I worked at Amazon when what we called the "Crying at desk" article[1] was published in the New York Times. The memorable moment from that article was an Amazon employee who said he had, at one point or another, witnessed every one of his teammates crying at their desk. For what it's worth, in my ~10 years at Amazon I saw only one person crying at their desk.

After the article came out, it actually had a big effect on our group. Our leaders talked to us about the article and about morale. We instituted a "happy hour" which basically ended the workday early (earlier than usual) on Fridays. We opened a little snack pit in our area with free food and drinks. We started doing irregular team building exercises.

This moment, with the NYT article, was actually the only time I recall seeing noticeable changes to our day to day work. Leaders came and went. Teams changed. But everything was more or less the same. Then, one day, this article comes out of nowhere. I didn't identify with it at all, our group was much more mild than anything the article talked about, and suddenly we were making all of these changes - almost instantly.

I liked and appreciated the changes but it always perplexed me why it took a story in the NYT to get them to come about. Either the NYT knows our internal morale better than our leaders did, and our leaders didn't react until they saw it in the NYT - or, the NYT didn't know our morale and our leaders overreacted based on third hand reporting about it.

It's very odd to me. I've seen people directly telling leadership that we are overworked, that schedules are impossible, that we need to work on group morale, etc - and it very obviously meant nothing to the leaders. You could almost see the words washing over them and leaving nothing behind and indeed, nothing ever came from complaints or feedback like that (so far as I could tell). And yet, if a NYT reporter writes a single article, instant and dramatic reaction.

All this is to say that whenever I see articles like this one, I have to wonder first, if the average Medium employee is going "That's weird, I didn't know there was a culture war going on here." And second, what the reaction to something like this article would be. Are the leaders at Medium going to start suddenly doing different stuff because of the "Techcrunch article"? Would it need to be from a media company with more cachet to make a difference?

1 - https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...