> Amazon's boss Jeff Bezos wrote in a memo to staff that the "article doesn't describe the Amazon I know".
I'm not surprised he feels this way, being solely unaccountable in the way that his employees are and primarily responsible for both denying and preserving the culture.
> Mr Ciubotariu invoked the company's culture of fun in his LinkedIn post. "We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand," he wrote.
Did this make anyone else cringe? You couldn't pick an example that better demonstrated an awkward, forced element of corporate "fun."
I have to wonder, though, what he means by them getting "a bit out of hand":
- "fun" exhaustion?
- loss of place in stack ranking system?
- injuries? deaths?
- productivity lost to spontaneous bouts of letter-writing from employees to their friends about how much fun it is to work at Amazon?
Yep. After spending 10 years in a medium-sized marketing agency, I wrote a recap post called "A beer fridge does not make a culture," which included this bit that the "nerf war" comment made me think of:
"About that beer fridge...It’s pretty cool. So is the pop-a-shot table, the happy hours, the lax dress code, the summer outings (i.e. Drunk Hook-Up Fest), and the staff lunches. But those aren’t culture. Those are nice-to-haves, things that make the good days great and the great days awesome. But they don’t make the bad days good. Please, please, please don’t rely on those kinds of things."
I had pretty similar thoughts to the "free food" bullet point at the bottom. That's so far into "nice to have" territory that I can only see such comments as whinging about how green the neighbor's yard is. (Except, there's actually a chance for you to go live in the neighbor's house, if you really wanted to.)
The Nerf thing made me cringe too. Sometimes I feel like I'm the only software developer out there that does not want to be treated like I am some sort of over-sized elementary school kid.
Maybe I am just getting old... Work can be fun without resorting to gimmicks. What's next snack time and mandatory naps?
Anytime: Find an empty conference room with no windows and lie down with your feet touching the door and spread a bunch of paper clips out around your body. Then when someone tries to open the door they'll wake you up and you can claim you were just picking up some fallen paper clips...
I worked in a corporate setting for about a year that handed out Nerf guns on day one (if you wanted one). At the time I was 35 years old. Let me tell you how I felt.
I grabbed that gun and started a war. People that were face deep in code picked up their guns and started smiling and shooting each other, running around, diving under desks. It was fun!
I made friends immediately and are some of my best friends to this day, 4 yeas later. People that are friends have fun. It wasn't forced. If you didn't want to play, you didn't have to play. The morale picked up 100% after the game.
We were NEVER treated like children. Ever. We never had "nap time" or "snack time", that's ridiculous. We were treated as professionals that like to take breaks and mess around while creating great products.
I did great work while I was there and so did the other people at that company. I met some amazingly talented people that are still at that company. They stay there because they enjoy the work and they enjoy the environment.
Ha! I had the urge to comment on the Nerf wars, and you beat me to it. I cringed because, in my adult mind, having "daily Nerf wars" at work means they really don't know what the word "fun" is supposed to mean. I think it kind of proves the point?
> "We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand"
This really bugged me too, but reflects a trend that I've notice in tech circles of infantilizing engineers (vs treating them as working professionals). But maybe this really is attractive to some employees who might be eager to extend their HS/college environment a few more years.
I just wondered how you can have Nerf wars in offices full of electronic equipment. Do you go outside then? Seattle is known for being rainy... And how are you getting people out, all in one go? Doesn't sound very spontaneous.
Mr. Bezos' response strikes me as the all-too-familiar case of upper management not keeping tabs on middle and lower management. If he is truly sincere that he does not recognize the version of Amazon depicted in the article, and does not agree with that type of management, then he (like many high-level managers) needs to take an active approach in weeding out abusive managers at all levels (especially lower level managers).
I work at a large enterprise (5,000+ employees) and this is a huge problem for us. Upper management has a vision for the organization, but it gets lost on its way down the chain. A simple phrase is the main culprit: "...<any given policy> is up to manager discretion."
