Amazon might be the US’ biggest retailer now, but working there seems to be a soul-crushing affair, according to a scathing 6,000 -word report from The New York Times.
The NYT’s expose depicts Jeff Bezos’ company as an environment where workers are frequently driven to tears, others are weeded out after encountering medical issues, and a competitive stack-rank system encourages employees to undermine one another. Bosses are said to carry out random sackings to keep workers on their toes and staff even have a button in their toilets to call a cleaner so they don’t waste time looking for one. Amazon’s 14 Leadership Principles dictates the steep level of achievement and standards each new hire must reach. New employees are drilled on the Leadership Principles during orientation, which occurs every Monday, so expectations for achievement are set incredibly high from the get go.
AS it expands heavily, Amazon’s demanding and competitive ethics, of which is wrung out of every employee, has produced some of the company’s increasingly intricate forays into personalized delivery services. Amazon’s priorities became your same-day, and later, same-hour delivery systems. With mind-melting amounts of data, metrics, manpower, and tears (everyone cries there apparently), Amazon has willed itself to the top of the global retail market.
The NYT, which interviewed more than 100 employees and ex-employees for its story, recounts several instances of the brutal work ethic inside the company. An ex-Amazon employee who had a stillborn child recalled how she had “just experienced the most devastating event in my life” but was then told by the company that she was being put on a performance-improvement plan. This, she told NYT, was “to make sure my focus stayed on my job”.
One Amazon veteran told the NYT: “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
However, Jeff Bezos and other Amazon employees are airing their displeasure over the expose. In an online blog by Nick Ciubotariu from Amazon’s Search Experience department, he stresses that some of the claims are ‘completely false’ and accused the New York Times of writing sensationalist ‘reader bait’.
In an internal memo forwarded by an Amazon employee to The Verge, the company’s founder and CEO Jeff Bezos tells his staff: “I don’t recognize this Amazon and I very much hope you don’t, either.”
“The NYT article prominently features anecdotes describing shockingly callous management practices, including people being treated without empathy while enduring family tragedies and serious health problem. The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day.”
