
Amazon Spars With The Times Over Investigative Article - hvo
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/business/amazon-spars-with-the-times-over-investigative-article.html?&moduleDetail=section-news-4&action=click&contentCollection=Media&region=Footer&module=MoreInSection&version=WhatsNext&contentID=WhatsNext&pgtype=article
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bbarn
Sorry, all the nitpicking about small points in an article don't mean nearly
as much to me as the dozen or so people I've known who's been miserable
working there for low pay, and told me so personally. Embrace the culture you
have, or fix it, but stop denying it exists, Amazon.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
I don't think anybody in a tech role would say they have low pay. Many
problems, but that isn't one.

Edit: I meant in a tech role at Amazon. Amazon are not known for low pay.

~~~
rm_-rf_slash
Considering most entry-level positions in big tech pay well but come with
outrageous hours and no overtime, an accusation of low pay seems justified. I
know plenty of Google engineers who recently started in the Bay Area at around
$86,000. Considering the amount of time they're expected to work and the costs
of living there, that's pretty pathetic for a huge company with deep pockets.

~~~
gogthr
I don't believe there are full time engineers at Google making less than 6
figures. Right out of college at Google I'm making 105 base and way more with
stocks/bonuses.

~~~
jnbiche
Wait, so you're making only ~5% more than the threshold you don't believe
exists?

You don't think that among the many thousands of people working at Google,
perhaps someone has 10% worse negotiating ability than you, or someone's
background and experience impressed their interviewers 10% less? Or work in an
area of the country with 10% less cost of living?

~~~
jacquesm
You missed this bit:

> and way more with stocks/bonuses.

The base pay is one thing, the total is quite another. Don't be surprised if
the total comes to 200K +.

------
jroseattle
I can't imagine this Olson story is over.

AMZN publicly airs personal and damaging information about illegal activity
(their words) of a named former employee, in an attempt to destroy his
credibility as a source of their story. The former employee publicly refutes
those claims, essentially saying that AMZN is intentionally telling a lie.
Someone is not telling the truth, and I'm not sure there is much wiggle room
in this scenario for both to be plausibly correct.

No matter who is the truthful party, AMZN has taken on a lot of potential
legal liability, and for what? In an attempt to refute one source of an
article that has many sources. And a source that said people cry at their
desk.

Seems a very large bet to place with little to be gained. I would imagine Mr.
Olson has already been contacted by lawyers galore.

~~~
deskamess
It will likely be settled out of court. AMZN cannot risk having any of the NYT
story ex-employees be bought up in a courtroom. The truth could be devastating
and validate NYT. If I were Olson I would let the lawyers work on a simple
35-40% commission.

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6stringmerc
One thing that consistently bothers me about a "down economy" is the ability
for some companies to feed off the desperation of good people seeking honest
work. This applies both in technology-skilled positions, and also manual-labor
positions in the case of Amazon. In different economic conditions, and with
the ability of sites like Glassdoor or Medium to spread stories and reviews,
I'd like to think Amazon would be forced to hire the least-employable members
of society, like Ex-Cons, because nobody else would want to work there.

I'm not laying waste to Amazon as a hopeless pit of despair, but do I give
credence to the stories about life in their warehouses? How people are
treated? What toll it takes on the human body? Yes, I do. That doesn't start
from the concrete floor and go up to the Executive Suite in my experience...

Long ago I remember reading stories on BestBuySucks.org. At one point in my
life, I needed a job and got hired on at Best Buy. It did, indeed, suck...but
it definitely motivated me to attain my first professional gig.

~~~
demian
This is capitalism critique 101.

Marx was a tech writer in a way, he wrote about the emerging power asymmetries
between the people that owned the machines and the people that operated them.
I know you guys are not big for socialists authors in the states, but you
should at least read the classics.

PS: I'm not a communist.

~~~
mentat
Thank you for this insight. I think it is spot on.

------
Saad_M
This ongoing spat can't be good in the long term for Amazon's image. Wouldn't
it of been easier if Amazon had been a bit humble and say: "Yes, things are
not perfect, we will try and make it better for our employees." Rather than
fighting it out in public with a newspaper.

~~~
bambax
Carney should be fired (my guess is, he will be). His entire job is to try and
make sure that kind of snafu never happens, or if it happens, to make it go
away as quietly as possible.

He worked with the reporters about this story for six months, and a very bad
article was produced. He probably feels a little betrayed, and must have
endured quite his share of head washing from Bezos.

But now, two months later, he should really try to change the conversation;
instead he's throwing former employees under the bus and revealing personal
details about them, to make up for failures that are mostly his own.