For example, upper management: "We are creating a flexible part-time teleworking agreement whereby employees can work from home up to 2 days per week. Usage of this arrangement is up to manager discretion." Lower management: "I know about the new teleworking option, but our department is not participating because how can anyone get work done at home?"
If upper management does not actively monitor and intervene with stifling lower-level managers, they can definitely create an organization that, in practice, differs greatly from the one they imagine, the one they wanted to create.
If Bezos really wanted to put his money where his mouth is, he would implement a minimum mandatory vacation period and significant maternity/paternity leave at the least, if not a max # of hours per week.
Of course, that would not maximize profits at amazon or most other companies so that's not really what will happen.
I don't think the assumption that long hours and little vacation maximize profits should be taken for granted, especially in a longer-term time frame. I've seen quite a lot of information in the past few years that shows that (especially for developers) long hours have diminishing returns on productivity, and may actually hurt productivity.
It may hurt productivity, but the employer gets the benefit of keeping the employee on a leash by not giving them time to look for other opportunities , plus in some businesses you can just keep grinding employees to the bone and sift until you have the most workaholic ones, such as in finance.
I won't claim to know what will happen to Amazon or other companies if they keep trying to squeeze every cent out of every employee all the time, but in my professional circles of people who work front office at investment firms or consulting firms (in the northeast), there is a long history of making sure the newbies are in the office 80+ hours a week. These are also the same firms that continue to make the most money year after year, so I would assume there is some possibility to extract extra value from the subset of the population that is workaholic.
I think this is something that varies a lot based on the nature of the work. Creative software development/design/engineering is more taxing in a way that precludes almost anyone from being productive at an 80+ hour/week level, especially if it is the "normal" workload.
Not to diminish finance people, by the way. I'm sure they work hard, but in a different way.
A client had an interesting system along this line. Every employee was required to leave for one week to make sure that day to day operations continued without interruption in their absence. As result, everyone took at least one week of vacation. Often they would take two at this time.
Funny thing is, Amazon has never really been into maximizing profits, at least in comparison to re-investing the company in new experimental directions. An investment in their own employee's well being seems to be something in line with that. But, I'm not a CEO.
Technically, Amazon might not be into maximizing profit via cash flow. But Bezos certainly has an interest in maximizing share price, via undercutting competitors and offering the cheapest prices and maximizing market share, thereby leading to a possibility of increasing profits via sales. Any which way, squeezing every cent out of the employees will work towards accomplishing these goals. So while they may not have a ton of profit in the traditional sense, it's still all the same interests reaping the gains they always have.
I think the clear and interesting thing I have taken from this debacle is that all the horror stories come from non management with a large portion of the criticism targeted at people who work around the level of the people who are coming out to talk about how wonderful it is.
It's easy for management to say how peachy things are when they are the people who very well might be (unknowingly) creating this culture.
The most amazing part about all of this is that not a single person who has come out saying this is false has said they will either look into it themselves or put their money where their mouths are and do something about it. It's easy to be the general when the guns aren't pointed at you.
Not surprising. Likely he knows exactly what is going on in his company (known as a micromanager) but can't stand criticism. But like the titans of old (Rockefeller, Carnagie etc) employee happiness doesn't register as important to him.
Is it just me, or is there something extra creepy about Bezos having AMZN employees read the NYT article and then email him personally if they recognized any of the practices?
That's sort of like being the National Security Adviser and telling all NSA agents, "if you notice anything illicit, please email me personally [whereafter you will receive a personal drone visit]".
Understandably, a story that could have been titled "Nick Ciubotariu from Amazon responds to criticism" is not as eye-catching as "Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace"
>> Mr Ciubotariu invoked the company's culture of fun in his LinkedIn post. "We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand," he wrote.
This reminds me of Rackspace. Rackspace claims to have this great fun environment and they love their employees and they're always doing this fun stuff at work. I know a handful of people that work there and I'm always being told about the elaborate pranks games going on.
