Letter to Amazon Board from Fired Ad Exec
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Let me let Kivin and any one else working for a company in on a little secret. HR is not your friend. HR is not there to protect you and your career. HR is there to protect the company AGAINST you.
To the extent that your goals and the company's do not conflict, HR can be helpful. (Need some help with your health insurance or your 401k? HR is awesome!)
But if you're going to HR about an issue that could be damaging to the company, HR will gladly listen to you sharing confidential information while quietly working with the leadership to build a case against you or protect themselves. If you're caught in a situation that could potentially lead to a legal dispute with the company (serious conflict with mgmt as seen here, discrimination, etc), make sure you document EVERYTHING, put as much in writing/email as possible and tread carefully before sharing too much info with HR. They won't be in your corner when shit hits the fan.
It was made abundantly clear that the goals of HR do not align with our notions of HR being champions for the workers.
I appreciate this sounds blindingly obvious and almost forehead slapping to anyone who hasn't been on the sharp end of this, but let me assure you that when you are on the sharp end, this will be driven home with fervour.
We are referred to a 'Resources' for a reason.
So I was curious if $NAME_WITHHELD and $NAME_ALSO_WITHHELD was the same company and looked into it. Took me one minute and apparently it was...
However, I do believe this is somewhat Hacker News worthy in that it serves as a cautionary tale. As someone who has been in the industry for 20 years, it's weird to think of myself as an old-timer who has been around the block, but a significant demographic of HN readership are very young and inexperienced graduates; it likely serves them well to be aware of these complex organizational issues and how they sometimes manifest.
The landing is also available on a vastly larger number of news sources, which dilutes the amount of focus it gets on any particular site. Upvotes are a proxy for the number of people paying attention to the story through HN, not the number of people paying attention that are on HN.
So you basically come here for the politics and get bored of the landing a probe on a comet kinds of things?
My experiences with HR:
- Often staffed by aggressive, yet very sociable and smiley people. They would nail you to a cross if the directors demanded it.
- Even a basic knowledge of labour laws is not a pre-requisite for a career in HR. That is because there is little regard for them by the C-levels.
- Try and avoid them. Do not go running to HR. Sort it out yourself or work it out with your boss. If the problem is your boss, it's likely that they're much friendlier with HR and treated with much more respect than you. If you do go to HR, think hard about how you are respected and viewed at the company.
This is the surprising thing to me. My wife works in HR, but is also an attorney and her boss and boss's boss are also attorneys. They run their department substantially more in line with federal and state laws than just about any other I've encountered. When we're talking with friends and other people who work in HR, she usually later tells me everything they're doing wrong and it's interesting how far off-base many companies are.
Of course I've been in situations where HR don't know the laws and others where they chose to ignore them or denied their existence.
When it comes to saving money, HR departments educate themselves rather well in regards to the law.
Look, I'm not hopelessly naïve (most of the time) and understand very well about standing up to what's right, but there's a way to do that without acting like this. Even if the person you're dealing with is a sociopath, even if they're terrible human beings, there are ways around them that don't rely to threats, real or implied.
Negotiation takes a lot of nuances, verbal and physical, but you can achieve a lot diplomatically without being intimidating physically.
I understand where you're coming from, but I disagree completely.
Edit: Also, I didn't downvote you because what you brought up was still interesting and allowed me to voice my opinion.
That said, some people can only think in terms of who can kick who's ass - for them might IS right. The stupid ones become muggers and extortionists, the smart ones get a system (legal, corporate, etc) to fight their battles for them.
I see no moral problem with presenting them with a simplified model of their worldview, it's their choice, I am just showing that I am willing to make it manifest.
Like I said, take with a grain of salt.
Also, this is why labor still organizes in the US, even if organization is down substantially over what it used to be.
And yes, if the workers had pursued legal action, I think they would have had a case, but these people were somewhere around lower middle class or poverty level and they were very afraid of losing their jobs. Knowing them, and others who are in similar situations, I completely understand and sympathize. When you're treated like crap, but given the illusion that you're respected and needed, you'll convince yourself that everything is "good enough." I myself did it for many years.
This is where a little bit of knowledge is very dangerous. Companies read a small part of the laws and think it's very simple to reclassify hourly employees to salaried employees. It's not.
Id be the good cop and my old mate Pat Mulligan who's Industrial relations for the post office could be the bad/cop legal muscle.
Have you ever, for example, had a contract change forced upon you, benefits taken away/downgraded, had long-time overtime policies changed, experience blatant discrimination? It's been my experience in cases such as those, you find out who HR works for.
I have less than great experiences with HR as well, sure, but I don't agree that it's as horrible as many here describe it.
A company trying that in scandinavia would be committing suicide, they'd get smashed by their union reps and would get shunned by other companies (Nordics have a labor model similar to germany, cooperative and regulated by collective bargaining agreement at multiple levels, generally starting at the "economic sector" level and filtering down. A company trying to break labor agreements which others have to follow in such a way would be seen very badly)
This might be a US-centric view. In the UK if you don't know employment law you're no use as an HR professional. Your line managers almost certainly don't so HR are often the only people who do.
I agree with your statement but I do not think it disagrees with mine. Perhaps I should have said "for a job in HR".
It turned out, as it often does, to be a blessing. And it absolutely taught me the role of HR.
Usually they wind up mangling the staffing requirements provided by the managers, farming applicant discovery out to headhunters, cutting corners on benefits to boost profits, and put new hires and their target teams through byzantine processes.
My wife is an attorney who works in HR and labor relations. HR existing to protect the company was one of the first things she learned in either an HR class or employment law class.
Golden words and everyone especially new joinees need to understand.
HR is a purely political entity within most companies.
you silly Americans :)
HR employees can be fired, hence are under pressure, hence are on the side of the company. Works council members in developed nations are protected, cannot be fired on a whim and get fully paid while fighting for you.
