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.
Same here. I know 2 people who went there, both after short startup stints after college. They both lasted under 2 years and are now at Mozilla and Facebook and would never go back. So many awful stories...
None of that absolves the NYT from checking sources and attempting to determine the credibility. This is journalistic malpractice.
If we excuse a "news" organization from fact checking because "well, I've heard stories along those lines" we're screwed.. because where will most people hear those stories? The same organizations.
Whether the statements are true or not is what the journalists should care about, and what they did, in this article.
You’ll notice that Carney never disputes the truth of the claims. He only attacks the character of the people who made them- or adds related but not contradictory details. Overall, side issues not actually related to the substance of the claims themselves.
The point is that "journalists" have ethical guidelines they have to follow. Failure to do so compromises themselves and their profession. It leads to the defense and promotion of "fake but accurate" articles that tell a great story but risk being just that.. stories.
It's the equivalent of asking Hillary Clinton's opinion of Donald Trump. She may be 100% accurate in her assessment but she is not neutral or impartial.
Whether the statements are true or not is what the journalists should care about
This is a very naive view of journalism. It is trivial to do horrible, biased reporting while printing statements that are factually true or not falsifiable. In fact, that is how most of the biased articles are constructed these days. In the age of the Internet you can't get away with outright lies. The tool of trade are mission, misrepresentation, manufactured context, selective citation, cherrypiked expert opinions and so on.
You may see it that way. I didn't actually see any egregious failure of NYT "fact checking" in that victimization post spewed by Amazon PR yesterday. Just Amazon attempting a PR slight of hand. And of course Bezos owns WP, so attacking NYT credibility fits his playbook nicely.
Well, let's not get ahead of ourselves. For the most part, mainstream media organizations are not really "checking sources" so much as presenting a coherent narrative that their advertisers want propagated.
I don't doubt that the original anti-Amazon article was a hit piece that was commissioned. That doesn't make its claims false, however.
If it was a commissioned hit piece, that makes it even worse.
We have a "news" organization doing opposition research, calling it investigative "journalism", and then the editor defending their process and integrity without an appropriate disclosure.
I sincerely hope that isn't the case. I could see the FTC getting involved if it was.
That's exactly the way the PR engines work these days, though.
You pay for a column to advertise for your company, you get your column. You pay for a column to criticize your competitor, you get your column. You pay for columns to introduce new concepts that your company will use in the future so that the public has been primed for what you're going to put out there. All of the major companies do these things in order to stay in the public consciousness, and stay favorable.
Sure, these columns will admit "alternative viewpoints" in passing to maintain their veneer of credibility, but that's no threat to their actual purpose. The editor is going to defend their process and integrity until he is fired-- and firing him would represent a concession that mistakes were made. This spat with Amazon is good for the NYT, as it proves that they're willing to "stand up for themselves", which is the perfect trait for a proxy to have when you're paying them to go after the other guy.
I had heard awful stories first-hand from former employees long before this story came out as well. I'm not even in the information tech industry, yet they complained to me without prompting.
The level of and emotional investment in denial is important, it just shows that there is a problem going on.
It is a bit like when two people are accused of something, one is guilty and one is not. The one who is guilty will react more violently usually and go to extra lengths to "prove" their innocence.
So in this case we see them going the "extra length" with these response articles months after the original incident.
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.
$86k at Google in 2015? That's the lowest starting salary there I've heard in 5+ years. I'm not saying you're wrong, just saying that not even the cachet of Google could get me to accept that salary in the Bay Area when I could get the same salary in Texas and live twice as nice of a life.
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.
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?
Median salary for SF Region in 2014 was $75,900. Thats ~10k over the median for an ENTRY level position. Sure, could Google pay them more, absolutely. But I don't think 86k a year is anything to scoff at.
Why should you expect a very technically demanding position that requires passing strenuous filters and interviews to not pay much beyond the median in the entire area across all jobs? Should doctors who've just completed their residency start at $75-85k too just because they're technically entry-level?
You'd be surprised how low people are willing to go in a tough economy. I think the bigger issue is also that techs aren't given a fair-income, especially at places like Amazon, because of the H-1B scam. If you are young and trying to get your foot in the door, you'll put up with the low pay.
Hm, based off of the wage-fixing done by some of the biggest names in Silicon Valley, I'd say that the pay that tech workers actually get is probably lower than what they're worth. Doesn't mean they have low pay in absolute terms, but I think that for the most part, tech workers could do much better, given the high demand we're seeing right now.
