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Comment by ucaetano | Hacker News Reader

It's actually weird to see a company firing back this publicly, releasing performance data (no matter if positive or negative) on previous employees, and it all being posted not by the CEO or a HR VP, but by the head of PR.

[Edit: Not only it smells of whitewashing, but it also looks deceptive.

And PR? Seriously? Not only it's a sleazy piece, but Amazon chose the worst possible position to convey the message. Get some engineer, accountant, designer, heck, get the HR intern who just joined 2 weeks ago to talk about this.

It would have more credibility than a PR person who's been in the company for less than one year.]

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As I remarked when it first came out, NYTimes article was almost completely anecdotal. That's not damning, but it does require you to trust the reporters to distill a large complicated mess to representative pieces.

What part of Carney's piece do you think similarly depends on us trusting him? Do you think he fabricated the email from Kantor? Do you think he's outright lying about the context of Olson's dismissal to the extent that it wasn't incumbent on the Times to disclose this in the original article?

I'm totally willing to accept for the sake of argument that Carney is dishonest, but I think that is largely beside the point here. If you accept the truth of the bare facts presented by Carney, putting aside his spin, then the badness of Carney and/or Amazon is irrelevant for assessing the badness of the NYTimes.

I agree with you that NYTimes piece is largely anecdotal but I will give my reasons for not believing a SVP of Amazon PR.

1. Personal attach on a former employee as the head of public relation for a multi-billion corporation from a personal blog seems cowardly. Did he give Olson a chance to respond? Is there extenuating circumstances? How did Amazon carry out the investigation? Who knew what when? He accused NYTimes lapses in journalistic standard; he isn't even pretending there is any standard.

2. His attack on reporters is unconvincing. His rhetorical questions sound conniving. The reporters might not have asked those exact questions but they must have examined the named sources' credibility and employment history. Amazon might have refused to give details about Olson's termination, ironically on employee's privacy concern, and then itself divulges specifics, though I am sure after being cleared by their legal department. Noticed that Carney went into hyperboles here rather than stating any facts. A few sentences describing Amazon's interaction with reporters would go a long way here. But no, nothing.

3. His refutation of other three named sources amounts to verbal parsing. Some parts of the review are good so no parts can be called bad. Written review is good so no verbal review can be abusive. No direct requirement so everything is employee's fault and they deserve everything they get. It is almost offensive to read this part. If this is the best Amazon can come up with, it must be bad.

4. Cheery picking Amazon's interaction with NYTimes' reporter. Select publication of correspondence and one-sided characterization of interaction is sly. Make public all correspondence, with proper permission, so we can get a full picture.

Fundementall Carney is a former reporter and whitehouse spokesman who is now attacking former employees in behalf of a giant corporation with enormous resources on personal blog. He is committing every bad act he accuses NYTimes of and a lot more. It is debatable whether NYTimes followed the ideal journalistic standards but it is clear Carney follows none here.

With regard to #1, I don't much care how cowardly Carney is. The Times based an anecdotal article largely on the impressions of someone who is clearly suspect. Not informing the reader about it is unacceptable.

I guess I agree with #2, except that the alternative scenario -- that the reporters based their piece on an employee who they didn't know had an axe to grind -- just makes them incompetent/negligent rather than malicious.

I agree with #3, and honestly just ignored the relevant section of Carney's post for exactly the reasons you give.

I disagree with #4. I'd love to see the entire correspondence process too, but I can't imagine a reasonable scenario where the reporters aren't dishonest about their intentions. I think being willing to betray one's subject with bald-face lies completely destroys a journalist's credibility, and it doesn't matter how evil their subject is, or if they call it investigative reporting.

I'm sure the reporters felt they were justified, or only bent the truth rather than lying, or whatever. But it's exactly that ability to self deceive that makes them untrustworthy writers.

You know, the bias against anecdotal evidence is great and everything, but it only applies if somebody somewhere has a credible anecdote opposite to the claims. Otherwise, it's as good as data.

So, look at the ex-employees opinions, and see if there's one. (And no, PR pieces are not credible.)

I am an ex-Amazon employee and I had a totally fine experience while I was working there.

That said, my experience very much is totally an anecdote. It was a big company and different teams ran in very different manners.

How's this for anecdotes? I'm an ex-Amazon employee and I've never seen anyone cry at their desk, and had in fact never heard of this happening until I read the NYT article.

My team was a mediocre place to work; better than some places, worse than others. Worlds away from the bizarro world depicted in the NYT.

Do you think it would be difficult to find credible anecdotes of Amazon employees having positive experiences?

Yes, I did. If things were that generalized, it would be.

Got two already, so it's at least not universal.

Why shouldn't it be the PR person? Someone at the level of Jay Carney is ostensibly more than just a mouthpiece, but someone who gathers the information and weighs in on what's useful and relevant to disseminate to the press. This isn't always a nefarious thing; sometimes employees have incomplete information but aren't in a position to confirm it with the executives.

At this phase, where the story has run and the damage has been done -- the response should be done by Carney. Take the rebuttal to Mr. Olson, for example. That revelation is absolutely not something that should be revealed by Mr. Olson's boss or a coworker. First of all, just because you're an engineer doesn't mean you have all of the facts. The PR person is in a position to collect the facts, including whether or not it's legal to reveal Mr. Olson's reason for termination, and confirming that reason for termination with HR. Even Mr. Olson's boss wouldn't have that same level of confirmation.

