
An Amazonian's Response to the NYT's “Inside Amazon” Article - nickc181
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu
======
mratzloff
If we're comparing anecdotes, I know maybe eight people who work at Amazon or
have worked there in the last few years. Here are some stats on those eight
people:

\- Two of them liked it. Six disliked it.

\- The two that liked it said that their teams were unusual in that they
worked a 40-hour work week.

\- Everyone agreed that most people they interacted with were overworked,
sometimes dramatically so. In most cases, the people themselves were
overworked. Midnight emails are a thing.

\- All of them left within 18 months, or plan to. Most left within one year.
The ones that currently work there are biding their time.

~~~
MCRed
This happened to me: October, we notice an issue when our boss gives us bad
specs. Boss insists it came "directly from Bezos." We push back because we
know it's wrong. Boss is a wimp and knows nothing about technology. We talk to
peers of bosses boss and boss, and get word to Bezos who confirms he wants to
make the change.

So we make the change.

The change exists on the site for weeks. Then the early hours of the day
before Thanksgiving, at 2am I am awoken by a page. I check the ticket, Bezos
discovered the change. He is livid. Thanksgiving is important. We much fix it.
Right then. around 70 people are on the ticket, most of the management above
my boss (who is asleep) is weight in and constantly making demands... which
means fixing it is hard to do while being bombarded by these people with big
titles (and no understanding of engineering. This is a retailer, not a tech
company.)

Finally, after around 4 hours I push the fix to production. I managed to get
to sleep at around 8:30am.

Then roll into work at 10:05am!

5 minutes late for the daily standup! (Which were always 30 minutes because
some useless PM liked to drone on for 25 minutes telling us things we already
knew. BTW, she became a rising star- because she was excellent at kissing ass
and manipulating people, but I never saw her contribute anything of actual
value.)[1]

The DAY before thanksgiving!

To get CHEWED OUT BY MY BOSS for being late!

Because I was up all night fixing something that I had raised as an issue
months ago (whole team raised it) and Bezos had changed his mind.

I've been working as an engineer for 25+ years. Amazon was the worst job I
ever had. Period. Full stop.

Absolutely incompetent management, and that went from my boss (Who was dealing
drugs to employees in the pacmed parking garage on the side) to Bezos himself.

I sincerely hope Blue Origin's first flight ends in disaster and Bezos is
aboard. I would consider that justice.

I don't feel that way about any other place I worked. I worked from some
jerks, I worked for a lot fop people out of their element, and in a lot of
startups that were poorly run... but circumstances. It's understandable.

Amazon is the only truly evil company I worked for, ever. (and that includes
Microsoft in the 1990s!)

[1] And since I know we live in the age of SJWs, this isn't misogyny. Most of
the women I worked with at Amazon were competent, including one with a
significant handicap who was a fantastic engineer despite it.

------
outside1234
Here's some data: Amazon has an ungodly high turnover rate despite employing
tons of H1-Bs (who can't leave realistically without returning to their
country).

If the article is not valid, then what is rotten about Amazon?

~~~
morganvachon
I found it intriguing that the experiences of the white collar employees
speaking out in the NYT piece mirror the experiences[1] of the blue collar
Amazon employees toiling away in their warehouses: Pushed to give as much as
they can to the point of physical illness, burning out after just a few short
years or even months in some cases.

And then along comes a dude who has been at Amazon for less than two years,
and holds a management position higher than anyone interviewed for the NYT
article, attempting to whitewash the story.

"Rotten" is an apt description.

[1] [http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-
amazon-c...](http://www.mcall.com/news/local/amazon/mc-allentown-amazon-
complaints-20110917-story.html)

~~~
MCRed
Amazon's culture, and this goes from the top and permeates the executive ranks
and middle management, has absolutely zero respect for employees. Employees
are seen as sheep to be herded and manipulated and as a cost center, not a
valuable resource.

Amazon is run by retailers, not tech people. They literally see no difference
between engineers and warehouse packers-- which would be good if they treated
both well.

------
MWinCal
The data that I keep coming back to is this: the median employee tenure at
Amazon is one year (2013 data). This must mean something is seriously,
chronically wrong. A LOT of people are leaving after just months of work.

~~~
beagle3
This does sound bad.

Does this include warehouse employees? (seasonal work, and generally shorter
length than desk jobs?) Do you have this data separated to warehouse and desk
jobs? (Are there other distinctly different job types in Amazon?)

Do you have such a number for comparable jobs?

------
Yhippa
I feel that the NYT article may have probably cherry-picked support for their
arguments due to the fact that it seemed fairly one-sided. It would have been
nice to see more balance in the story. Who knows, maybe they actually are very
accurate about what it's like to work there.

On the other hand I've worked for big companies in the past and there are some
tells about what they described that are familiar. The concept of having stack
ranking and "managing out" the X% of the bottom performers. A tacit
expectation of answering emails and texts outside of normal working hours.
Lots of politics and unsolicited feedback going on.