He's really doing a terrible job.

~~~
CaptainZapp

      He worked with the reporters about this story for six months, and a very bad article was produced. He probably feels a little betrayed
    

But the guy was a damned reporter _himself_. He should know all the tricks of
the trade and moreover, he should know that a reporter is _never_ your friend.
She's after the story and if you're in the way: tough luck!

That said. You may be totally right. But such a reaction due to a bad case of
bruised ego _from a reporter_ is hard to fathom.

[edit : fixed syntax]

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DocSavage
About a decade ago, the NY Times wrote a story about an event and a group I
started. I was interviewed and my wife was present, occasionally saying
something. When I read the piece that came out, it was clear the writer had a
story line and anything that interfered with the story line was omitted. At
least one of the quotes attributed to me was said by my wife.

There was no Medium at that time so I wrote a rebuttal piece on my blog. The
author of the NY Times story thought it was great that I had a chance to give
my take on the whole thing, which I thought was grand because his piece was on
the NY Times and mine was on a personal blog.

Before then, I knew that you couldn't trust what's written in newspapers,
particularly those that favor story telling to make the news more interesting.
The incident really drove home that opinion.

This is not to say that Amazon is a good place to work. There's been a lot of
substantive reports that it isn't a decent workplace. However, it's not
surprising the NY Times cherry-picks its quotes to backup the theme of the
article.

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sremani
I am not sure I am adding much to the conversation, it may be unfair to
Mr.Carney, but when I see a Politically involved person like Mr.Carney who
worked as press-secretary, I do not trust his message. I simply do not. Even
though I spent some time reading his entire posting, my biases were yelling at
me, "do you want to really take this political hack seriously?". Amazon has to
find a better spokesperson for public tussle, better in this case would be
someone who is not already labeled.

~~~
cryoshon
It isn't unfair. Amazon hired a spin doctor, and spin is what he produces. My
guess is that Amazon will be just fine after this scandal, though-- they're
too big to let a petty thing like "bad culture" impact profits.

~~~
hobs
And there is enough people who see Amazon as "getting in the door" that they
will tolerate a year or two of utter bullshit so they can jump ship to Google
or other more humane jobs.

------
MCRed
I worked for Amazon, I found it an abusive workplace. Not just because after a
re-org I was taken away from a good boss and put under an abuser, but because
the culture of the company is set up by people who clearly don't respect
employees. I had interactions with Amazon management all the way up to, and
including, Jeff Bezos, and the problems outlined in the article are
systematic.

By definition any previous employee who does not like a company is
"disgruntled". And while there are employees who are insulated from the abuse,
often by working for the good people at Amazon (and there are a lot of good
people there) the idea that companies are good by nature is a mistake and
there seems to be a bias that any employee who complains must be the problem.

So, it's natural to bash the employee speaking out, and that's the route that
Amazon has taken.

Well, there are thousands of us, and what we witnessed was not one off events,
but the result of a culture.

~~~
eclipxe
You post the same thing on every Amazon post. I understand you had a bad
experience but it does seem like you are fairly upset at Amazon and have an
axe to grind.

~~~
jarek
Don't see how that's any more objectionable than a third of your HN posts
supporting Amazon

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alexwebb2
I think a lot of HN commenters are being too quick to dismiss Amazon's
objections - either because they have heard similar anecdotes from friends or
because they distrust Mr. Carney.

Amazon's core objections are that A) the NYT flat-out lied to them about the
nature of the article they were producing, and B) the NYT failed to subject
their sources to the usual standard of scrutiny.

Reading between the lines, it appears to me that Amazon is accusing NYT of
deliberately producing a hit piece on them in response to Jeff Bezos's
purchase of the Washington Post.

Does Amazon have serious cultural problems? I'm inclined to say yes, and
Amazon's reluctance to admit as much is troubling. But I'm also inclined to
suspect that the NYT article was indeed a hit piece that greatly exaggerated
the issues at Amazon and that this came from a place of business strategy and
not genuine journalistic investigation.

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leothekim
It's odd that Amazon would stir this up again months after the original NY
Times piece came out. Then again, maybe Amazon doesn't really feel like it has
anything to lose. And maybe attacking the veracity of the NY Times would be in
the best interest of someone who, say, owns the Washington Post.

~~~
ceejayoz
I suspect they're hearing mentions of the article as reasons for people
turning down recruiters and job offers.

------
bgentry
One of the main reasons Amazon is able to treat its tech workers so poorly is
their aggressive use and enforcement of non-compete agreements. Fed up with
Amazon and want to jump to Google or Microsoft for better pay or better
working conditions? Be prepared for a lawsuit, or at least a threat thereof.

Unlike in California, non-competes are enforceable in Washington state. When
will such anti-competitive, anti-free-market behavior be outlawed there? It's
hard to imagine that a popular vote on such a referendum would not pass.

