put up with that for a microsecond. They'd say: If Apple and Microsoft want to sell their tablets they need to pay for their own advertising on their own time slot. And they would be correct in pushing for this. The networks would, effectively, allow Amazon's competitors to steal Amazon's advertising budget for their own financial gains. Wrong. Well, this is EXACTLY what Amazon is doing today to every single one of their advertisers. If you advertise on Amazon your ad budget is very likely to generate sales for competitors. That is wrong beyond description and Amazon seems to have zero interest in fixing the problem. The solution is very simple: A listing that has an active spend budget needs to be locked out from any other sellers. It becomes a single seller listing for as long as the seller is spending even a single dollar a day in Amazon ads. Problem solved. After reading most of the posted letter I've come to realize that the problems within Amazon are much greater than I thought. You see two faces of this corporation when you work with them as a vendor. The public face looks clean, organized and inviting. The "back office" side is in constant chaos, is disorganized, has ethical problems, is clueless, does NOT have the seller's/advertisers best interests at heart and, it seems, is perfectly comfortable with conducting business in unethical and fraudulent ways, perhaps unintentionally due to dysfunction, yet the consequences to those engaging with that side of the organization are the same. Where is Jeff Bezos in all of this? It would seem he needs to become very visible and push forward a major reform in a very public way, at least public to their advertisers. Almost like what Domino's Pizza did: http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34812047/ns/business-us_business/t/dominos-tough-love-itself-getting-noticed/#.VGTqdvnF_h4 http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34812047/ns/business-us_business/t...
• hrasyid 12y ago
  Forgive this stupid question, but how do we know the letter as seen on this scribd link is authentic, let alone verify all the screenshots, emails and transcripts in that letter?
• graycat 12y ago
  A classic case of goal subordination, a standard topic in courses in organizational behavior and/or public administration. So, the definition of goal subordination is an employee acting in a way that helps them but hurts the company. That is, the goal of helping the company is subordinated to, that is, made less important than, the goal of helping the person engaging in goal subordination. In the case of the OP, it was not nearly just the fired employee who was hurt but 2-3 levels of management above that employee, the whole company, Bezos, and the stockholders. Gee, some parts of the roll out were not ready on time! Like this is the first time in projects? Gee, even for the pyramids, the project leaders needed enough in workers, food, stone cutting tools, wood, rope, etc. -- lack of any one of these inputs could stop the whole leaders whole project. That's part of what we now call materials requirements planning, right, MRP. And for getting all the parts ready on time, there is methodology for that, in part, an application of linear programming with critical paths, etc. US aerospace got good at such things. So, that little project at Amazon fumbled the ball on having the ad parts ready? They hired the people straight out of what, kindergarten? And, after the project went forward, Amazon sent in a staff group, in an independent part of the organization, to analyze what went right/wrong? In Tunisia, Ike did that after Kasserine and the other battles in the Tunisian campaign, and soon Rommel was permanently back in Berlin, and the Allies had captured about 300,000 Axis soldiers and driven the Axis out of North Africa, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, to Egypt and the Suez Canal. Apparently in the US Army, such analysis of what happened is called an after-action review, e.g., as at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-action_review http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-action_review not nearly new stuff, and Amazon should be able to do well with such a process. Managing, planning, executing, reviewing projects is not nearly new stuff; Amazon just blew it. Not so good for Bezos. The most serious sources of goal subordination are middle management: The worker bees don't have enough power seriously to hurt the company, and the work of the C-level guys is too visible to the CEO and the BoD. It's totally dumb for the company to have HR blindly back middle management possibly engaged in goal subordination, playing politics to "look good" while, really, making a mess, etc. E.g., she was messing up and reported to a guy who knew her resume was wrong -- can anyone guess what might have been going on here? I mean, anyone who at least went through junior high? Bezos made it through junior high, right? Also there needs to be a company culture of honesty, hard work, good ideas, etc. For such a culture, need to be sure that a middle manager won't dump on a subordinate who does really good work. A lot is known about how to manage, e.g., to reduce goal subordination. For the employee who got fired, when I get around to needing a guy to work with major advertisers, I'll consider him in a millisecond. "Black list"? Sure, fine with me; the other companies can black list him while I hire him! But he might sue my company? If my company messed up as badly as it appears Amazon did, then he should sue us; if he