The other advantage of having Carney make this response is that you can be sure that this is, for better or worse, the official company response. If instead, this was a blog post by Mr. Olson's co-worker calling him out for being a fraud...and the reaction to it was negative...then Amazon could pedal back and say, "Oh well that co-worker blogged something he shouldn't have and now he is being punished".

But since the condemnation of Mr. Olson has come straight from Mr. Carney, any backlash will be rightly the reaping of what Bezos, Carney, and all their lawyers have sowed.

edit: FWIW, a non-anonymous redditor is saying that he knows Bo Olson, personally, and says "I can assure you that Bo was not the one defrauding vendors that was another employee in the same department"...it strikes me as improbable that Carney (again, not just Carney, but Amazon's lawyers and HR) would get this wrong. But if they did...it's going to be a great backlash, and a much more lasting one than had this allegation come from someone other than Carney or Bezos himself.

https://www.reddit.com/r/business/comments/3pcnlh/what_the_n...

I think a lot of people's problem with this is that it's not very transparent.

You don't find out who Carney is until the very bottom of the article, and it's presented as just another journalistic article published by Medium and not an official rebuttal by the company.

If the whole thing was prefixed with "Following is Amazon's official rebuttal to the New York Times article", I don't think many people would have a problem with it.

What's a "journalist article"? Medium is a blog host, not a newspaper. Medium is just paste.org with a better UI.

Fair enough...I saw his name at the top and immediately knew who he was but only because I work in media. However, Carney would be right to assume that his main audience -- the media -- will also recognize his role.

That said, I don't know if this is them trying to be intentionally deceptive or if this is just a clunky use of the medium (no pun intended). It is his first post on Medium, and it's written not in the first-person (as a way to make a personal connection with the reader) but uses "we", e.g. "We were in regular communication with Ms. Kantor from February through the publication date in mid-August"...I don't think there's much evidence to show that they are trying to hide the author's bias or position, other than it's on Medium and not on news.amazon.com.

As it stands, Amazon/Carney have made a defamatory statement about an individual while providing no evidence of their claims. Claiming to have the results of an internal investigation is not evidence. Now, the entire investigation will need to be made public and scrutinized.

This will likely allow legal entrance into all of Amazon, as all internal policies will need to be examined.

Defamation is by definition making a false statement that damages someone's reputation. You're claiming too much, since without any evidence, we can't tell whether the statements are true or false.

If the statements Amazon made are false, then they are clearly defamatory, since they accuse the employee of criminal action. Do you really believe that Amazon's expensive lawyers didn't vet this post before it went out?

The statement should be assumed false until proven to be true by the accuser. A negative, public claim with zero evidence (nor even a promise of forthcoming evidence) should be viewed as defamatory.

>If the statements Amazon made are false, then they are clearly defamatory, since they accuse the employee of criminal action.

Here's a key piece. If Amazon is now claiming that their former employee took criminal actions:

1) Amazon took criminal actions.

2) Why reveal this now, instead of taking it to the proper authorities when it was discovered?

>Do you really believe that Amazon's expensive lawyers didn't vet this post before it went out?

Does it matter? Expensive does not mean they are competent, nor does it mean they are correct.

It's only defamation if it's not true.

"you can be sure that this is, for better or worse, the official company response"

Quite the opposite: there's absolutely nothing official about it. It isn't published on an amazon domain, doesn't carry any signature as amazon, and the only evidence that this is in any way related to amazon is that the guy works at amazon.

"there's absolutely nothing official about it"...except that it's coming from Amazon's Jay Carney, who is described as "Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon". Could his Medium site use a custom banner to show Amazon's letterhead? Sure (I don't know, I haven't logged into Medium in awhile to know its design/customization options). But this message is signed by him, acting in his role as Amazon PR. Quibbling over whether it should've shown on an Amazon domain vs. an outlet like Medium does nothing to change that.

There's a difference between Elon Musk speaking as CEO of Tesla and as Elon Musk. Or pretty much anyone else.

Senior executives are usually careful to point out when they're not speaking for the company. Carney identifies himself as an SVP at Amazon, uses "us" and "we" throughout the piece, and refers to internal records and emails he would have no reason to access otherwise.

Yeah, it's the White House's former press secretary, Jay Carney. His whole existence is to whitewash, downplay, obfuscate, and pass a sanitized story to the media.

I suggest we ignore Amazon's commentary and accept the worst vision as reality. That way, if we were to end up working there, we might be pleasantly surprised by a rosier picture, rather than upset by something that is below expectations. After all, the bottom line can't accommodate the truth most of the time.

Holy ad hominem batman.

> After all, the bottom line can't accommodate the truth most of the time.

And pessimism will almost certainly become self-fulfilling prophecy.

That isn't ad hominem. Ad hominem would be something like "Jay Carney smells, so we shouldn't believe what he says." Carney's history and position are clearly relevant here.

I predict they will take down this article and issue an apology.

It would be deliciously ironic if the apology also came from the PR department.

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