------
wallace21
My best friend has been working there for six years. I've been asking her
about these articles. In her experience: (1) she hasn't seen crying, (2) she's
had coworkers with medical conditions who were treated very well, and (3) when
she or a coworker has had a bad manager, it was no worse an experience than
for friends at Google or Microsoft. Her opinion is that the original NYT piece
was cherry-picked. She thinks that the anecdotes they used could be true, but
that she just hasn't seen any of that in the past six years across different
departments.

------
crabasa
If you're curious as to why Amazon is behaving so foolishly given that this
rebuttal serves only to extend the shelf life of the original story, you
should consider that the founder and CEO of Amazon happens to own the
Washington Post, one of the New York Times' chief competitors.

------
mc32
If the times wants to be the news of record, it should do a better job of
reporting on news rather than editorializing or trying to sway opinion or
garner a writing prize for "investigative" work.

No doubt Amazon has bad managers and may have toxic work cultures, but for the
Times to be shoddy in reporting is surprising in light of their house cleaning
after the fake news reporting by at least one of their previous and now
disgraced journalists, but no, it appears he was more symptom of the
management of the NYT rather than mr Blair being a single bad apple.

It's also surprising to see the management dive into what's degenerated into a
spat. Report news, dont get into personality fights, keep composed, stay above
the fray, if you purport to be a news org.

------
techterrier
It's really not helping their 'we aren't a bunch of dicks we promise' line at
all.

------
redwood
It's somewhat disturbing to me that a former President's press secretary is
just a gun for hire for the biggest megacorps.

I mean obviously it's totally predictable but at the same time very
disturbing.

------
rdtsc
The vigor with which Amazon is fighting back, for me at least, conforms that
there are serious problems going on.

It reminds me of cases when someone is guilty and at the slightest mention of
the problem they start swearing up and down that they are alright, and
everything is fine.

~~~
hga
I strongly suspect you're correct, but I like the thesis that this is hitting
their recruitment hard and that could be the primary driver.

The two go together quite well, we hear that most people don't stay at Amazon
for more than 2 years, so this could be an existential threat to their current
model if they're no longer able to get enough new warm bodies to replace the
attrition.

That it was sparked by the first big, really prominent MSM expose strongly
suggests its a perception problem of some sort, that article was just more of
the same to those of us on HN.

~~~
rdtsc
The article got a ridiculous amount of attention and in many way it conformed
what I've been hearing about it from the word of mouth, it conforms with my
interview experience there -- forgot I was coming that day, didn't call for
almost 3 weeks after, forgot about me during lunch, a good number of
interviewers seemed disgruntled and seemingly not happy. (Now, to be fair, I
heard good things about it as well, and that is why I was initially going for
an interview there, and it is a big company after all, but I am talking on
average).

In a way if they didn't have a problem, like let's say the same article came
out regarding Google or Facebook, there would have been as much talk about it,
and author and the news source would have been condemned and discredited, and
it would have been blown over quicker. But in case of Amazon that article
keeps coming back somehow.

~~~
pinewurst
I think interview experiences could be the luck of the draw. My AWS interview
was actually highly organized and pleasurable barring the emphasis on
behavioral questions about Jeff's Commandments. The people were quite nice and
professional and even admitted that some parts of Amazon were "grim".

~~~
rdtsc
Yeah could be. Well, at least I thought that about the first couple of screw
ups. But by the last one, it was getting funny, I kept thinking "Nah, this is
a cruel joke of some sort, it can't be that bad.."

So it kind of my personal interaction with that company and somehow they
managed to screw up so many things in a row, so it definitely left an
impression.

------
pinewurst
An interesting comparison, I think, can be made with the Microsoft bad culture
article published by Vanity Fair in 2012:

[http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-
lo...](http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lost-mojo-
steve-ballmer)

This article received a lot of exposure at the time, yet I don't remember MS
hiring political hacks or trying to (at least overtly) discredit sources.

~~~
dekhn
Not exactly discrediting a source, but:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-frank-shaw-on-
why-...](http://www.businessinsider.com/microsofts-frank-shaw-on-why-he-
slammed-david-pogue-2013-10)

anyway I think we know how windows 8 turned out in the long run.

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happywolf
Amazon's arguments are flimsy at best, and it renews the focus back to this
piece of news which most people have not talked about. Staying quiet or saying
something more humble would dull the backlash a lot.

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klenwell
One HN Poll I'd be interested in seeing: Would you accept a competitive offer
from Amazon?

"Competitive" here meaning a salary and title as good or slightly better than
your current job or next best offer.

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kraig911
I think the industry knows that Amazon in terms of HR is on borrowed time. If
they want to maintain their dominance it's time to invest more in their
employees.

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treebeard901
Who wants to bet that Mr. Carney is crying at his desk this week?

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droithomme
Not so much sparring as debunking.