didn't, that would be against him. I'd hope that we wouldn't mess up like that. Yes, that ad guy might report some really great successes to me. Okay, I mean, terrific, if they are real. Of course, I'd also get independent confirmation, say, directly from appropriate people at the company paying for the ads. If he did really well, then, sure, presto, bingo, bonus time, say, early in December. I know; I know; this idea of such a bonus doesn't go along with the Ben Horowitz lecture, just yesterday or some such, in Sam's course, right? Sorry, Ben. The US military can give battlefield promotions, decorations, etc., so I'll be willing to hand out a December bonus. If the ad guy didn't do so well, then have a project to understand why and do better the next time. If he needs to go to a week long seminar "How to Be a Good Ad Exec 101", and it's actually a useful seminar, then fine. If he can't really do the job, then help him learn to do his job. Why might he not be able to do his job? One reason: He worked really hard on some of his last jobs while the world changed. So, e.g., he needs to get caught up on, say, the business of mobile ads. Okay; let him get caught up. Notice I said he's an "ad guy" and not an "Ad Exec". I just want him to do his job and not hang on titles that can cause problems (here Ben was roughly correct). And the manager? Largely to heck with that nonsense: In a good university, usually a department chair doesn't get to rule over the professors as if they were subordinate worker bees. Instead, the chair does some coordination, etc., and the job is not always coveted and not necessarily a promotion! Basic fact: Each instance of good work is first done between just one pair of ears. Sorry 'bout that. For a team, all the good work is of just this kind. What we really want now is just such good work. For the routine coordination, etc. can leave that to managers, but that is inferior work. E.g., the coordination needed to get all the pieces done on time for the big roll out is work that was done at least back to the pyramids and, thus, has to be regarded as routine. Some of this is controversial? Yup. YMMV. Sorry 'bout that.
• throwawfromlv 12y ago
  The document does not have the image of the ad itself or how it was advertised to customers. What was stopping customers with discover card to temporarily remove and re-add it? Promotions like this are picked up by coupon blogs, with detailed steps to get the deals. This would explain the ad budget getting over before the forecast and also, gift cards being awarded to users, who had not even seen the ad. The document does acknowledge that the team responsible for forecast "ad execution team", admitting the fuck up and using amazon cash to fund the the remainder of the promotion. Meanwhile implementing the workflow to require ad click requirement. Given the context that this was a secretive gen 1 kindle tablet project, people should have been working hard to pull it off by deadline. And you have this whistleblower shooting emails to SVP looking for "who is responsible for latency on amazon.com". I am an engineer at an equally big company in bay area, I hate to work with PMs like OP.
• jessaustin 12y ago
  Regarding the Bezos quotes, it is striking that instead of saying "we will do X and we will not do Y", he opted for the considerably more weaselly "X is cool and Y is not cool". To those whose careers depend on doing Y, he might as well not have mentioned it, which was probably his intent.
• throwawayamz 12y ago
  I was a dev on a partner team (but have since moved on....) and there is a bit more backstory. Kivin wasn't an exec at Amazon, he was 1 of 4 product managers at the time. Only Pinsky remains from that group still on the team. Kivin wasn't my favorite person to work with, but he also clearly had different expectations about the job and responsibilities than what he actually did. He often was frustrated and felt dejected. Munira has retaliated against others, and it's my understanding she has had "high" churn in her org over the years. Hence throwaway/AC. For those who want to see the advertisement creatives, they are available here: https://www.behance.net/gallery/5329673/Discover-Card-Concept-on-Kindle-Fire https://www.behance.net/gallery/5329673/Discover-Card-Concep... Also, note that while the copy on the ads talk about "Receive a $10 gift card when you spend $20 on your discovery card", it was widely understood that the actual goal was to get customers to set their discover card to 1-click. This was the working assumption across the team. You'll note in the description of the campaign, below, the excellent designer confirms this understanding: "Their main objective was to get customers to change their default payment method on Amazon.com to Discover." This aligns with what Kivin contends. Amazon Payments privately objected since Discover cards cost more to process than other cards, and so they contended that the advertising campaign would be a net loss for the company since the $500k or so in ad spend would not be made up by the $1MM or so in increased merchant costs. Since Amazon Payments and Amazon Ads are in different orgs and have separate budgets, only someone at Jeff's level or at Discover would see the net... and hence the reason Amazon Ads and Discover would do the deal. The whole amazon ads program is one unmitigated disaster, both in terms of tech and business. It's a shame. So much of the rest of the company is really good, but it's the few bad orgs like this that tarnish what otherwise could be a neutral employment brand.