If you make $100,000 per year at an 8 person company, but the company's profit is $12 billion per year — do you have low pay?
The tech industry has discovered you can make employees happy by paying them more than "average," but it's still a lot lower than the benefits, productivity, and supernormal growth powers employees are providing to companies.
A productive software developer is worth at a minimum $3 million per year.
I don't see how fair pay is linked to company profits, if they are paying you market rate for your job, you're not underpaid whether they earn $12/year in profits or $12B/year in profits.
If the company is earning $12B/year with 12 employees, then the company founders (and early employees who contributed sweat-equity to get the company off the ground) should enjoy their success, but that doesn't mean that they need to pay new hires extravagant amounts of money as a sense of "fairness".
I've seen the balance sheet for my company, and right now, our software developers (well, all employees really) are worth negative dollars per year. Sure, our investors (and to a lesser extent our employees) may be rewarded handsomely some years down the road, but it's not the developers money that's on the line - they get a paycheck for as long as the company is in business, and they have no chance of losing any money they invested in the company. Though even if I could snap my fingers and make the company earn $100M/year overnight, there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
The concept of "early start" or "sweat equity" resulting in extraordinary reward is a convenient financing meme, but it's not great for reality. It just persists because people like the idea of becoming rewarded more than their contributions.
Just because you "got in early" and worked for a year then coast for the next 10 years while other people pull of the business doesn't mean you should get outsized rewards.
there's no way a developer is worth $3M/year.
Then perhaps your company isn't using developers as efficiently as they could be used? Sure, you can automate a $10 million industry, or you can destroy an $800 billion industry. Not all choices are equal.
It's not because he got in early and worked for a year, but because he got in early, worked for less (or no) pay than he would have gotten at a more established company. I.e. that developer took on risk, and with risk comes (sometimes) reward. And, his investment may never pay off, the company may never be successful so all of that time and effort spent at low pay may have been for naught.
Not all developers can work for companies poised to take over an $800B industry. For every developer in a disruptive company that's going to earn huge rewards, there's 100 developers writing a web backend for a struggling publishing company, or writing integrations for an ERP implementation. (and though that ERP can save the company millions of dollars, that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts)
Not all developers can work for companies poised to take over an $800B industry.That's the point of managing your own career and your own life, isn't it?
Well no, it's a market limitation, not every developer can work for companies that are poised to take over an $800B industry. No matter how successful a developer is at such a company, there will still be a need for developers in less lucrative, more mundane jobs.
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
Again, that's the risk part, not every developer is in a place in his life where he can quit his job with a steady paycheck and work for some speculative startup that may or may not ever become successful.
And besides, didn't you just say that developer who quit his job to work at a small startup shouldn't get an outsized reward just because he took that risk to work for an early stage startup?
Take your yearly salary and turn it into an hourly rate. The standard number is 2087 hours per year for a salaried employee.
So, let's say $100k per year. That's (roughly, rounded up) $50 per hour.
What's minimum wage? A few places have minimum, uneducated, non-creative wage of $15 per hour.
Your hourly rate of $50/hr is about 3x of just somebody who does manual, non-creative labor. Are you worth more than 3x of a restaurant employee? I sure am.
Then, what's your "better than a non-creative womp" multiplier for your output? 10x? Surely you provide more than 10x value as compared to a fast food employee. You're a creative force (or, you can be when you apply yourself). 100x? That's more in the correct range.
So, 100x * minimum wage of $15/hr * 2087 hours/year = $3 million per year.
I know multiple people who received advice from their doctor within 2 years of starting at Amazon that they should quit, because the stress of the job was having dangerous effects on their health.
I can't say that I have heard that of any other tech company.
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.
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.
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.
Culture rot takes a long time. It's slowed by the employees who just want to vest their options and get out of there. It's promulgated by the jerks and sociopaths who see no problem with the culture of stepping on others to rise up the ladder. It's calcified by those same jerks who become managers and justify their actions, because everyone else at their pay grade is doing it. By the time it becomes a real problem, upper management is such an insular echo chamber that they can hardly recognize or acknowledge the problem.
Enter the harbinger of American corporate stagnation: the outside management/PR consultant, whose job it is to identify the problem, be thoroughly ignored by management, and be quietly paid and asked to leave while the rest of the executive team plays hot potato with the blame until they find the right people to fire for Wall Street to stop bellyaching. Then once the stock is back up enough, fly out with a golden parachute.