As a European working in the US it feels like time travel when it comes to work, health, banking. Just had a discussion about why Google Health has failed - while Austrian citizens already enjoy an electronic health record, tracking their medication across doctors.
So many patriots here will defend the US as the greatest country, no matter what - but actively oppose the very fabric of this nation, the government, with its rules and regulations to protect the people. Very hard to wrap my head around this.
http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2m3avv/i_am_mike_rowe_...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Jackson_(gangster)
It was partially sarcastic, partially not. In 2014, its about as relevant as complaining about links between the Mafia & Unions. They used to be connected in places but it was relatively small scale (e.g. local) and not on the scale people like the parent claimed.
Is that the founding principles you mean? Because George Washington had nothing good to say about them after having tried them during his terms in office.
But over many years through a combination of Supreme Court decisions, legislation, and executive decisions, authority has become more concentrated in the hands of the Federal government than in the state/local government, or left to the individual.
That's not to say that it's all bad - civil rights, for example was a hugely important movement only made possible by moving some power away from the states. But to deny that it has happened isn't right either.
No, I was not referring to the Articles of Confederation. I was instead referring to the system of limited government defined by the Constitution.
(the tone of this post has been set by the federalist and anti-federalist pamphlets that lead up to the Constitutional convention, some words have been changed for clarity)
The concept of the "American people" predates the current American government. It will survive the current American government (plenty of developed or developing countries have had multiple governments in the past century, without interrupting the notion of that country as a group of people. In the more distant past, consider France. France remained a country of the French, despite several dramatic changes in the nature of French government in the past 300 years). The people are the "fabric of America", not the government that the people have created. That government is just an imperfect tool used by the people.
That's the idea anyway.
And if you understand why Austrian citizens' tracking doesn't extend across all of the EU, maybe you'll also understand why it doesn't happen across the US.
What feels like time travel is going to Europe and having to use cash everywhere in Portugal because cards are so rarely accepted outside of big chains. Felt very backwards.
Trying to insinuate that the degree of differentiation between states is the same as between Europe countries is utter absurdity. Clearly, trying to track healthcare across different governments with different languages and different cultures is much harder than trying to track healthcare across different states with the same language, the same national government, and a very similar culture.
While CC companies have no means to jail you, locking down your credit card access in a mostly cash-less world can be a real pain - and unlike governments, they have no (somewhat) independent appeals process.
As a manager, I'm frequently helping the personnel on my team work to overcome the barriers that HR erects in their way. HR seems to just have an innate love for policies, the more the better. Even when those policies do nothing to protect the company or the employee, and actively interfere with our efficiency, HR will stick to them. I think it's just because having to back off a silly policy makes the other policies appear weaker.
So I see that employment law in the USA makes HR specialists important in a company of any size, but that doesn't mean that they very much improve things beyond that domain.
I know people that say that about their IT departments. Or legal. Or marketing. Sales.
I know a lot of very high performing HR teams. The best growth companies in SF/SV have amazing HR teams. They're responsible for a whole lot more than your 401k.
If you're in an org where X is not your friend - then you're probably in a large, politicized organization. Best advice is to either accept that and adapt, or get out and find somewhere that fits your ethos.
A great HR team?
Showing up on your first day and having everything you need. A laptop that does what it needs, a pass, someone to induct you, materials that get you started. Making you feel welcome. Being productive and part of the team. Sure, your manager and team are part of that, but HR facilities this (In most cases, teams are woeful at doing this).
A great office environment. Making sure people have the right skills. And not just technical - managerial skills and support. Encouraging teams and cross-functional discussion.
Coaching hiring managers on the best ways to interview. Making sure people are greeted properly. Interviews are kept. Presenting an employee brand that makes people want to work at the company.
Having a performance review system that doesn't suck and gives people the feedback they need to get better. Sure, people hate then, but people also crave feedback.
An office environment that suits the culture and makes people productive. Making sure people are getting the emotional support they need.
Ever had a co-worker who's depressed, suicidal? Someone that has committed suicide. Or a death in the company? Someone that has a family tragedy? Organizing counseling for the team? HR steps up. It's easy to brush over these things until they happen. You appreciate a professional when it does.
Ever needed someone walked off the premises because they are threatening? Sexual harassment? Health and safety violations. Easy to say, meh, these aren't important – but, no, they are. Blocked fire exits kill people. Toxic cultures sink companies.
.. And yes. Making sure people get paid. That the health insurance works.
There are plenty of examples where this doesn't work. There are plenty of sucky implementations. Performance reviews generally suck. But I can assure that the growth tech companies wanting to kick goals are getting these things right.
http://www.amazon.com/Corporate-Confidential-Secrets-Company...
A few takeaways.
1. Performance improvement plans are not for performance improvement. They are for firing employees. Management already formed an irreversible negative view. It is too late.
2. You cannot win a case against the company. Because a) companies have more resources and b) even if you do win then other companies will mark you as a troublemaker. Getting hired is going to get a lot harder.
3. If you insist on fighting then do document everything. Supposedly you need a few months of notes. In other words, being called a slur once or twice does not make a hostile work environment. If HR is unaware then the company is not liable, but if you share your notes then you won't win the case anyway. There are a few narrow forms of discrimination that are claimable but the best option is to keep your head down and find a new job.
4. Do not document anything on company software or networks. My friend got to learn what Data Loss prevention software really did.
5. HR has zero legal obligation to keep your secrets. Their job is to identify threats to the company. They literally get paid to share your secrets.
Bonus anectode: I went to HR and asked "Are you legally required to keep things I tell you confidential? For example, if I tell you I want to leave then will you tell my boss?"
