Amazon Spars With The Times Over Investigative Article
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Edit: I meant in a tech role at Amazon. Amazon are not known for low pay.
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.
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?
> 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 +.
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.
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.
Amazon simply canceled $170 million (http://recode.net/2014/10/23/amazon-takes-170-million-writed...) due to their fire phone failure. Or, they could have given each employee working on the project a bonus of a little over a million dollars.
Easy come, easy go.
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.
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.
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)
That's the point of managing your own career and your own life, isn't it?
Nothing gets handed to you. You have to position yourself for success.
that savings is only due in a small part to that single developer's efforts
Not if you quit, make it SaaS and sell it to 3,000 companies for $100/month (or even $1,000/month).
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
PS: I'm not a communist.
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.
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.
Or, to toss out an allegory, it's one thing to step on a few ants, it's another to stomp on their nest.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe offered to forgive relocation expenses he'd otherwise be on the hook for?
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.
He worked with the reporters about this story for six months, and a very bad article was produced. He probably feels a little betrayed
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]
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They're shooting themselves in the foot with all this.
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.
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.
I mean obviously it's totally predictable but at the same time very disturbing.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
http://www.vanityfair.com/news/business/2012/08/microsoft-lo...
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.
anyway I think we know how windows 8 turned out in the long run.
"Competitive" here meaning a salary and title as good or slightly better than your current job or next best offer.