The people at the bottom of the ladder? Fuck 'em. If they don't recognize what's going on, it's their fault they get taken advantage of, right?
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.
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.
The NYT must be loving this. So many ad impressions on their site over this. Amazon's PR are doing a god awful job putting this to bed.
Amazon should just release a statement that says:
"Amazon is a large global company employing thousands of
people in a variety of locations and teams. We do not deny
that there may have been situations where employees have worked
long hours under difficult circumstances.
This is part and parcel of working for a company that lives on the
cutting edge of technology, in a highly competitive business.
We are striving to make changes that improve the working hours of
our employees and their conditions, in order to reduce stress and
improve the health and well-being of our most valuable asset."
There, job done. That's how you do PR.
Good PR isn't about defending yourself when you perceived as being wrong; it is about showing humility, regardless of whether you are actually wrong or not.
People can believe what they want and you can't change that, but (at a minimum), you can distance yourself from a specific action or incident, by demonstrating that you are but human, and whether or not people like or dislike you, at least you are perceived to be making an effort to change for the better.
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 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.
This is an interesting demonstration that rising to an elevated role is no proof of competency. Carney became a "brand" by working as press secretary, but seems grievously out of his depth actually having to do damage control; something that high-end PR usually handles with nonchalance.
How autonomous is he? I suspect he's just doing Bezos' dirty work here. I mean, right after this Bezos bizarrely pulled Chromecast from Amazon because his firesticks aren't selling, but claimed it was because of "consumer confusion." He also refuses to allow the Prime Video app to use Chromecast in any way. That's on top of getting a beating for his Fire Phone, which was laughed straight into the bargain bin.
Amazon is run by a something of a meglomaniac and everyone knows it. Carney is just collecting a paycheck, imo, and knows this response is a bad idea. I think its obvious Amazon wants to be a tech giant like MS or Google but simply can't pull it off. This NYTimes piece just made hiring a lot harder for them, right or wrong. Bezos must be livid, especially since everyone has cloud services now, many of which make AWS look poor in comparison. What's Amazon's big claim to fame today? Being an online retailer and e-book seller? That's not tech powerhousing, that's just sales.
I can't see how this is good for Amazon in anyway. Going on the offensive like this in a PR battle doesn't make you look strong, it makes you look brash. A little humility would go a long way for their reputation.
I thought Bezos's response at the time was the right one - "That's not the Amazon I know". It is still defensive, but not overly antagonistic.
I'm frankly very surprised that their head of PR is going this direction. I would have thought that he would have known better. This direct conflict with the Times is not helping.
I do not believe those two responses are unrelated. Amazon is a company for whome PR is a key product. While excellent customer service is key to their growth, their PR campaigns are key to their stock valuation. This is why they put out non-starter products like the Fire Phone and hoaxes like "Drone Delivery" and release numerous il-concieved but good for a press release products (amazon menus, amazon movie listings, the whole search engine fiasco, etc.)
Bezos takes the high road-- "Oh, we're not like that" (which to anyone who has worked there rings really hollow as Bezos is someone for whome reality is pretty plastic. He has a reality distortion field of significant power)... meanwhile thru backchannels work to discredit the employee telling the truth.
Given what I experienced there, I can believe that all the dirt they are slinging at this employee is post-hoc ergo propter hoc rationalization.
When I attempted to transfer within Amazon, I was attacked by my boss and HR, and when I resigned I was fired. (Of course, you can't fire someone who has resigned but that's a truth that is not reflected in Amazon's employee records.)
Now I'm a "disgruntled" employee who was "fired" for the "crime" of attempting to transfer departments after getting an offer from AWS, and then resigned when his transfer was blocked by his boss (something explicitly forbidden in Amazon's policy handbook, but of course such rules are there for propaganda more than anything else.)
This allows them to spin anything the former employees says as sour grapes.
BTW, as part of leaving I was made to sign a terrible agreement, under threats that I now understand to have been extortion (because they were illegal under Washington State law) that included, among other things, that I would never publicly speak ill of the company. I am doing so now because I'd be happy if they sued me- I have lots of stories to tell reporters.
I've had one former employer (not Amazon) threaten to withhold my remaining paychecks if I did not sign a non-disparagement agreement upon leaving - this was on my last day.
Of course, wildly illegal - but also a verbal conversation (deliberately so of course) so no hard proof it ever happened.
I told the HR person that's illegal, refused to sign any exit paperwork whatsoever, and left the building. Of course, my remaining paychecks arrived without trouble, LOL.