Her answer to my second question was no, but guess what my boss and I talked about the next day!
"You're screwed"
1) Very few of us suffer from the legal definition of discrimination. (Being mistaken for the secretary sucks but it's not illegal.) The book gives us realistic options.
2) Most of the time we just deal with an unfavorable boss or upper management. The book gives more actionable options there.
This. If you're ever suing a company for a grievance, make sure the potential winnings are enough for you never to work for another company again. It's illegal but you will be black listed.
This isn't really true. Most businesses don't do thorough background checks and the frequency of people claiming fake degrees w/o getting caught is proof of that.
I've known two people who successfully sued their employer. One had no trouble getting a job after that. It was the second suit that they lost that caused their issues (they looked like they were paranoid and had mental issues based on the company's successful defense). Even tho they are a friend of my parents, my parents and I both agree that they weren't acting all there at the time and that likely came across in interviews.
The other one only had trouble because the area was so small it was literally the only member of that industry within 300 miles. No one wanted to pay for relocation for non-management positions during a recession. Once they relocated with their own money, they had no issues.
I've never heard of an instance of someone being "blacklisted" outside of a failed lawsuit where they were shown to be deceptive and/or mentally unstable.
EDIT: do want to add a hostile work environment can wear down any mentally robust person.
That depends more on how well the hiring decision makers at the companies you apply to network. Even in a large metro area like Los Angeles chances are that if you are in management at a software company you will have a second degree connection with someone at an applicant's previous employer. You might not get blacklisted from "software," but you might be blacklisted from companies funded by a particular VC firm, or where managers attend the same CTO meetups, etc.
Answering unsolicited reference requests is supposed to be an invitation to defamation lawsuits, but in my experience it's the norm and not the exception.
I know you say that was her answer to the second question, but the way you frame your quote it looks like you asked them consecutively before a response from her in-between. As they say, the devil is in the details.
While this ends up mostly true in practice, I have known people who were able to turn things around after being put on a PIP.
> You cannot win a case against the company. Because a) companies have more resources and b) even if you do win then other companies will mark you as a troublemaker. Getting hired is going to get a lot harder.
There is a flip side to this. The company wants to ensure it has a water tight case against you, to ensure the complaints are dismissed before going to court. Otherwise, if there is any merit to your complaint, despite the company having more resources than you, they do not wish to be tied up in legal entanglements. This is why HR and Management document everything heavily.
I don't have the source handy, but in the US workplace legal disputes is the number one costs to companies.
You're really going to have to qualify that somehow. It can't possibly be close to true in that form.
I'm one!
It took a few hours of introspection but I applied a new focus and drive to aligning my personal goals with the company's goals. Have not looked back since.
As for winning cases and payout sums: your anecdotal data point is your sister. My source is the EEOC. Each field offices investigates hundreds of claims per year but only a few are accepted. The odds of an individual claim being winnable is small.
Winning half a million dollars also sounds made up. According to the legal award limits it is not possible. Then again IANAL.
In my experience it's not quite so clear cut.
When you are put on a PIP the company has decided what outcome it is seeking, and you have little-to-no control over that, but it might not be planning to fire you.
I've see all three of the following:
1. You are being "managed out". You are expected to resign, or the company will document enough performance issues to fire you. You will not win.
2. The company wants to make you conform to their expectations. They've done a cost-benefit analysis and decided that "fixing you" is going to be cheaper than getting rid of you and hiring in someone else with the necessary skills. This usually happens when you have a history of good performance and they just want you to "return to prior performance levels". However, if you don't conform to their expectations you will be fired.
3. Your job is safe, but you did something that embarrassed someone senior and they want to remind you that they have the power and such behaviour will not be tolerated. The PIP is all for show - so that you don't forget your place.
- PIPs are definitely the tool you use when you want to fire someone, but they're also the tool you want to use to get someone's attention when all else has failed. I had to give a PIP to an employee who just could not get his head in the game. I had absolutely no desire to fire him.
- I have definitely witnessed HR stand up to managers and push back on plans to fire employees who haven't had adequate time to fix their conduct and turn things around. You can argue that they're protecting the company from wrongful termination liability, but I know at least one of the HRfolk involved and that was definitely not his primary motivation.
I get thinking that big corporations are only driven by profits and are therefore always going to be selfish/evil (though I don't really believe it) but I don't get thinking that blanket statements/accusations about individual people in these organizations could possibly be true. There are well-meaning HRpeople in the world, and managers who mean what they say. Maybe not as many as there should be, but still lots.
As just about any manager on here will tell you, this is complete bunk. Being on a performance improvement plan obviously isn't good, but I've had many people complete their plan successfully, and not only that, but go on to long & successful careers.
Even in the corner cases where the manager/HR was acting in good faith, the employee will be under the thumb of his superiors; even if someone manages to survive intact the PIP will be a mark on someone's record they can do without. It's something that will come with every promotion discussion, transfer, etc.
It's quite rare for anything good to come of doubling down, for the employee at least.
I suppose it makes me a cynical person but my view is that unless I have a pre-existing personal relationship, I assume that anybody in management views their employees as tools to use for their own political ambitions within the company, whether they need a scapegoat to cover their own incompetence or a proxy to claim glory and credit for jobs well done.
Maybe it's just a European thing but I've seen more HR professionals despair at the actions of managers than staff. Yes, they may help him/her get rid of you but what they're really terrified of is his ill advised actions which open the company up to a massive liability.
Its a power-balance thing. Managers have more power vis-a-vis HR staff than line staff do, thus are more likely to be able to get away with persisting in things that HR staff doesn't like. So, more likely a source of HR staff "despair".
Employees -- unless backed by a manager -- are more likely to meekly acquiesce.
My personal view from my interactions with HR (as a manager looking at redundancy, poor performance, sickness) is that they're best viewed as the Employment Law team.
