
Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec - kvargs
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-UEZdQ4D9zd883gw8tn3D&show_recommendations=true
======
DevX101
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.

~~~
kelukelugames
Using this opportunity to plug the book Corporate Confidential. It will save
your career.

[http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-
Company...](http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company-
Know---/dp/0312337361/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415893862&sr=8-1&keywords=corporate+confidential)

A few takeaways.

1\. Performance improvement plans are not for performance improvement. They
are for firing employees. Management already formed an irreversible negative
view. It is too late.

2\. You cannot win a case against the company. Because a) companies have more
resources and b) even if you do win then other companies will mark you as a
troublemaker. Getting hired is going to get a lot harder.

3\. If you insist on fighting then do document everything. Supposedly you need
a few months of notes. In other words, being called a slur once or twice does
not make a hostile work environment. If HR is unaware then the company is not
liable, but if you share your notes then you won't win the case anyway. There
are a few narrow forms of discrimination that are claimable but the best
option is to keep your head down and find a new job.

4\. Do not document anything on company software or networks. My friend got to
learn what Data Loss prevention software really did.

5\. HR has zero legal obligation to keep your secrets. Their job is to
identify threats to the company. They literally get paid to share your
secrets.

Bonus anectode: I went to HR and asked "Are you legally required to keep
things I tell you confidential? For example, if I tell you I want to leave
then will you tell my boss?"

Her answer to my second question was no, but guess what my boss and I talked
about the next day!

~~~
balls187
> Performance improvement plans are not for performance improvement. They are
> for firing employees. Management already formed an irreversible negative
> view. It is too late.

While this ends up mostly true in practice, I have known people who were able
to turn things around after being put on a PIP.

> You cannot win a case against the company. Because a) companies have more
> resources and b) even if you do win then other companies will mark you as a
> troublemaker. Getting hired is going to get a lot harder.

There is a flip side to this. The company wants to ensure it has a water tight
case against you, to ensure the complaints are dismissed before going to
court. Otherwise, if there is any merit to your complaint, despite the company
having more resources than you, they do not wish to be tied up in legal
entanglements. This is why HR and Management document everything heavily.

I don't have the source handy, but in the US workplace legal disputes is the
number one costs to companies.

~~~
apetresc
> I don't have the source handy, but in the US workplace legal disputes is the
> number one costs to companies.

You're really going to have to qualify that somehow. It can't possibly be
close to true in that form.

~~~
balls187
Fair point. I stepped away and did not have a chance to edit the post to
qualify it as legal costs.

~~~
rogerhoward
Labor tends to be one of business' largest costs as well, so labor-related
legal being the largest category of legal costs is (if true) not unreasonable.

------
tomp
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.

~~~
danielweber
_Munira is a liar /cheater, and still employed at Amazon._

I'm still a little disturbed as to why I'm seeing her dragged through the mud
on a top link on HN. We aren't a gossip site, so why is this "confidential"
letter being shared amongst the community at this time? What context am I
missing?

~~~
edraferi
The story is compelling because Amazon's treatment of Kivin is a relevant
warning to HN readers, who sympathize with technical employees who are
victimized by their employers. In this respect, it's similar to posts about
the massive collusion between Google, Apple etc to suppress wages.

The use of Munira's real name isn't even necessary. S/he is just the hand of
the corporation. It valuable for each HN reader to think about who Munira
might be in their work place, and defend themselves appropriately.

~~~
sremani
I disagree, too many of these articles leave the wrong-doers unnamed and
unscathed. I am happy Kivin is taking names and calling the whole thing for
what it is. Amazon gave a 4-week severance and 18month non-compete clause,
which falls even below than unfair.