I can imagine someone less savvy or newer to the industry to easily be fooled.
Yeah, that trick doesn't work for going concerns. It wasn't threatened before the 13 senior people at a startup I worked at faxed in a group resignation to the devil investors that had taken over the company, but they sure did fight trying to not give us our back pay, or all of it.
But the state, Virginia in this case, takes a very dim view of such stunts (hey, on top of everything else they lose tax money), has an office staffed with no-humor people who've seen it all, and all we had to do was to wait and accept only the full amount.
Almost certainly they offered him a large financial inducement in exchange for A/ signing it and B/ agreeing never to say disparaging things about Amazon.
I knew someone who bragged that their job was stopping/crushing unionization of US customer service reps. It was apparently one of the strong motivators for their current offshoring of that role.
One way to look at it is that maybe they want to take the hit now and fight the fight? It might discourages any future journalist from thinking they can write a story and expect Amazon not to try and discredit them. Secondly, as a potential candidate of a finite ecosystem of engineers, I do not forget. To have them put out facts from their files, while messy, at least puts doubt about me ever working there.
Company vs 'the press' usually does not end well for the company, they can fight all they want but they are not in control of what gets written about the fight and journalists as a group tend to look down on companies trying to control the media reporting on them, especially if there is plenty of corroborating evidence for that which is reported (and some of that is echoed right here in this thread).
Amazon has a problem. By failing to recognize it and act on it and trying to squelch the bad news they make the problem a (potentially much) larger one.
On the other hand, you should hold the press accountable. It's easy to say fighting the press is a bad idea, I don't even disagree most of the time. But that doesn't mean we should excuse their failures.
Have fun when the press happens to make you the target. Have fun not being allowed to defend yourself while they skirt whatever truths they feel like they can legally get away with to promote their self-serving narrative. Have fun when people come in and tell you that you should not bother to tell the truth in the face of lies, because you'll just cause a snafu. Have fun seeing your associates share the article with each other as if it's credible and honest when you know it is full of half-truths and omissions, and you can't say anything about it because they have ink to spare to bury you with more lies.
I don't think this is one of those cases. Agreed that when the press goes off the rails (I've had this happen once, a reporter tried to get me to say something I really did not want to say on the record and the cut and pasted my words until they supported his foregone conclusion) it is not nice. But when the press reports actual wrongdoing you should address the problem, not attack the press. Shooting the messenger is usually the wrong response.
It most definitely is one of those cases unless you think Jay Carney's argument can be dismissed out of hand as being entirely factually incorrect.
> But when the press reports actual wrongdoing you should address the problem
By stating it this way, you have already ceded that the press's report is truthful and accurate. Furthermore, you seem to just accept that the press's views on what constitutes "wrongdoing" is reasonable and honest.
The substance of Carney's objections is that the report was not, in fact, truthful and accurate. He states, for example:
Elizabeth Willet, who claims she was “strafed” through the Anytime Feedback tool, received only three pieces of feedback through that tool during her entire time at Amazon. All three included positive feedback on strengths as well as thoughts on areas of improvement. Far from a “strafing,” even the areas for improvement written by her colleagues contained language like: “It has been a pleasure working with Elizabeth.”
He's accusing the Times of failing at simple fact-checking. He's accusing them of failing at responsible journalism. Either Carney is wrong or it is "one of those cases." It can't be both.
I definitely agree with you, and just want to mention another wrinkle that Amazon could be, inadvertantly, ripping into a large tear. Like you note, they might be able to discredit a few people willing to speak on the record, but if the problem alleged by the article is true, in principle, there potentially are more and more people who would be willing to come forward. People with 'squeakly clean' records. People who might even share more damning things that they've just simply moved on from so they can continue their careers.
Or, to toss out an allegory, it's one thing to step on a few ants, it's another to stomp on their nest.
Additionally, giving a company bad press is usually good business for the press. Especially in a place like Seattle, where Amazon is not thought of highly in the first place.
I suspect the real intention was to put the fear of Bezos in the golden-handcuffed employees who have to stick it out for longer to vest their options, knowing that bad words about their (former?) employer will hurt their equity gains as well...
There's a lot of pressure internally, I think, to refute the whole thing and go into full-denial mode.
After all, Amazon's culture got this way for a reason - and it's not by taking complaints seriously, admitting to cultural failures, and making real substantive change.