  • hullo 12y ago
    That's definitely not the creative you picture in your mind while reading the letter, thanks.
• dang 12y ago
  We changed the title from "Letter to Amazon Board from Ad Exec Fired for Refusing to Lie to Customer" to the largest subset of it that any of us is in a position to confirm is accurate.
• pessimizer 12y ago
  I'm surprised this story got so many comments (I flagged it, and I rarely flag.) It seems like a minor internal dispute between an conscientious employee and their bad, less-conscientious manager, over a very small amount of money. I can't detect a larger issue involved here except that when people screw up in a way that loses money, they will sometimes try to come up with a way to cover their ass rather than admit it and attempt to rectify it and therefore show everyone that they messed up. Whoever posted it has exposed Amazon to a lawsuit, though. When eventually negotiating to fix this quietly with Discover, Amazon will be at a serious disadvantage.
  • legendben 12y ago
    I find this article immensely useful to someone relatively new to the tech industry. While politics isn't the core topic on Hacker News, it is a reality that affects everyone's life! The question we all should ask is "what would we do if it was me?' Very seldom do you see what happens in a big company like Amazon. The shared article offers great insight that you cannot find anywhere else. To pessimizer, just because you don't learn anything new in this article does not mean it is not useful to others. Your flagging it is rather self-centered.
• mistermumble 12y ago
  so Kivin is taking the fight to the streets, or at least to the front door of Amazon HQ, with a daily protest vigil. http://www.geekwire.com/2014/protesting-outside-amazon-hq-former-employee-asks-current-employees-stop-working-hard/ http://www.geekwire.com/2014/protesting-outside-amazon-hq-fo...
• john_smiths 12y ago
  While one thing's for sure, I am blacklisting him from my company.
• sidcool 12y ago
  I feel like coining a new phrase 'Pulling of a Munira', defined as 'Successfully but falsely convincing people of having a degree from a coveted university over a long period of time'
• g8gggu89 12y ago
  I like how he's unhappy with 2 weeks' severance pay when the rest of us little people get nothing when fired or leaving a job.
• toli 12y ago
  I went to Stanford with Munira, she was a few years older but we overlapped, and she was a CS Section Leader (CS198) which means she taught my intro CS class when I took it, and helped me (and others) when I was stuck writing my first programs. I subsequently became friends with her, and I can personally vouch that she took all the requisite CS classes, and she was pulling all-nighters in the same lab as me, writing code for her classes. I remember Munira being wicked smart - and an honest conscientious person. Now, she may not have officially graduated - but keep in mind that she was finishing Stanford in the heady dot-com days, and she was likely a few units short of getting a full degree when Epiphany (a high-flying startup at the time) lured her in, and she never went back to finishing it. Similar story happened to me - i was 3 or 4 units short of required 45 units to get my CS Masters when i was graduating (I did the same co-term program where you get a BS and MS at the same time); and Stanford wanted me to pay the remaining $4k to get my degree. I paid, but quite possible that Munira was in the same boat, went to work for Epiphany and never bothered to finish her remaining units. I don't work for Amazon, and I don't know the full details of the story - but it sounds a lot like ramblings of a disgruntled employee. I would definitely like to hear/see the Amazon side of the story before I draw any conclusions. Keep in mind - I'm heavily biased, I was friends with Munira at Stanford and afterwards before she moved to Seattle, but i'm very skeptical to be taking all of the allegations at face value. Official degree or not, I'd hire her to work at my startup in a heartbeat without any worries. side note: Munira is not exUSSR from Tajikistan - good guess, but she just worked there for one summer. Nor Bangladeshi either. Either way, it's not in any way material to this conversation. I, on the other hand, am from former USSR, in case that makes any difference.
  • mililani 12y ago
    Wow, Epiphany. Haven't heard that name in a long time. I used to work at IBM above their office in Campus Dr. in San Mateo. I think they went out of business and that space was later occupied by a staffing agency. I might have run into her before in the lobby. Such a long time ago. Man, time flies.