------
CSMastermind
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.

~~~
dreamweapon
If what you're saying is accurate (I'm not suggesting that you're lying; but
if there are no important omitted details that might cause us to draw
different conclusions about what you've said so far), then do I hope she has
the courage to come forward with the FB transcripts -- especially all the
explicit fantasies the hiring manager was stupid enough to post in conjunction
with an explicit quid-pro-quo in the same channel. Along with copies of any
ridiculous statements she was forced to sign.

These companies just _won 't_ stop behaving badly until their behavior gets
vividly exposed often enough for them to start thinking twice. In the case of
sexual harassment, the more incontrovertibly damning material that comes out
(provided it is done with the express consent of the victims), the better.

~~~
reinhardt
The "victim"? Please. She weighed things and decided that a fulltime job right
out of the gate was more important than a one-nighter and cheating on her ex.
Not justifying the manager and everyone involved in the cover-up but this
sounds more like a consenting adults agreement than a poor victim
exploitation.

~~~
discodave
Or you can look at it that if she was a guy she would have just been offered
the job. In this scenario her manager thought "hmm, she fits in well here and
I can also get laid!" In that case, she had to have sex with somebody to get a
job that somebody else would have got without question.

------
downandout
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.

~~~
abalone
Is there any evidence Discover agreed to that? As far as I can see he is the
only one claiming the sole purpose of the campaign was to convert 1-click
settings. That is his editorializing. Everywhere else it's mentioned, e.g. in
Amazon's response[1], the campaign was not tied to that goal specifically. He
even notes this himself:

 _" The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used
their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10
Amazon Gift Card."_

Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with
the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and
capped to the original budget.

[1] [http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-
kivin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-
varghese-2014-11)

~~~
anigbrowl
If you read the email from Jill Losser (ad buyer at Discover) on page 10 you
can see she is pretty pissed off about the problem and also uncertain on the
details of what happened because Amazon managers have been holding back data
on exactly where the discount monies went. When you cite the line about 'the
promotion was structured in a way...' you're taking his description about how
it operated in practice while ignoring his statement on how it was supposed to
operate (laid out in the next two sentences). I agree that this is
editorializing on his part and it would have been better, if possible, to
include the text of Discover's ad buy request - but when you look at the email
from the Discover ad buyer it's pretty clear that she's unhappy about the way
the promotion has turned out.

The best interpretation you can put on this is that Discover may have failed
to be sufficiently specific in the terms of its ad buy and that Amazon
misinterpreted this lack of specificity to mean that Discover wanted to give
$10 to any Amazon customer using a Discover card as their 1-click option,
rather than incentive customers who were not doing so to change that behavior.

Mind, I'm not commenting on the overall merits of Varghese's letter but on the
likelihood that he accurately represented Discover's expectation.

~~~
abalone
_> she is pretty pissed off about the problem_

The problem she was pissed off about was lack of visibility into the
performance data of the program, not its structure. There is no mention of a
problem with how it is structured; in fact, there is a reference to another
promotion, "free holiday shipping", which very conceivably would be structured
the same way. Offer a promo to Discover card users, promote Discover card
without going so far as to tie it exclusively to conversions.

The Amazon's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this
visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program
within its original budget. That really goes against the notion that Discover
had a different impression about how it was supposed to operate.

~~~
anigbrowl
I disagree. In the first paragraph she says 'in the first two weeks we have
over-delivered on the impressions allocated for the entire campaign'. Varghese
argues that the issue was not one of excess impressions, but promotional
monies being used up without any impressions being delivered at all, ie to
Kindle e-reader users who already had Discover cards as a default and got a
$10 rebate for just using their e-reader as they normally would, without ever
having been served an ad in the first place.

There's explicit discussion of new vs existing defaulted Discover cards in her
request for data, and a request for information on 'how [Discover] will be
made good', which would not be meaningful if they did not consider any funds
misallocated. In fact that's mentioned twice, the second time saying that they
will still 'need to be made whole'. You don't ask to be made whole unless
you've suffered some sort of economic loss, such as not getting what you
thought you'd paid for.

Of course we can't draw conclusions on the basis of cherry-picked emails, but
this one does clearly suggest that Discover felt itself to have been short-
changed in some fashion besides a lack of analytics information.

 _there is a reference to another promotion, "free holiday shipping", which
very conceivably would be structured the same way_

Conceivably, but not necessarily, and even if it was structured the same way
that doesn't mean Discover should have had any expectation about it. If was
was in the habit of ordering apple pie from you and one day added an
additional order for pumpkin pie, I would not be happy just to receive an
additional apple pie - not because I had lost my taste for it, but because of
the failure to fulfill my order for something different.

 _The Amazon 's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this
visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program
within its original budget._

That is itself a bone of contention - Varghese is suggesting Paul Kotas shares
responsibility with Munira Rahemtulla for the whole situation and helped her
obfuscate the issue. So without endorsing Vargheve's position, that email
could be entirely consistent with it.

