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Comment by khnd | Hacker News Reader

wow. i wonder if bezos is going to address this.

I bet he will. He did last time when that article in NYT came out. He responded by sending an email which stated that Amazon will not tolerate such behavior, encouraged people to report to HR and instituted zero-tolerance policy for callousness.

Anyone know how many managers were terminated because of that.

EDIT: Found this example, who knows if it is true:

https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home/fired-for...

To be completely ridiculous (I already started this in another comment), let's imagine Amazon as sort of a tiny country with a Stalinist ruling party running it. Here are the similarities:

* Personality cult: Bezos = Stalin

* You sing praises to the great leader: the 14 leadership principles.

* Officially they have a zero-tolerance policy for harshness. But I bet if anyone complains to HR they get sent to Siberia (i.e. put on performance improvement plan) or shot (terminated).

* The top management is the Central Committee. They wield massive power. Officially it is a meritocracy but it is all about gaining favors with the ruling party.

* In the warehouses I hear they do these group exercises: Stalin loved public performances.

Anyone wanna add more?

Companies can be described as tiny islands of totalitarianism in a democratic world. Except now they are giant continents and it's the base democracy that's looking threatened.

Companies with a flat-like structure buck the trend a bit, but even they aren't run on purely democratic principles. I'd love to see a company built on democratic principles (either direct or representative democracy).

Hardly. According to Jeff, nothing is wrong and everything is for the best in his best of all possible worlds.

Read enough https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/ and it's a consistent picture though. Speaking as a Seattle local, I hear these sort of anecdotes all the time.

I recently got an email from an Amazon recruiter, who, for whatever reason, told me that their team is "largely working < 50 hours/week, in most cases".

The fact that they felt it important to mention this (and qualify it) definitely started me thinking...

The fact that he views less than 50 hours a week (ie less than ten hours a day... ten!) as somehow worth bragging about says even more.

I considered working at Pixar at one point, and spoke to their hiring department.

Curiously, they considered the salary they were offering you to be for 50 hours per week. This wasn't an upper limit; no, you were expected to do occasional overtime past 50. But 50 was the baseline.

I didn't follow through with the interview process. Screw that.

50 hours seems to be normal in some effects houses, which are increasingly operating like sweat shops. Weta Digital is also the same. And they strictly expect minimum 50 hours there.

Yup. Movies (and games) often have very hard deadlines and missing the release window can mean losing a fuck-ton of money. I remember working on a TV Christmas special once, and let's just say that letting the release slip to early January was Not An Option.

Companies have deadlines, sure, but that doesn't mean they need to routinely require overtime.

I mean, if all my recent projects required 10% overtime, I've got a bunch of options for my next project:

a. Hire 10% more staff

b. Increase my existing staff's efficiency by 10%

c. Reduce scheduling and rework inefficiencies by 10%

d. Quote 10% longer delivery times to customers

e. Promise customers 10% less

f. Start work 10% earlier.

g. Plan to make my employees work 10% overtime.

If my company was choosing option g every time, I'd expect my employees to quit for better jobs because planned overtime is a pretty big 'fuck you' from your employer.

Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is frankly beyond me.

> Why employees in the games industry put up with this sort of thing is frankly beyond me.

They typically don't, forever.

But there's an unending stream of fresh meat entering the game industry who will put up with anything to achieve their dreams of working on video games.

I've been lucky, in that I've done a lot of games, but haven't worked anywhere that routinely required overtime of me. The occasional project here or there would go south, or there would be a bad manager, but other than the last week or two of crunch to get a project finished, I've not done too badly.

So what you're saying is that despite Christmas coming on the same day every year for the last few hundred years, management still can't plan their way out of a wet paper bag. Yeah, not my problem, nor am I paid to make it my problem.

A: hey, that company sucks. B: but this company sucks too. we are good.

As one person remarked to me once, "when you hear that someone works at Amazon, ask them if they need a shoulder and a box of tissues".

Also as a Seattle local, all you have to do is ask around a little bit and these stories start crawling out. A few people have a good time, but that's not normative.

And this is in white collar, imagine how they treat blue collar in their warehouses, where the supply of new cheap labor is unlimited.

For those whose imagination is lacking: http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...

I read a bit of that site based on your link. It almost makes me feel like I was working at a different company.

I had a great manager. I had a wonderful time working there. My biggest problem was that I was too fast; I'd get things done too quickly and run out of things to do. This happened even when I would ask for more work.

Otherwise the people were great, the pay was amazing, and I did most of my work from home, coming into Seattle for a few days every month to connect with the team in person.

Some of that is quite distressing. I'm not sure I want to support a company who encourages sociopathic practices between employees.

My impression is that the Amazon.com is on the decline overall, with several problems (eg sketchy vendors selling fake products, usage of questionable courier services) diminishing the user experience.

The reports you read from Amazon employees vary wildly, but I do wonder if toxic work culture has contributed to the website's decline. Even if the problem is isolated at a department level, just simply Amazon being too big (and trying to do too many things) to effectively manage well strikes me as a red flag.

Doubt it, that nytimes article about their work culture spread everywhere but not much has changed.

People keep working there, so why would they change?

Edit: s/should/would/

Exactly. And other firms will adapt that working style. Why shouldn't they? Amazon gets away with it.

Maybe they would be more effective if they changed.

Actually a lot has changed since the NYT article (I don't know whether any of it is related to the article):

1. Much better parental leave

2. Easier to transfer internally (no longer need to wait 6 months, transfer can't be blocked by the current manager)

3. At least in my org, more transparent promotion process.

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