So, background, I'm an ex-Amazonian, converted from internship to full-time along with a few dozen others, so we all kept in touch on FB. Nearly all of us are gone now - nearly all of us left within 2 years, a few have stayed on as long-term Amazonians.
When the NYT article first hit it was kind of a weird sight. Among the (legion of) ex-Amazonians the response has been pretty universally "yeah I recognize the Amazon in this article". Among the (few) current Amazonians the response was universally "all lies! slander! hit piece! yellow journalism!". The gap was startling - every single one of these long-term Amazonians knew many ex-employees, some they called friends, who left disgruntled and unhappy, and yet here they are insisting that the whole thing was a pack of lies.
Odd to say the least, but lines up with what I saw myself internally when I was there - criticism of Amazon's culture was always met with overt hostility and vehement denial on the internal mailing lists that discussed such things. It never seemed like an environment where change could take root simply because no one was willing to own the failures to begin with.
Bezos made some conciliatory gestures, but I'm personally skeptical - even if he's serious about change, the rest of his company isn't.
having been inside another companys' RDF, i can totally understand that. you don't always understand how bad everything else when you're living it day to day.
Exactly this... I cannot believe he reopened this can of worms. While not forgotten the mental imprint of the original article was tailing off... and he brings it all up to the surface again. I would be furious if I was part of PR.
"we will try and make it better for our employees."
They won't say that because someone might try to hold them to it. Even admitting there is a problem might spark an internal revolt or a hiring problem.
> 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.
No, probably not. Although humility seems like the sensible approach for decent people, a newspaper that has published a deliberately biased hit piece against you is not decent people. The Times declared war on Amazon, not the other way around. If Amazon apologizes, the Times will merely use that as ammunition in their next hit piece.
Amazon knows NY Times is going to attack them no matter what they do or say. If Amazon makes any admission of guilt, the Times will simply use that as ammunition in the next hit piece.
> Rather than fighting it out in public with a newspaper.
Here's the thing: when you call something a "newspaper," especially in this context, you're giving them a privileged status. This privileged status comes because people expect newspapers to behave with journalistic integrity. We give them status because we trust them to do their research and make reasonable efforts to maintain objectivity and be intellectually honest. If even a portion of Amazon's criticisms are true, it is clear that the NY Times, in publishing this article, violated the journalistic standards that earned them the status we accord to them.
If the NY Times is deliberately trying to promote narratives about Amazon rather than doing research and reporting objectively, honestly, and factually with reasonable attempts to minimize bias and maximize credibility; then it's not only imperative that Amazon stand up to them, but it's imperative that you do, too.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Amazon has to find a better spokesperson for public tussle, better in this case would be someone who is not already labeled.
Why would you trust anyone else more? They'd be doing the same exact job for Amazon as Carney is (even if it differs slightly in the implementation). It's just deliciously transparent when they hire Carney to do it.
Any other person would be bullshit artist too, Carney is just known for delivering bullshit. If someone sees a name on Amazon's PR mouthpiece and doesn't immediately drop their evaluation of that person's statements to Carney's level, they're simply being tricked.
Although I do think it is heavily colored by survivor/leader bias in the same way that Bezos "I don't recognize" response was. And that there are "good groups" within the company and that senior developers and their teams are more likely to be treated well than those who are essentially purchasing agents and vendor managers on the pure retail logistics/ops side of the company, where skills are not compensated as highly or as difficult to find in the employment market.
I can't believe he would try to misrepresent Amazon's anonymous anytime feedback tool that is in use by literally tens of thousands of people. He said its a) not anonymous and b) rarely used. Apparently as an SVP he's not familiar with it.
The more important reason why Carney is being used is that he is trusted by journalists and/or has had an important job and reputation that preceded him. As such he will be given certain leeway and the benefit of the doubt that won't extend to others (with less of a pedigree). This isn't about what the tech press thinks (or what even an Amazon customer thinks) it's about what other important decision makers (who follow the journalists that are impressed by Carney think). Separately, when does any PR hack speak the truth (if you want to call it that).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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".
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.
I don't think in this case it is a false accusation. I have heard enough stories and it matches with some of those experience.
Usually if there really is no problem, in most cases people will deny it, and rely on the fact that the situation will sort itself out as a misunderstanding. (Yes, that in some situation ends up biting back and all, but it doesn't deny that people will do that). However if they are guilty they will put their full force in denying it and go the extra mile (as in pull personnel files and share them, write articles about it on blogs months after the incident, and so on).
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.
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.