~~~
abalone
_> There's explicit discussion of new vs existing defaulted Discover cards in
her request for data... which would not be meaningful if theydid not consider
any funds misallocated._

That's not really true. Cards run promotions like that all the time where the
benefit is offered to all cardholders. One goal may be to drive adoption, but
it also drives other goals like retention and brand value. It's false to
assume that the only reason they'd be pissed about lack of data on campaign
performance is that they had only the one specific campaign goal in mind.

~~~
anigbrowl
Selectively editing my quote so as to exclude the primary point (about
Discover's insistence on being made whole) forces me to doubt either your
reading comprehension or your honesty. Whichever is to blame, I see no point
to continuing this conversation.

~~~
abalone
Re: reading comprehension, being "made good" was specifically in reference to
the distribution of Fire vs e-reader impressions -- which was in fact made
good by subsequently restricting the campaign to Fire (see BI story). That's
100% consistent with Amazon's SVP statement on the matter.

There is _absolutely nothing_ in there that states that by "made whole"
Discover meant the campaign should solely target 1-click conversions. That is
pure speculation and runs counter to all the email evidence.

------
grellas
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
[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.

~~~
hawkice
> The litigation goal, you may recall, is to compensate the aggrieved for
> losing his job over failure to join a criminal conspiracy.

So, that's what the document claims. 'grellas makes the point that this isn't
just a normal letter, it's probably written by a lawyer and has legal
implications. In this case, we have some very serious allegations within the
context of a legal battle. The next step, which should clearly be within the
legal system, is discovery/investigation. Saying "there must be another side
to this" is pretty reasonable -- I'm not lawyer, but most courts allow both
sides to speak before making up their mind.

------
mgraczyk
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.

~~~
jholman
I'm actually really unclear on what alleged value Scribd might bring to users.
Why do people even use it and/or link to it?

As others said, I already have a PDF reader, and unsurprisingly, it works
better than Scribd.

~~~
philo23
I believe it used to be quite useful when your only option to read PDFs was
Acrobat which was slow and would often lock up your browser while the plugin
loaded.

Now that both Firefox and Chrome include built in PDF readers and we've also
got other options like SumatraPDF, I see little value in Scribd any more.

~~~
Torn
It's easy to host a pdf on it. Most file sharing sites have countdowns / ads /
gates to entry instead of just showing the content.

~~~
iancarroll
Except Scribd just _doesn 't_ show it on mobile...

------
moe
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
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.

------
oskarth
_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?

~~~
potatolicious
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.

~~~
jobu
> PIPs are a disgusting, spineless tool used by disgusting, spineless people.

PIPs are often required by HR to get rid of even terrible employees. They
suck, but it's a cover-your-ass tool so that the company has explicit proof
the manager communicated problems with the person and tried to get them to
change their behavior.

In most companies it's actually pretty difficult to fire someone unless they
do something obviously illegal.

~~~
potatolicious
PIPs are absolutely not required - I've seen people more people fired without
them than with them.

A Performance Improvement Plan is not the same thing as documenting an
employee's misdeeds. Yes, you need to document to protect yourself legally,
but what you don't _need_ to do is put them on a rigged "plan" that is
intentionally engineered to fail.