The way this rebuttal goes it's a lot of "I've never seen this so it's
obviously not true" and "If it is true then shame on that manager". What I
suspect that's going on here is that he's only been there for 1.5 years and
that's not enough time to evaluate the culture of a big company. There are
lots of times when I heard how things were run in a different part of the
company and I thought "Do we work at the same place?"

I say we ask him his opinion again in 5 years. If he's around for that long.

~~~
BurningFrog
> he's only been there for 1.5 years and that's not enough time to evaluate
> the culture of a big company

It's also questionable to what extent giant companies "have" a culture.
Different parts of these vast organizations can have very different cultures.

~~~
steve19
For what its worth, it is accepted in academia that large companies do have
cultures. I would think aspects of those cultures cross geographic boundaries.

The US Army and US Navy might have different cultures, being two very large
and very different sub-organizations, but they retain many aspects of the same
overarching culture.

I worked for one company that had two vastly different workforces, non-
unionized white collar and highly unionized blue collar. Despite the head
office (where the white collars worked) being a different parts of the city
and country as where the blue collars worked, the same rotten, thieving and
sexist culture was evident in both.

~~~
BurningFrog
I don't disagree that large organizations have distinct cultures. I'm saying
that there can also be substantial variations within them.

My experience at Google was possibly extreme, but my team and other teams I
knew people at were _very_ different.

------
asdfologist
Disappointing. He asserts in the beginning of the blog post that he'll debunk
the original piece using "data," and then proceeds to provide mostly personal
anecdotes.

Much of his so-called rebuttal goes along the lines of "The original article
claims many employees experienced X or heard Y, but I have never experienced X
or heard Y in my team!"

~~~
techwizrd
I agree. I read the entire thing looking for data and found none. He
repeatedly produced quotes from certain internal pages, but there is no way
for any reader to verify them, nor does that make it data.

~~~
zerotolerance
Quoting the official text is data. Summarizing internal data sources is data.
In contrast to the interpretive dance that were the quotes from third-parties,
this was dripping with data.

~~~
serge2k
Both are primary sources of data for an article.

~~~
zerotolerance
This author is a primary source.

------
surrealize
> Last year, during all-hands, a very high ranking Executive said

> My mentor, an Executive

> most Amazonians and especially Executives

Who capitalizes "Executive" in the middle of a sentence? A middle manager who
idolizes Executives, apparently.

It reads like the author has drunk the company kool-aid.

------
nickc181
____My comments __ __

First, thanks for taking the time to read the article.

1) No - no one asked me to write it. I wrote it because the NYT article is a
complete hatchet piece full of false assertions, and the record needed to be
set straight 2) All the data I provided is 100% true and above reproach 3) So
much of the NYT article is junk it's laughable. A company that doesn't
reimburse travel expenses, for instance -how do people even make this stuff
up? 4) If Amazon was a fraction of what this article described, no one would
work here, myself included 5) What you got from the LinkedIn article is what
_actually_ happens at Amazon. It doesn't sell as well as sensationalism. Sorry
to disappoint

I appreciate your time in reading the article, as well as your opinions. I
make it a point not to "argue on the Internet" \- you have my apologies for
not responding to you personally

Respectfully,

-Nick

~~~
zer0defex
"I receive anytime feedback, both positive and constructive, for the folks
that work for me."

It saddens me that you can't say "negative" here as the obvious counter-point
to positive, instead opting for kool-aid management speak. Up to this point I
hadn't looked at your job title, but this sentence made me do just that as it
reeked of feigned management behavior. Suspicion confirmed.

------
slantedview
The NYT article calls out what everyone in the tech industry in Seattle knows
full well - that Amazon chews up its people and spits them out. The Seattle
tech community is only so big - we've hired numerous people from Amazon, and
the stories we hear align pretty well with the NYT article. The rebuttal
doesn't really do much to change any of this.

------
mmaunder
AMZN PR is having a bad day. Headline in the Seattle Times print edition is
the lack of diversity among professional ranks.

[http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-more-
dive...](http://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/amazon-more-diverse-at-
its-warehouses-than-among-white-collar-ranks/)

~~~
sidcool
I am not a fan of Amazon, but this article is straight yellow journalism.

~~~
zerotolerance
It's not journalism. This guy is writing a personal account. He is not a paid
writer, and this work was unsanctioned.

~~~
g8gggu89
Unsanctioned by Amazon? You'd get in serious trouble for that.

~~~
zerotolerance
Well, he's not.

