By almost every account, Amazon is terrible place to work: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
This isn't the type of leader you want to be.
This isn't the type of leader you want to be.
As a current employee at Amazon, that article might as well be fiction as far as I can tell. It describes nothing like what I or any of my co-workers have ever experienced here. We chuckle about it, occasionally, making jokes about crying at our desk, etc. But seriously, that article does not describe the place where I work.
When the article came out, Jeff sent a response to the company that has subsequently been published online. In it he said, paraphrased, "I would quit if my work environment was what the NYT article described, and I'm sure any of you would, too. If you're here, and you're work environment is anything like what the article describes, please _tell me_ so we can fix it."
You've mentioned elsewhere that Amazon has among the worst employee retention in the industry, but that's a fact that I'd also dispute. I've seen articles like http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turno..., but as far as I can tell they're using median tenure as a proxy for employee retention. That's going to skew the results in any company that is hiring at a high rate. Imagine a hypothetical company that has gone from 50 to 100 employees in the past 12 months. Median tenure is only going to be less than 1 year at that company, regardless of whether or not anybody has quit. Amazon also hire lots of seasonal workers to handle shipping, customer support etc, which also very likely skews the results.
Glassdoor is filed with them too
I'm glad you are happy at your job. Many people disagree.
Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell? I don't.
Agreed that Glassdoor is an outrageously bad indicator about a company, taken in isolation.
> Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell?
Nobody is claiming that every single employee has a terrible life at Amazon. But new college grads who don't mind and/or mind but don't really believe better working conditions are possible can build most of what you referenced.
I have only anecdotal evidence, but the majority of ex Facebook, Apple, and Google employees I know say pretty balanced pro/con things about their former workplaces.
Of the six ex Amazon employees I know well enough to discuss this with, they universally decry the horrible work cultures they experienced there.
So, I'm glad you like your work culture, but I know I'd never even consider working at a Jeff Bezos company. Despite how awesome I thing Blue Origin is.
The counterargument is that of course the things which makes Amazon's work culture toxic to people are orthogonal to their success and not a cause of it. My former boss was very well aware that she could sometimes be downright mean and nasty to our staff, and I cringed every time she justified it by citing what people thought the same of Steve Jobs: While true, we can't avoid the fundamental problem of causal inference, and there is no saying that had Jeff been actively striving to make a more welcoming culture, or if Steve or my former boss were nice people, that they wouldn't have experienced even greater success.
They have terrible retention. One of the worst and in many years the absolute worst.
A few years back workers were passing out from working in 100 degree temps. They were disciplined for performance and instead of installing air conditioning, they lined up ambulances and paramedics to take falling bodies to the hospital. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...
This is grotesque.
For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.
This is pretty good rant from the technical\engineering side: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
There is no need to fetishize amazon and if amazon is your model I feel sorry for your employees.
Low skill, yes, low pay, God yes, seasonal - not usually. At least where I am, they aggressively hire for full time positions, and clearly intend for non-temporary employees to consider it as a career. Retention is poor because of the environment and the workload.
And theft. Apparently there's a lot of theft. But that's bound to happen when you surround people with expensive merchandise, work them like dogs and refuse to pay them a decent wage.
Having "success" be the metric is a very slippery slope.