Collecting evidence to fire an employee is one thing - a PIP veers into
_manufacturing_ evidence to fire an employee.

------
xiaoma
> _" 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.

~~~
a3n
I've been contacted twice in ten years. The positions were interesting, but
their reputation preceded them even back then, so I never seriously considered
it. I personally (and possibly unfairly based on hearsay) lump them with Dish
as dysfunctional employers.

~~~
logfromblammo
I have also been approached by recruiters for Amazon. The first time, I asked
a few specific questions about the work culture there, and the response did
not answer a single one directly. It was 100% evasion and redirection.

Among the specific questions:

\- Under what circumstances would I be required to repay relocation
assistance?

\- Would a non-compete agreement be required?

\- Does Amazon use an employee evaluation system similar to Microsoft's old
"stack ranking"?

\- What is the median employee tenure (a.k.a. how bad is the turnover rate)?

The first recruiter pleaded ignorance for some of my questions, so I helpfully
provided him with some links to articles still available on-line from
nationally-known business publications. These claimed (with references and
fact-checking) that Amazon had the second-worst turnover of all companies
where that statistic could be calculated, it does employ a variant of stack
ranking, and that Amazon frequently pursued former employees for their
relocation and NCA after leaving, even when it was Amazon's decision to fire
them.

As I already knew all this, my goal was mostly to help convince that guy to
stop being a recruiter for Amazon, and go take an easier job recruiting for
someone else. I didn't exactly consider that the company would probably sue
him for leaving, or maybe even fire him for not getting me to apply, then sue
him for getting fired.

Always do your research on the prospective employer, kids.

~~~
potatolicious
You've already answered a bunch of these, but I figure a hard number would
help put Amazon in context with other tech employers:

> _" \- What is the median employee tenure (a.k.a. how bad is the turnover
> rate)?"_

When I was there, strictly limited to engineering roles, 18 months.

~~~
FlyingLawnmower
Interestingly, their stock grants vest over 4 years at 5%/15%/40%/40%. 18
months means you see a tiny fraction of the big sum that draws you into the
company.

~~~
potatolicious
Are they still doing that? Geez, it's a wonder they get hires at all.

Honestly, any vesting schedule that is non-linear is just a plain ripoff and
should be laughed out of the room - or at the very least approached with
extreme caution.

------
throwawayamz
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-
Concep...](https://www.behance.net/gallery/5329673/Discover-Card-Concept-on-
Kindle-Fire)

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
That's definitely not the creative you picture in your mind while reading the
letter, thanks.

------
monochr
> 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
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?

~~~
a3n
"Member of a protected class" is probably a more accurate term (if
applicable). (IANAL) And if she's a member of a protected class in the US or
her state, then yes, any company has to consider the consequences of being
involved in a protected class employment suit.

~~~
danielweber
You can fire for no reason.

You cannot fire for wrong reasons.

Although companies need to worry when firing members of a protected class, and
we can debate whether that level of worry is underblown or overblown, lying
about your educational record is a smoking gun that would make it trivial to
dismiss the employee on the spot if the company wanted to do so.

~~~
yuhong
One of the reasons I don't like anti discrimination laws. However, I am for
allowing the EEOC, anti-trust or similar to order particular sets of companies
to stop discrimination for a period of time if necessary, as I mentioned
before.

------
pja
_" 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
A colleague once commented that these things are essentially one year notice,
and you should use that time to carefully find a new job.

------
MrBuddyCasino
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
Why would you ever accept an 18 month non-compete in the first place?

~~~
andyjdavis
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.