Germany certainly hasn't - when you win, you typically get your legal fees and damages (as in: what the court decided you _actually_ lost). So there isn't _that_ much of a liability - the main concern for companies is probably that they'll have to stop mistreating their other employees, too.
OTOH, there's a separate branch of jurisdiction especially for employment related issues which is generally employee friendly and for the employee a lawsuit is free and doesn't require legal representation on the lowest level.
My experience is that it can be invaluable to make personal connections with one or more management-type folks outside of your team. This is sometimes called a "mentor," although I think that term is pretty cliche at this point, and puts too much pressure on the relationship.
The point is to have someone a bit more versed in the internal politics, with whom you can have informal conversations before doing anything dramatic--like going to HR or emailing your boss's boss's boss.
They can help you predict the likely outcomes of those actions. And they might also be able to end-run around the "bad layer" in your management. For example, they might be able to go to another senior person and informally pass along the word that a key issue is not being addressed...without naming names.
How to build those relationships? Take people out to lunch or coffee. Have a conversation. Ask them how they got to where they are, what they wish they'd known earlier, etc. Often you can figure out pretty quickly whether you get along with them or not.
HR exists to defend against litigation and conspiring with Kivin's manager worked directly against that purpose. Their actions resulted in a fat public lawsuit where winning won't matter. The findings related to the ethics of Amazon's ad platform are damning, their corporate customers would love to recoup misappropriated advertising dollars with their army of attorneys on retainer.
This way, HR would more likely be incentivized to work for both employee and employer (because they are audited themselves), except in extreme corrupt cases. HR practice would also become a lot better, as it became more competitive and profitable. People with more knowledge of labor law and history would thrive. Yes, there would still be stooges working in these outside HR firms, but at least they would stooge for the real laws in place rather than corporate policies.
Also the cases you cite, they're go-between firms where the power relationship is obvious. Big government tells smaller corp to do x, or big credit card firm tells smaller firm to do y. For employee's, the power relationship isn't there unless you have unions, and union organizations would be ones you would go to in these cases.
Right.
Being a friend, advocate and protector is the role of a professional union.
Unfortunately, the labor in tech seems convinced that each is better off on his or her own despite being up against a cartel of behemoths [1].
1: http://pando.com/2014/03/22/revealed-apple-and-googles-wage-...
I learned this one the hard way myself. The change wasn't motivated by any grief or frustration, I was simply looking for career growth since my role wasn't offering me any new opportunities. Instead of what I thought would happen, my boss identifying I could offer the company more in that new role, he was offended I'd ask to change teams and retaliated. I ultimately left the organization soon after because he had made it an absolute nightmare.
> HR is not your friend. HR is not there to protect you and your career. HR is there to protect the company AGAINST you.
This was very shocking to me to realize early on in my career, I'd always heard that HR was on my team. I quickly learned that they're just there to keep the assembly line happy and functioning.
The only people who feel the need to tell you how on your team they are would be the ones that are not on your team at all, and expect to get some kind of benefit for the people whose team they are actually on by convincing you otherwise. I.E. by screwing you over.
Once you understand it, it can also help explain some of the staffing and personalities you will encounter in HR departments.
P.S. I'll add that, in my experience, this extends to most performance reviews. Their primary function is to reenforce top-down policy and decisions. They are not really, primarily, about assessing you and planning (real) improvements. They are about laying the paperwork for whatever Management decides.
Perhaps this sounds overly cynical. And for favored employees, these processes may align more with their own interests. Even then, favored one year may not extend to the next year.
> Amazon gave me their final offer: 4 weeks of severance for 18 months of adhering to the broad non-compete that would not allow me to earn a living in my field, and further explained that if I didn't accept their final offer, Amazon would sue me for tens of thousands of dollars in relocation expenses.
Employee complained, was fired, Amazon insists s/he can't work for another 1 1/2 years (I know that's legal in the US, but it's still asshole-ish behaviour).
> What we found was that there were tens of thousands of Kindle e-ink owners, the vast majority who hadn’t even seen the promotion details (as customers had to click on the ad to see the details), were qualifying for the $10 Gift card because every day, there are thousands of customers who own a Kindle and already have Discover set as their 1-click default card, that buy a digital good on Amazon in the ordinary course of their activity.
> Meanwhile the promotion continued to run and within a few more days we had gone over the $500,000 budget.
Discover Card pays $500 000 for a campaign that gives $10 to each user who switches default 1-click card to Discover. Amazon gives $10 mostly to users who already have Discover as default. Munira, the manager, lies to Discover about that.
> Munira was forced to admit under oath in deposition [...] that she falsified her educational record on her resume to Amazon and all her previous employers - claiming to have earned a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford when in fact she earned no degrees at all.
Munira is a liar/cheater, and still employed at Amazon.
"Munira was forced to admit under oath in deposition, several months after my termination, that she falsified her educational record on her resume to Amazon and all her previous employers - claiming to have earned a Bachelors and Masters degree in Computer Science from Stanford when in fact she earned no degrees at all."
"And in fact, even after finding out about Munira’s lies regarding her educational background and other issues I raised before my termination, Jeff Blackburn represented in his deposition that Munira was given a promotion, even though according to Amazon’s policies, falsification of personnel records is a Tier 1 offense likely resulting in immediate termination"
The letter reads awesomely, totally like a good book.
> At the end of the day. You should do what you need to do to maximize free cash flow for the device. Do what you need to do to make more money
Well, yes, we assume you would be aware that she hadn't yet completed a course (her Masters) she couldn't enroll in yet because she had not completed her undergraduate.
This is something my step-daughter could understand, especially with her education as a lawyer (not yet completed, as she is seven years old).