Then I wonder why it takes them 2 days for a sales specialist to call me back, 6 hours to respond to a support ticket or it takes them 45 minutes to locate my server in one of their datacenters.
I don't work there but 1 note about support plans at companies: You will get what you pay for. If you have an SLA of 1 hour you will get your reply in an hour. If you don't have that (lets say you have a 12 hour SLA) the team, even if they can answer your question right away, is likely going to hold off on it for awhile because you haven't paid for that level of service.
It's also protection as their response could lead to another reply from you and possibly a call would have to be scheduled and then meanwhile a few important tickets from clients that pay for the extra service come in and now they are backed up.
Sales guys should be calling you constantly though!
I don't know anything about Rackspace's internal operations, but I have used them with business support before and it was some of the best customer service I have ever experienced with a company. Also, since this is an Amazon thread, their customer service is the cat's tits as well!
"No one tells me to work nights. No one makes me answer emails at night. No one texts me to ask me why emails aren't answered."
Well, if you're willingly working nights and weekends (which we know you do, as you penned the response on a Saturday), then of course nobody is going to tell you to do so. This statement does nothing to disprove that those who wish to have lives outside the workplace aren't harassed by their coworkers and/or managers.
I was struck by the same careful wording. These kinds of policies and pressures never bother the True Believers who have already decided to make the company #1 in their lives. You know, the kind who will enlist an already-annoyed spouse's help to proof-read a work-related article on a Saturday morning. The problem is with those who still believe in a work/life balance that's something other than 90/10.
"In Mr Bezos' memo, he encouraged Amazon employees to read the article, and email him directly if they recognised any of the "shockingly callous management practices" it described."
Oh well, this seems to be a bit hypocritical. ("Hey Mr. Bezos, my boss, John Doe (cc'd!) wants me to do this task until tomorrow, but it's 8 pm. What do you think about this?")
That was the statement that caught my attention too. If the environment really is how the NYT article, and many HN posters say it is, then Bezos' offer sounds a lot like US whistle blower protections. Sounds good on paper, not so much in practice.
If you haven't read this book, The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, and you want to know how Amazon has worked from day 1, it's a good place to go. It straight up tells you the culture at Amazon, starting from day 1.
Amazon's success at being a grinding place but reaping major business results align with what I've seen of my previous employer (a transportation icon) that tightened the screws, re-engineered processes, encouraged thousands to leave. Revenue, profit, stock price, and bonuses soared.
All of what we've been told about the war for talent, desire for caring work places, etc. seems to be exaggerated. Companies can literally have a policy of "be happy you have a job, punk" for professionals for YEARS, and people will suck it up. Morale does have an impact but not as much as you'd think once your company is large enough AND it is successful. One commonality in both companies is that they are very data driven. Eliminating a costly perk? Do it and see what the data says. Make a change to a major process that people are resisting? Do it, fire any insubordinates, and see what the data says. Basically don't take management policy or process for granted unless you have data to back it up.
There's a line between tough and abusive, however, and this seems to be where Amazon's (and other tough cultures) walk the line.
The data-driven management you're describing is based on the significant assumption that you are able to gather accurate data, and interpret that data accurately.
For example, if you are making a management decision based on how much time employees are spending on X, you are assuming that you actually know how much time is being spent on X and what the value of that time is.
Simply measuring data is not sufficient. You have to measure the right data in the right way for your stated purpose. Companies operating like Amazon does (apparently), are wildly over-confident in their data collection and interpretation abilities, in my opinion.
Most companies I have consulted or work for make decisions based on politics and conjecture, with data being invented at a bare minimum to back the argument up, but no one doing serious analysis of it.
The culture of having data collection and an ability to challenge it (whether it is flawed or not) indicates a desire for a fact-driven culture vs. a power-driven culture.
They might be over-confident, but one would think that reality in the market will eventually catch up to that.
This is entirely possible. However, when the data being measured is about complex human behavior (i.e. time allocation, productivity, work habits, etc...), I don't think we are even a little bit close to accurately representing reality. If we were "pretty close," then sure you could justify making decisions based on that data, but I don't think we are close enough for that.