~~~
danielweber
5) When hiring you, the company verbally insists up-and-down that they won't
enforce the non-compete, and you believe them

~~~
johnward
I find this too. When we were acquired we (group of employees) had lawyers
come in (to a bar) to go over the agreement the new company required we
signed. The lawyer basically said not to sign it because they could probably
enforce it. Ultimately the company made it seem like we were making a big deal
out of something they would never try to enforce but still insisted everyone
had to sign it. A few people refused to sign. Other signed and then left for
competitors anyway. A majority signed it and still work for the new company.

------
r0h1n
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
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
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
> 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
> 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
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.

------
jorgecastillo
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
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
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.

~~~
hga
The shopping experience has definitely degraded, and it's clearly a manpower
issue. For the last year or so they've become quite bad at keeping product on
the shelf. In my current lifestyle, I make a monthly trip and it's
_guaranteed_ at least one of my staples won't be there, or in inadequate
quantities.

And they know it, the cashiers are no longer asking if I could "find
everything I needed", and a memo touching upon this has gone public within the
last few days.

Amazon still has my business because they're still playing straight with me as
a customer, and that's vanishingly rare (outside of small companies that tend
to have fragility issues). But I pay attention to stories like this because
the potential for losing their customer first culture is there.

------
kvargs
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
That means they are a partner to the business, not a partner to you. This is a
common (not Amazon-invented) term.

------
adam-a
> 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.

~~~
penprog
According to the article she admitted to a lot of this stuff in a deposition.

~~~
adl
And according to the letter, she was even promoted.

------
akclr
Here's a link that says that he has won the litigation against Amazon
[http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_a...](http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_advocates_client_prevails_ag/)

~~~
GrinningFool
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.

------
aetherspawn
Remember kids.

Anyone who will steal _for_ your company, will steal _from_ your company.

~~~
narag
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_.

------
alexggordon
> 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).

------
morky
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
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.

~~~
gregd
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
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.

~~~
srean
I am sure you have heard the bengali version of the phrase that you can bring
the horse to the water but not make it drink it. If someone is determined on a
path, no amount of evidence or convincing is going to change that. The
allegation of 'failed to build consensus' is just plain apologism and an oft
used and convenient one, very frequent in abusive relationships, "you should
have stopped me from beating you but you didnt, your fault".

------
toli
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
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.

------
sidcool
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”

------
ericd
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
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
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.

------
gnu8
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
I've rejected employment offers because of non-compete clauses. But not
everyone is in a position to do so.

~~~
adventured
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.

~~~
cowsandmilk
the non-compete was restricted to the area he was working in; he was told he
would be working on kindle. It was not until he was hired that it was
disclosed he was working in this much broader area of tablets (aka the kindle
fire). Amazon presented it as a very narrow non-compete in the e-ink reader
space before he was hired.

~~~
Dylan16807
So he essentially signed a blank check.

------
logicchains
So they basically tricked Discover out of something like $400,000? I wonder
what Discover thinks of this...

~~~
davidw
Yes, I wonder if there was ever a lawsuit from them, or they managed to
resolve it with Amazon, or what.

~~~
moe
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?

~~~
apetresc
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.

~~~
seren
I wonder if someone was fired on Discover side for having the idea to run a
campaign on the Kindle with such a bad ROI. But I am not familiar with the ad
business, maybe the efficiency was in line with what could have been
expected...

~~~
hga
It was a new platform/venue with an company they were spending 30 times a much
on advertising. This strikes me as a "nothing ventured, nothing gained" and
"none of us realized they were a criminal organization". Unless all
advertising venues are roughly this bad (Neilson has a service where they
track advertising to allow companies to confirm they're getting what they paid
for...) this one effort shouldn't be such a black mark for those on the
Discover side, prior to their learning these ugly details.

------
ChuckMcM
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.

------
akclr
Here is link that says he has won the litigation against amazon.
[http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_a...](http://www.advocateslg.com/blog/2013/07/litigation_success_advocates_client_prevails_ag/)

~~~
thyrsus
From [http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-
ki...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-
varghese-2014-11)

    
    
        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.

------
empressplay
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
More here: [http://day0001.tumblr.com](http://day0001.tumblr.com)

~~~
LukeB_UK
Writing a tumblr in 3rd person and as a press release just feels wierd.

~~~
dontworryboutit
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!

------
jan_g
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.