------
sidcool
Not a convincing article. Although the writer of the post is in good standing,
I doubt the motives.

~~~
alexandercrohde
I agree. He manages other managers and so has a vested interest in maintaining
the content of his employees.

What really struck me as cool-aidy is that he tosses out statements like
"Amazon is, without question, the most innovative technology company in the
world. The hardest problems in technology, bar none, are solved at Amazon."
That's a cool-aidy statement for any company (google, tesla, amazon) and
pretty much irrelevant to the main topic.

------
lsiebert
Maybe the engineering culture is less like what was described then the
marketing and executive cultures?

I'd also appreciate a female Amazon employee's perspective on gender, since
they are more likely to notice issues that Nick wouldn't see, or have
experiences Nick wouldn't have.

------
x5n1
Stories like these point to a need for a union for workers of such companies,
both blue collar and white collar. This is exactly the sort of thing unions
have addressed in the past. Most bozos understood not to do these sort of
things because they would lead to unionizing actions.

------
serge2k
> As I cracked open my laptop to write this article, people were already
> discussing its existence on certain email distribution lists, and the
> expressions were mostly of disbelief at how uninformed the article was

Company email lists? Why would those do anything but praise Amazon?

or you know, people would complain and someone would shut down the discussion.
"Let's take it offline" was a pretty common trick. "This isn't the right
forum" is another.

> I sit on the floor, in a desk, not an office, because I like to be close to
> my folks

Also because you aren't a high enough level to be given an office.

> which means I’m part of a select group of people at Amazon who not only has
> visibility into our hiring standards and practices, but has the direct
> responsibility of ensuring they are always met.

True, and you can give insight into how the process works. Consider though,
can you actually give good insight into how and why candidates might think it
is broken?

> As long as Amazon is around, and I’m here, we’ll continue to be customer-
> obsessed

I really can't go into details, but Amazon is at best inconsistent with this
ideal. They do a lot of things right, especially in retail, but they get a lot
wrong. I have seen decisions made that were decidedly anti-customer.

This also cuts the other way, if something doesn't have customer impact it
becomes hard to get it done. Shortsighted engineering practices.

> No one, I repeat, no one is encouraged to “toil long and late.” As a matter
> of fact, I’ll take a bit of time to expand on this:

of course not, you just get a deadline dropped on you instead.

> Yes. Amazon is, without question, the most innovative technology company in
> the world. The hardest problems in technology, bar none, are solved at
> Amazon.

okay.

> Our cafeterias are subsidized,

you mean the ones that serve mediocre sandwiches at mediocre prices?

> Executive mandates don’t fly around here

we had so many "drop everything and do this" moments because some exec found a
problem. Sometimes it was justified. Sometimes it would not have happened if
it was anyone but the boss.

Besides, the situation would probably go something like this for a mandate...

Manager: We are doing X Engineer 1: I think X is a bad idea because of Y.
Engineer 2: I agree, and I wonder if we should do Z instead. Manager: Lets
discuss this offline.

Then nothing happens.

> I’ve never been called an Amhole, and I’m completely certain this is made
> up, as I’ve never heard anyone say this, and as an insult, it wouldn’t make
> a very good one, in my opinion.

It's used by people complaining about Amazon "ruining" seattle.

> I won’t discuss Organizational Level Ranking, or OLR. Some companies, such
> as Microsoft and Accenture, no longer use it

Gee, I wonder why. The defender of the company won't discuss one of their more
criticized practices. Despite being in a good position to do so.

> To assert otherwise without a single shred of data is irresponsible and just
> plain wrong.

So he said/she said basically. Both sides have bias, but considering what you
hear about the process while inside the company I'd go with the idea that it
is pretty harsh.

> I have seen Amazon do more to encourage diversity than any other company
> I’ve worked for.

Like having a joke of a maternity leave policy and refusing to discuss
diversity figures for engineering roles?

> How could being an attentive, respective leader, who is vocally self-
> critical and candid be a bad thing??

It's not really an amazon issue, but data shows that women who are more vocal
and disagree (i.e. disagree and commit) tend to get labelled as more difficult
to work with, relative to males who do the same. That's a tough issue since it
probably involves unconscious bias.

> This part of the articlea deals with attrition

Unlike you who immediately pivots to how people want to work at amazon and how
innovative and awesome the company is. Fact is, attrition is a known problem
at Amazon and from personal experience it doesn't seem to be one that is dealt
with well. Excuses are made, new people are hired, everything continues as
normal.

------
steve_g
One of the pull quotes in the article states that Amazon reminds the customer
if they've purchased the same book twice. Oddly enough, about an hour prior to
reading the article, I repurchased a book deliberately. I'd given one as a
gift, and I wanted to read it myself. There was about a 4 day interval between
the two purchases.

I wondered if Amazon would alert me about it, because that's how I'd design
the system. They didn't.

Does that have any implications for the article's accuracy?

~~~
andyman1080
Took it as referring to the text box that appears at the top of the item page
on the site that says something like "you purchased this item on <date>."

------
lsiebert
Also, to the extent that this article exists and people hear about working at
Amazon being punishing and stressful or horrible warehouse jobs, if things
have really changed, Amazon has a marketing/PR problem.

------
kelukelugames
Anyone bothered by how all companies are using Pride commercially?

~~~
zerotolerance
You're bothered that Amazon employees (I'm assuming that they are not paid
actors) that were celebrating pride were captured in a photo, and that photo
shared?

~~~
kelukelugames
I believe a lot of employees participate in Pride because we are celebrating
the gay rights movement. But I am more skeptical when official twitter
accounts, high level managers, recruiting, etc use these photos.

Edit: here's a prime example:
[https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse](https://twitter.com/WhiteHouse)

Obama never voiced support until half of the nation polled in favor of gay
marriage.