Doxing is when you find very personal information, such as place of residence. In can involve information about the workspace, Linked-in profile or so forth - but only in the case that the victim is operating under a pseudonym and have not disclosed their true identity themselves.
What we are doing here is calling someone out on their bullshit in a public profile.
Honestly, calling this doxing is pretty accurate. Before that user posted her LinkedIn profile, she was an anonymous figure in this dispute which, frankly, was all that was relevant to HN. Now, through LinkedIn, she will potentially receive hate mail and, with an identifying image, is more likely to be pinpointed on other platforms which may reveal more personal information about her.
People should remember that there is a lot about this situation that they don't know. This man who was fired from Amazon may have a legitimate grievance and he may not. Things might look one way when described on paper, but could have seemed quite different in real life. We could be (and probably are) missing out on a lot of important details that only eye-witnesses could be aware of.
How was she anonymous when she was named in the article? Her LinkedIn profile is literally the first thing that comes up if you google her.
Not really. The company can add any stupid clause it wants to the contract, but in the vast majority of states which allow NCA at all for employees they're heavily restricted in time and space, and must not prevent employees from earning a living.
In Washington State, NCAs are enforceable if they're "validly formed and reasonable" (Racine v. Bender), although a big issue there is you have to go to court to see whether this specific NCA is enforceable or not. I would guess it's not (because it's completely unreasonable), and Amazon's behaviour is not entirely dissimilar to SLAPP.
edit: in fact, Amazon was essentially told to fuck off in what seems to be a different NCA case: http://www.lexology.com/library/detail.aspx?g=a5cde10f-9ca3-...
> When Amazon learned that Mr. Powers joined Google, it first engaged in discussions with Google about Mr. Powers' employment. Following those discussions, Amazon sought injunctive relief through a Washington state court. After Mr. Powers successfully removed the case to a Federal District Court in Washington, Amazon moved for a preliminary injunction against Mr. Powers to enforce the non-compete restrictions.
> The court denied most of Amazon's requests, and upheld the non-compete restriction only to the extent that it prohibited Mr. Powers, for a period of 9 months from the date he last had access to Amazon confidential information, from servicing any customer as to which he had obtained confidential information* during his employment at Amazon (this restriction was essentially the same restriction as the one Mr. Power voluntarily agreed to upon joining Google).
> […]
> With respect to the validity of the non-compete restrictions, the court next determined that the restrictions were enforceable only to the extent that they sought to prevent Mr. Powers from working with his former Amazon customers. The court also determined, however, that Amazon's attempt to uphold the more general "worldwide" ban against competition — i.e., not tied to specific customers — was unenforceable because it was unreasonable and Amazon failed to show how such a restriction was necessary to protect its business.
(emphasis mine)
To me the entire requirement of 'consideration' falls flat on its face where they've essentially webbed a case of ruining someone's livelihood by preventing them from finding work after termination all the while giving a plainly inadequate severance.
That's not the best part. The best part is that somebody who directly reported to Jeff Bezos essentially told the team to go ahead and keep lying to the customer in order to "maximize free cash flow for the device". Which isn't something you can spin into yet another "rogue employee" case in which "we'll review our policies".
The division head asked something like "are we doing the right thing here?", and also said something like "we need to make money".
From the transcript provided it sounded like he didn't have the complete information about how they were screwing Discovery over: it sounded more like he was told that the campaign was costing Discovery more than Discovery had expected, but the plan was for Amazon to tell Discovery that they wanted to use money Discovery had already budgeted (and spent?) with Amazon but hadn't received a complete campaign for.
I've seen that kind of deal done before, and there isn't anything wrong with it provided both parties are transparent about it.
That's not the message I get from "At the end of the day, you should do what you need to do to maximize free cash flow for the device." The priorities are clear.
Because, you know, that could happen... 'some day'.
Whenever you think your boss is telling you to do something wrong, the best possible thing you can do is to write them a letter (and keep a copy) explaining how you think it's wrong, and that you want them to confirm that they want you to do it. If they refuse to confirm it, don't do it. People do actually have free will, you know.
You forgot the part where, after all that is said he goes "wink, wink".
Right -- just like they have the "free will" to decide to keep their jobs (and stay on the fast track). From the context, it's pretty darned clear what JB expected his subordinates to "freely decide" in this case.
I'm still a little disturbed as to why I'm seeing her dragged through the mud on a top link on HN. We aren't a gossip site, so why is this "confidential" letter being shared amongst the community at this time? What context am I missing?
The use of Munira's real name isn't even necessary. S/he is just the hand of the corporation. It valuable for each HN reader to think about who Munira might be in their work place, and defend themselves appropriately.
I know this was Washington, and I'm unfamiliar with the laws there, but I know in California it's nearly impossible to enforce a non-compete clause. [Here's a good read on the topic.](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/09/business/noncompete-clause...)
Actually, they can put in such a clause. There's a difference between "unenforceable" and "illegal". There's nothing to prevent Amazon from including such a clause in the contract, even if it is clearly unenforceable. The worst case scenario, from Amazon's perspective, is that a court simply rules that the clause is unenforceable (as happened in the example masklinn gave https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8600939 ).
The best case scenario is that Amazon can frighten an ex-employee with the threat of legal action if he accepts a job with a competitor. Even if the ex-employee knows that a court will likely rule the clause is unenforceable, he has to decide whether he wants to go to the hassle and expense of fighting Amazon in court.
Amazon could also use the clause as a pretext to dissuade potential employers from hiring the ex-employee. Again, while the potential employer might realise that the clause is unenforceable, they have to decide whether they want to take the risk of hiring someone who will then be sued by Amazon (while it may not affect the potential employer directly, the new employee will inevitably be distracted by the court case).