~~~
hga
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bu...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerry_Pournelle#Iron_Law_of_Bureaucracy)

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
Replace "bureaucracy" with "democracy" and you'll see _the number one_ reason
why politics in US and Europe sucks so much.

~~~
hga
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.

------
lhnz
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.

------
kvargs
Follow @kvargs on twitter for more detail

~~~
wpietri
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.

------
swombat
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.

------
matwood
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
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
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.

------
jnsaff2
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/)

------
awjr
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?

------
glifchits
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.

------
atmosx
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_.

------
drderidder
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
I don't like Amazon much either, so for books I usually go with
[http://www.powells.com/](http://www.powells.com/)

------
throwawfromlv
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
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.

------
wrd
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.

------
jmomo
I wonder if Michael Woodford (Olympus scandal) would be interested in having
this brought to his attention.

------
bphogan
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.

------
chj
Since no one else asked -- isn't this confidential?

~~~
indymike
Only the people who use the internet can read it.

~~~
dontworryboutit
git it, boo! this is the perfect comment to this entire delicious thread. "oh,
sorry, but internet just happened. grab your kids and head to the basement;
gonna weirder there, too, now that I think about it."

------
igonvalue
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.

------
pessimizer
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
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.

------
swamp40
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
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.

------
dang
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.

------
tdsamardzhiev
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.

------
jotjotzzz
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.

------
moogleii
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
"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?

------
andyjohnson0
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-
ki...](http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin-
varghese-2014-11)

------
abalone
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
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.

------
rebootthesystem
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...](http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34812047/ns/business-
us_business/t/dominos-tough-love-itself-getting-noticed/#.VGTqdvnF_h4)

------
mistermumble
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-
fo...](http://www.geekwire.com/2014/protesting-outside-amazon-hq-former-
employee-asks-current-employees-stop-working-hard/)

------
usaphp
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_view...](http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/mfp/cgi-
bin/mfpalumni/may_view2.php?id=95)

~~~
dagw
No one is claiming that she never attended Standford, they're claiming she
never earned a degree from Stanford.

~~~
apetresc
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
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.

------
kohanz
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.

------
nl
_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
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."

------
opendais
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
> 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
The latency issue is, I supposed I could have stated it better.

------
rburhum
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
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.

------
sidcool
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'

------
p4wnc6
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)
>!

------
graycat
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.

------
hrasyid
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?

------
tw04
Well... Discover is fully aware now.

------
devanti
Anyone know how Discover responded to this? Are they still working with
Amazon?

------
g8gggu89
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.

------
iblaine
Another result of this witch hunt is Munira Rahemtulla will forever be tied to
this lawsuit whenever someone googles her name.

------
RomanPushkin
TLDR?

~~~
DanBC
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."

------
kordless
Nice timing on this story.

------
khrist
is there any comment from amazon on this yet?

------
pseingatl
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.

------
yahya94
Good

------
mrtree
This is a GIANT, epic scale burn to Munira Rahemtulla.

------
paulhauggis
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.

------
john_smiths
While one thing's for sure, I am blacklisting him from my company.

------
mozboz
TL;DR: 'I was surprised to learn how online advertising works, my manager in a
big corp made me sad.'

------
dkarapetyan
This is dramatic but nothing unusual at a large company like amazon. This
shouldn't really be on the front page.

~~~
perfunctory
Are you saying that when dramatic stuff becomes usual, it's not as dramatic
any more?

~~~
dkarapetyan
I'm saying this is more like gossip and less like something that is
intellectually interesting.

~~~
dalek_cannes
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
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)

------
colinbartlett
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-amaz...](http://www.geekwire.com/2012/kindle-ad-team-
member-sues-amazon-alleges-internal-retaliation/)

~~~
donkeyd
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
> "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"