• pseingatl 12y ago
  What's this case about? An employee who had a dispute with his supervisor. As in most cases, the supervisor won. The employee's future with the company is destroyed. The supervisor is protected by the company. The employee sues. There may or may not be long-term collateral damage. The alleged victim, Discovery, isn't talking and may already have settled with Amazon outside the context of litigation. The supervisor's fraudulent resumé is now a matter of public record. She will be kept on at least until this lawsuit is over because Amazon needs her as a witness. After the case is resolved, she will resign. Could this matter have been resolved any other way? Probably not. It's sad to see that legacy companies are just as bureaucratic as legacy ones. Jeff Blackburn is culpable for not censuring Munira R. after Kivin V. brought this matter to his attention--after all, he was the one who insisted on a fix. Kivin should have tried to convince Munira R. to go with him to Jeff Blackburn. If she said no, then he would have to weigh her probable reaction. Clearly, Kivin miscalculated. He didn't realize how powerful Munira R. is at Amazon and what allies she had--and I say had because her time at Amazon is numbered. A person in Munira's position, who has to keep a secret, must weigh the possibility that secret will get out. Her miscalculation was thinking that Kivin would get fired and go away and her secret would remain hidden. Matters like this are clearly not serious enough for board intervention. It's for that reason that you have management in the first place. The board does not manage day to day affairs of the business and relies on management to do so. For Amazon, this squabble is a distraction that harms the company. What happens when companies get sued is that they circle the wagons. Whatever you might say about throwing attorneys at a problem, those attorneys know that because of Munira, their case is vulnerable. Munira's lies will be Exhibit #1 during her cross-examination. Indeed, her own attorneys will have to bring out her c.v. falsification--and not through the weasel-worded, "she had yet to complete the degree" nonsense spouted by Jeff Blackburn during his deposition. He was poorly coached by Amazon's attorneys. He should have simply admitted that she lied. Otherwise the follow-up--when you drag in twelve strangers off the street and make them sit together and call them a jury--will be, why can't you admit the obvious? Are you trying to hide something? What might that be? Amazon was probably blindsided by Munira's lies: as a top executive under a clear policy to tell the truth and an HR department that could easily have followed up, Amazon's general counsel and attorneys could not have expected that she would have lied. If you think you can't lose a case because a single witness lied about an unrelated matter, try rewinding the OJ tapes and listen to the cross of Mark Fuhrman. So what now? Amazon's smart move is to ignore the sit-in because all an arrest or eviction will do is bring more unwanted attention to the case. They may ask the judge in the case for an injunction preventing the sit-in because it is arguably an unethical settlement move not provided for by the Rules of Civil Procedure, and Kivin agreed to follow those rules by filing suit. Amazon has already backed down from the non-compete clause. I'm sure they would love to settle the case. But guys who camp out on your doorstep are usually difficult to settle with. Maybe Kivin sees millions of dollars--an executive paid $250k/yr. with thirty years of work, plus injury to reputation, plus interest would be entitled to a substantial sum. My guess is that Kivin doesn't want to settle. He feels hurt, wants to prove he's right, wants his day in court. My advice to both sides: settle. Kivin: take less than what you think they owe you, get them to agree to give you a glowing reference (though in the publicity-heavy context of this case I don't know valuable this will be immediately) and agree not to disparage Amazon. Amazon: despite the fact that your lawyers have told you this is a winnable case, it will only get worse. You have nothing to gain. To both of you: don't you guys watch Star Trek? Don't you remember the lesson of the Kobayashi Maru? Litigation is like that test that only Captain Kirk ever beat: the only way to win is not to play the game. If you win, you still lose heavily.
• p4wnc6 12y ago
  Oh, oh, I know this one! I read about this in Moral Mazes: < http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Mazes >!
• igonvalue 12y ago
  Did anyone else find the document difficult to read because of the tortuous writing style? > Though I was assured the internal investigation at Amazon was ‘independent and thorough’, we later found the investigation around the matters I raised while employed at Amazon was directed by the same internal Amazon lawyer that was helping my manager terminate my employment based on the same issues I raised in the internal complaint - so Amazon’s counsel was essentially directing the investigation around serious issues that she had been responsible for handling herself - far from ‘independent and thorough’ and a surprising lack of internal controls for a public company like Amazon.