I would never recommend that anyone sign an employment contract with a non-compete clause, even if it's clearly unenforceable. Even setting aside the potential legal hassle if it goes to court, you want to think about why they've included such a clause in the contract. Either they don't realise that it's unenforceable (in which case you have to question how competent they are), or they know it's unenforceable but don't care (which suggests that they plan to use it to frighten/bully you, as described above).
Recently, I turned down a job because the company included a clause in the employment contract under which I would have been prevented from engaging in "any activity" that competed with the company (or its related companies), anywhere in the world, for two years after I left the company. In the relevant legal jurisdiction (Switzerland), non-compete clauses are legal but "must be appropriately restricted with regard to place, time and scope such that it does not unfairly compromise the employee’s future economic activity". This one clearly wasn't. Effectively, it would have prevented me from working in banking or fintech, which is pretty much all that I've done for the last 14 years. I consulted an employment lawyer, who confirmed that it would definitely be thrown out if it ever went to court, so I pushed back.
I have zero problem with clauses that prohibit me from poaching clients or hiring other employees but if a company's hiring me for my expertise and experience that I've gained before going to work for them, I don't think it's reasonable for them to try to prevent me from using that same expertise and experience at another company if I leave them.
In the end, they refused to remove or alter the clause, so I turned down the job.
I still think it's outrageous.
One of my friends left a major hedge fund with a two year non-compete and hold me he would never even think of crossing their lawyers as they would stop at nothing to ruin his life as an example to others. The law real only helps you if you have the resources to use it.
And the NCC may still be done away with for being "unreasonable" e.g. it can not cover the whole country and prevent the former employee from working in the field.
[1] http://cgi.stanford.edu/group/mfp/cgi-bin/mfpalumni/may_view...
Actually, no. This is the key twist that changes the whole picture. It is only his editorializing that claims the point of the campaign was to convert 1-click defaults. But he is the only one claiming that. He himself notes that the campaign was not set up that way. It was set up to promote Discover card by rewarding all 1-click usage. Furthermore the response from Amazon notes that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with Discover and Discover was cool with continuing, provided it was narrowed to Fire users and capped at the original budget. [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin...
And who claims otherwise? From the article you referenced:
> Business Insider reached out to Amazon and Discover, neither commented.
I, personally, find it quite hard to believe that Discover would be gifting users $10 without any apparent benefit, not even branding! Also, if what you're saying is true, why hasn't Amazon shared the detailed statistics with Discover? Why have all his superiors acted in such shady ways (judging from the emails)?
Also, if anyone is doing shitty editorializing, its BI:
> He decides to stay home sick for the rest of the week
Because people decide to get sick, right.
I don't really see a point in providing BI as a reference, as it has no other sources than the original source.
There is of course some promotional benefit to that, and it's not unusual in the card industry. While some card benefits are conditionally offered to new signups (e.g. promo APR), most are offered to the entire class (e.g. cashback rewards).
The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card. The reason the good had to be digital is because to buy a digital good you need to use your 1-click default card, and Discover’s primary objective for this promotion was to get users who had a Discover card, to make it their 1-click default so Discover could be the card of choice for holiday shopping over the course of the fourth quarter. That was the only way Discover could justify spending $10 when someone ordered a $1 .mp3 music file.
She ended sleeping with him and true to his word he got her the full time position. About a month later I found out about the whole thing and broke up with her.
I submitted the transcripts of their conversations to HR. They conducted an investigation and he admitted to everything. The guy got to keep his job. They transferred him to another group and wanted her to sign a statement saying that nothing improper happened. They strongly suggested that her full time offer might be rescinded is she didn't sign the statement.
She signed and has been working there the past 6 months.
She worked there as an intern. She had not applied for a job.
He told her he'd make sure she'd GET an offer if she slept with him, not that she would have to do so to get a job.
She then did so, and hid it from her (ex partner). She also agreed that "nothing improper" happened (which is problematic for numerous reasons, and not without the threat of authority).
You're splitting hairs. From the point of view of the law, it was a quid-pro-quo specifying preferential consideration in matters of employment (or promotion) in exchange for sex. That's what matters.
She then did so, and hid it from her (ex partner).
Completely irrelevant to the sexual harassment issue.
She also agreed that "nothing improper" happened (which is problematic for numerous reasons, and not without the threat of authority).
She signed a statement, under duress (and implicit threat of termination) about the subjective import of what happened. Which in no way changes or diminishes the physical reality of actually did happen. Which for Amazon, appears to be quite damning on its own merits. Quite damning, indeed.
/kidding
I feel there may be more to the story, especially as you are her ex and I feel we should all take this with a grain of salt....
This is shitty, but there is a certain logic. By signing the statement, she repudiated the narrative by which she had earned her position by having sex. If she had not denied that, Amazon would have been employing someone who had a radically incorrect understanding of her duties as an employee.
These companies just won't stop behaving badly until their behavior gets vividly exposed often enough for them to start thinking twice. In the case of sexual harassment, the more incontrovertibly damning material that comes out (provided it is done with the express consent of the victims), the better.
Discover Card, which spends ~$15M/yr advertising with Amazon, wanted to give a $10 gift card to Kindle users that changed their default Amazon 1-Click purchase settings to use a Discover card. Instead, Amazon gave the gift cards to everyone that used Discover for a 1-click digital purchase, the vast majority of whom already had Discover as their default 1-Click purchase card. Discover's $500K budget was predictably drained in rapid fashion, and they barely got any of the actions they had agreed to pay for. The author of this letter was encouraged to hide this fact, pitch it as an overwhelming success of the campaign, and to ask Discover to expand the budget. He was fired after complaining about being uncomfortable with participating in obvious fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, and is now suing Amazon.