Even just the "time worked on X" example is too complex to track. It is deceptively "simple." It seems like (especially to managers) employees should be able to work on a task for awhile, and afterward record how much time they spent working on it. However, it isn't that simple.
In reality, "working on X" might actually mean working on X along with several other things such as email or web browsing or talking to a co-worker or answering the phone. With reliance on self-reporting, and without some sort of monitoring system, it is unreasonable to expect this metric to be accurate, yet this is how many (most?) time reporting systems work.
Managers are making large-scale decisions based on this data. It looks like accurate data, it has fancy graphs and charts and reporting...but it isn't actually very accurate. An employee might report an hour spent on a project, when really only 40 minutes of that hour were spent on the project work, while the remaining 20 minutes were spent on various interruptions and extra tasks. This inaccuracy isn't much of an issue for informal uses, such as sticking to a personal schedule, but for driving decisions as part of a greater pool of data, it is misleading.
At my organization, upper management is trying to use time reporting data to come up with a total cost for various initiatives. This is the kind of scenario I am talking about. Managers don't typically sit and watch everyone work, nor do they discuss time reporting entries individually, so all they end up seeing is the data. This separates them from how that data is generated and leads to inappropriate reliance on that data. From their perspective, it feels like reliable data that can be used to assign a cost to various projects, but the data probably doesn't adequately support that use case.
I feel you. Time tracking analytics is God awfully complicated and mostly impossible to get right unless you have a very disciplined culture. I've railed against such poor systems in my younger years.
But sometimes there are ways to make it work. At Pivotal Labs for example, you are allocated to a pair daily and then to a project or product over a few weeks. There are no interruptions or meetings beyond townhalls and daily stand ups... Unless you and your pair occasionally want a ping pong break. Productivity and resourcing becomes a bit more reasonable in this culture as its related to stories/requirements in Pivotal Tracker being completed relative to the number of pairs rather than tying it to individual worth. It's like an incredibly kind and collaborative culture that also gets good data.
Stepping back to a general management perspective, To me the most effective data is if you keep it relatively simple and do controlled experiments that are systemically tied to an external market result. A lot of companies in the logistics (and now software services) space get good at this.
That is a much better approach. It incorporates the humility you need to have with this type of data. That system works because it does not assume and expect accuracy, it works around the problem in a different way.
So, I guess my original sentiment is more like: "data-driven" is not a good thing on its own, because you need more than just a bunch of data, you need analytics.
It may seem more semantic than anything else, but I think there are some real differences in how people (especially managers) perceive "data-driven" vs. some other term like "analytics-driven". "Data is not magic" should be a catch phrase spread far and wide among the non-technical business world.
> We have to make clear that we didn't like nerf wars neither overworking
I do find those wars very entertaining and stress relieving. What is clear to me is that, even in the tech world, there are different cultures and not everybody are equal.
There's a bit of a divide that no one seems to be touching on - most of the issues talked about in the NYT article seem to be from non technical folks, while engineering tends to be a little happier for precisely the reasons Bezos mentions.
Amazon and most other companies have separate staff, culture and levels of morale for engineering and non engineering divisions. Can't really compare them directly.
Another anecdote: when I lived in Seattle I knew several amazon engineers and most seemed overworked and miserable. The reputation is that they hire college grads and work them until they burn out. My understanding is that the attrition rate is high within engineering so that may provide some data to back up this narrative.
I know numerous people who work in marketing or operations at Amazon, and their experiences more closely mirror the NYT article. Much of the pressure is self-imposed: Amazon hires type-A overachievers, then stack-ranks them. The pressure to succeed is immense, and as happens with any forced stack rank system, people try to tear each other down.
