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Comment by mbreese | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

Are there unions active within Amazon?

They've been pretty good at squashing them.

http://time.com/956/how-amazon-crushed-the-union-movement/

Not in the US as far as I know.

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.

How did they make you sign something, in a situation where you were resigning (however they internally scored it)??

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'd use the word "induced" rather than "made" in that context.

Maybe offered to forgive relocation expenses he'd otherwise be on the hook for?

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.

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.

As they say, "never pick a fight with a man who buys ink by the barrel."

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.

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.

> I don't think this is one of those cases.

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 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...

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