The failures here occurred in every department. First, at a fundamental technical level, I don't understand how this could happen in the first place if it wasn't intentional. This was a simple CPA campaign. When someone changed their default card to Discover, they got a gift card. So it begins with their "ad execution team". Second, the moment the problem was discovered, they should have simply credited the campaign such that they were only charged for the actions they agreed and intended to pay for. Third, any employee actively involved in encouraging fraud, let alone fraud against their 2nd largest advertiser, should be fired. Their engineering, marketing, legal, and HR teams all failed miserably on this one.
I don't envision myself ever having a need to run a CPA campaign through Amazon, but based on this I would stay away from them as much as possible. They had to have multiple internal discussions about whether or not they should commit a crime against a multi-million dollar advertiser. That's certainly enough to scare me away.
Part 1 (How I made my manager hate me): I insisted that we have better performance and everyone told me to f* off, so I went above my manager and now she hates me. (This is reasonable of her)
Par 2 She asks me to commit a crime and I raise it with HR, etc.
"The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card."
Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employee-lawsuit-kivin...
> Amazon in its reply noted that they reviewed the progress of the campaign with the customer and Discover agreed to proceed with some minor adjustments and capped to the original budget.
He appears to be alleging that Discover made this decision based upon false or very creatively spun data. During a meeting about this, a Senior VP said: "Are we hiding something? This doesn't feel right". The reply was "In this case we're hiding that it doesn't perform well". Instead of showing them that their $500,000 got them ~100 additional purchases made with Discover cards (an absurd CPA of $5,000), someone suggested that "We can show indexed sales (on device + on site) vs. a control group that didn't see the ad". That sounds intentionally deceitful (not to mention quite evil). They tried to hide the ill effects of their colossal mistakes.
> "The promotion was structured in a way where anyone with a Kindle, who used their Discover card to buy a digital good (e.g. mp3 or movie), would get a $10 Amazon Gift Card."
That's how it worked in practice obviously, but solely based upon his letter, it appears that this was not Discover's intention. Some of the emails he quoted in his letter also appear to be pretty damning evidence that they knew that this was wrong, and essentially didn't care.
I seems at very least Amazon were scared that Discover could insist that it has been implemented wrong if all the facts were laid out on the table.
The best interpretation you can put on this is that Discover may have failed to be sufficiently specific in the terms of its ad buy and that Amazon misinterpreted this lack of specificity to mean that Discover wanted to give $10 to any Amazon customer using a Discover card as their 1-click option, rather than incentive customers who were not doing so to change that behavior.
Mind, I'm not commenting on the overall merits of Varghese's letter but on the likelihood that he accurately represented Discover's expectation.
The problem she was pissed off about was lack of visibility into the performance data of the program, not its structure. There is no mention of a problem with how it is structured; in fact, there is a reference to another promotion, "free holiday shipping", which very conceivably would be structured the same way. Offer a promo to Discover card users, promote Discover card without going so far as to tie it exclusively to conversions.
The Amazon's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program within its original budget. That really goes against the notion that Discover had a different impression about how it was supposed to operate.
There's explicit discussion of new vs existing defaulted Discover cards in her request for data, and a request for information on 'how [Discover] will be made good', which would not be meaningful if they did not consider any funds misallocated. In fact that's mentioned twice, the second time saying that they will still 'need to be made whole'. You don't ask to be made whole unless you've suffered some sort of economic loss, such as not getting what you thought you'd paid for.
Of course we can't draw conclusions on the basis of cherry-picked emails, but this one does clearly suggest that Discover felt itself to have been short-changed in some fashion besides a lack of analytics information.
there is a reference to another promotion, "free holiday shipping", which very conceivably would be structured the same way
Conceivably, but not necessarily, and even if it was structured the same way that doesn't mean Discover should have had any expectation about it. If was was in the habit of ordering apple pie from you and one day added an additional order for pumpkin pie, I would not be happy just to receive an additional apple pie - not because I had lost my taste for it, but because of the failure to fulfill my order for something different.
The Amazon's subsequent email, cited by BI, notes that they resolved this visibility problem with Discover and they approved continuing the program within its original budget.
That is itself a bone of contention - Varghese is suggesting Paul Kotas shares responsibility with Munira Rahemtulla for the whole situation and helped her obfuscate the issue. So without endorsing Vargheve's position, that email could be entirely consistent with it.
That's not really true. Cards run promotions like that all the time where the benefit is offered to all cardholders. One goal may be to drive adoption, but it also drives other goals like retention and brand value. It's false to assume that the only reason they'd be pissed about lack of data on campaign performance is that they had only the one specific campaign goal in mind.
There is absolutely nothing in there that states that by "made whole" Discover meant the campaign should solely target 1-click conversions. That is pure speculation and runs counter to all the email evidence.
The letter is said to be directed to you in confidence. It is not. It is openly published on scribd for all the world to see.
The letter is said to be written by an ex-executive of the company. It is not. Or, if it is, it is written in a style that has "lawyer-written" stamped all over it.
The person making the claims is saying he is doing this to uphold company values but is far from disinterested. If he was fired for whistleblowing, that is wrongful and he gets large damages. Otherwise, not. So, maybe it is sincere and maybe not. But who knows?
The person also waited two years to write this letter. Does this undercut its premise that its goal is to correct wrongdoing? Or was it now put out opportunistically to further some litigation goal instead? Again, who knows?
Ditto for a complaint being made just now to the Washington agency responsible for fraud. Why now and not earlier if the problems were serious and pressing?
Then too, the alleged victim (Discover Card) is hardly a naive consumer, knows how to defend itself, and had known enough about this to ask questions going as far back as 2012. Is there, then, less than meets the eye concerning the claims of its having been overtly cheated?
Everything stated in this letter may be true and damning as it appears. I don't know what happened, nor do I know the people involved. But I do know when something is framed insincerely and this letter is framed insincerely. It may all be true but its style and timing do not ring true.