Amazon hires legions of MBA graduates every year, and most of them will have left by the time the next class comes in. Jeff Bezos seems to have modeled Amazon in the style of his former employer, McKinsey & Co., and it shows. The expectations at Amazon are similar to the expectations at McKinsey -- except that being fired from McKinsey after 2 years is almost considered a rite of passage in the executive world. Until Amazon develops a similar reputation (and becomes a lot pickier about who it hires) they will continue to have this perception problem.
It's certainly effective, but Amazon is not a nice place to work.
It is only happier because demand/supply seem to be working out for engineers at the moment. High competition to hire engineers = you have to be nice to them.
Bezos would treat engineers much worse if he could.
I wonder if this is related to H1 demand and lack of women in tech. Think about it for a minute.
H1 would have to leave (the country) if they lose their job, so they are stuck working for a bad boss.
Women can sense that, hey, this makes no sense faster than man who is somewhat expected to 'solider on'.
If there was less H1 (but more legal immigration other ways), than that would force a turn around and encourage more welcoming places. And less bad bosses.
I even look at product manager job postings and cringe: 'hold engineering team accountable for commitments'. The issue maybe that there is H1, that there are people willing to do it.
My experience with women at Amazon 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 emailed the transcripts of their conversations to HR. They conducted an investigation and he admitted to everything. The guy got to keep his job. They did some sort of formal counseling with him and then transferred him to another group. They made the girl 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 more than a year now.
“Even if it’s rare or isolated, our tolerance for any such lack of empathy needs to be zero,” Mr. Bezos said in an email circulated to all the retailer’s employees.
My note:
Zero tolerance policies without recourse for correction are a perfect example of the Amazon inhumanity. Straight from the mouth of the leader. There's your culture problem right there.
"BREAKING: Hugely successful big co has ex employees not fully satisfied, willing to criticize it. It also has current employees who appreciate it. Will keep you posted."
To top it off, written by a company that has clear conflict of interest in context of eCommerce (NYTimes is an eCommerce player) and publishing (Washington Post) with Mr. Bezos.
I am not in any way associated with the wunderkind of Seattle and/or his company. Just noting an interesting fact.
This "I didn't know this was happening" excuse doesn't cut it. You don't know because you don't look. As long as you are getting the results you want it doesn't matter if you're demanding people to come back the day after a miscarriage. Listen to any interview with Jack Welch and he'll tell you how accountability of work culture comes straight from the top, and how HR reviews are designed not to ask the right questions. As a random example, there's a huge difference between asking "have you been illegally treated in any way" and "have you been immorally treated". Little changes like that make survey results wildly different, and if management wants they can make employee's say a labor shop is a great place to work.
Read The Everything Store. It is clear the only relationship you want with Amazon is as a customer. Everything they do is to drive lower prices to the customer in order to take as much marketshare as possible.
You never see posts about people at Google or Facebook saying they're abused and overworked. Even with Microsoft, you read about political infighting and stack-ranking being stupid, but not downright emotional abuse or on-call madness. With Amazon, it's quite a regular occurrence.
Did you actually read those complaints? Some are about compensation (you don't even have to reach 1000 employees to get those...), some about work/life balance, some about not being as good as the company would allow you to be (!), but i can't see any about emotional abuse, people crying at their desk or having to pay for a parking lot. It's a different scale.
Even on glassdoor, Amazon averages 3.4 vs Google 4.4 vs Facebook 4.4. That 0.6 difference is what you mention: some people will inevitably be unhappy. But that other 1.0, that's not normal for a tech company.
I'm not surprised he feels this way, being solely unaccountable in the way that his employees are and primarily responsible for both denying and preserving the culture.
> Mr Ciubotariu invoked the company's culture of fun in his LinkedIn post. "We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand," he wrote.
Did this make anyone else cringe? You couldn't pick an example that better demonstrated an awkward, forced element of corporate "fun."
I have to wonder, though, what he means by them getting "a bit out of hand":
- "fun" exhaustion?
- loss of place in stack ranking system?
- injuries? deaths?
- productivity lost to spontaneous bouts of letter-writing from employees to their friends about how much fun it is to work at Amazon?