This has to have another side to it, in my view, and it is wrong to take it as self-evidently true without hearing that other side. What we have now is only a one-sided story that is heavily slanted in its presentation.
Certainly if I were a board member to whom this was purportedly directed, I would be highly skeptical. I would assume instead that I was not even the intended audience for the letter. And I would probably be right.
Way to stand up for the little $145B company. Who, by the way, have an army of lawyers and PR professionals who write everything that comes out of the corporation. Regular employees are banned from speaking on behalf of the company.
Aren't you a lawyer? Are you the only lawyer who tells clients "go ahead and speak for yourself, it's not my place to help you word your thoughts effectively"?
Who, pray tell, do you think writes the "Letter from Jeff Bezos" that occasionally appears on the website?
The litigation goal, you may recall, is to compensate the aggrieved for losing his job over failure to join a criminal conspiracy.
So, that's what the document claims. 'grellas makes the point that this isn't just a normal letter, it's probably written by a lawyer and has legal implications. In this case, we have some very serious allegations within the context of a legal battle. The next step, which should clearly be within the legal system, is discovery/investigation. Saying "there must be another side to this" is pretty reasonable -- I'm not lawyer, but most courts allow both sides to speak before making up their mind.
That was true in the past, yes?
The implication here is that no one to whom this was addressed took effective action after receipt of it, so now it's all on public display.
Maybe a comment agree/disagree voting system could be run, in parallel with the upvote/downvote system?
Instead of posting comments like this, please just upvote and trust your fellow users. If you (or anyone) think a comment has been treated particularly unfairly, you're welcome to email us at hn@ycombinator.com.
Grellas' is raising the point that this letter concerns a two-year-old dispute between two gigantic American corporations, one of which is a credit card company, but frames itself as an urgent public policy concern.
You can believe that concern is irrelevant, but you can't pretend that it's something it's not.
You'd think a nerd message board would reward critical thinking. Instead, the replies to this comment all seem offended by the concept.
This, I know, is not a helpful addition to the thread, but oh well, I'm just as bad as everyone else here.
Seems quite helpful to me. Without this kind of thing it's hard to see at a glance which of the 542 comments (at time of writing) are worth reading
I mean it: go look, you won't find a single bad comment. It's spooky.
I hate Scribd.
Puts a different spin on it, doesn't it?
As others said, I already have a PDF reader, and unsurprisingly, it works better than Scribd.
Now that both Firefox and Chrome include built in PDF readers and we've also got other options like SumatraPDF, I see little value in Scribd any more.
I think it's got something to do with how it's a Y Combinator graduate.
That might not still happen.
Some years ago, while helping a relative out, I saw this first hand with a bunch of Joomla documentation that had been removed to behind its paywall.
(Not that I hadn't already reached this opinion, on a more general basis.)
P.S. I would welcome a non-Scribd link to the letter. I've reached the point where I refuse to run/use Scribd. The monetization is one thing; the horrible UI and my lack of trust in it is another and is the basis for this decision.
There's also weighing that against getting the content onto HN if scribd is the only place it is found.
[1] Android 4.2.2, Firefox Android 33.1, Opera Mini 7.6.1
> Scribd is "Hacker News" quality. They're one of the HN venture capital funded companies.
I agree with @nsomaru that it would be great to submit PDFs rather that Scribd links, especially since the HN guidelines say the original document should be submitted. On the other hand, I'm not sure if HN wants to bypass a YC-funded company.
Seriously, apps are great but 90% of the apps out there would be just fine as mobile websites.
The most interesting aspect to me, apart from the main plot, was how far detached from reality everyone is operating.
Someone discovers a fatal flaw (5 second latency) in a multi-million dollar ad campaign.
You'd think this is a no-brainer; file a bug with the engineering team and have this fixed, right?
Instead, at Amazon, it eventually escalates into someone desperately "asking for the contact information for the person that manages latency for amazon.com". That alone is the stuff that comedy TV shows are made of.
Stories like these make me feel real pity for the little engineers all the way down the food chain. The ones who had to implement and test this adserver. The ones who likely weren't happy at all with 5 second latencies either.
I wonder if their voices were squelched by management in the same way, or if there's just an established culture of resignation and nobody cares anymore.
This reads like it came from a dystopian MegaCorp sci-fi story. Is this for real?
They say that money doesn't change people, it just reveals who they are. More generally, circumstances will often allow someone to express who they really are.
PIPs aren't just used at Amazon to tie people down, it's also used as pre-firing. To my knowledge almost no one gets off a PIP after being put on one, and management will go out of their way to have you "fail" to accomplish to the terms of the Performance Improvement Plan, and thereby give legal cover for your firing.
I personally know someone who was the victim of this exact mechanism - one of the smartest people I've ever worked with and who has been well-liked everywhere else and even well-liked within the company.
PIPs are a disgusting, spineless tool used by disgusting, spineless people.
Side note but somewhat related: I've worked at a lot of companies, Amazon is the only one where I can't help but resist writing a snippy note when their recruiters come knocking. It would take a supernatural amount of force for me to consider working there ever again.
Sounds like HR to me.
He was a nice guy, but did not flourish, and his peers did not help at all. I remember one analyst berating the new guy because he asked the same questions over again, when this particular analyst asked me the same crap all the time. Very annoying and disingenuous. I complained to my lead, which was a mistake. I, a developer was tasked with helping the new business analyst, when his role was totally different than mine.
To the point; he was put on PIP and eventually let go, and I had a couple of bad reviews due my involvement. I switched groups soon after, then left the company. I had worked with my lead and manager for 5 years before that, I thought we all got along great. Little did I know how tenuous my good standing was, and how I endangered myself for standing up for someone else.
PIPs are often required by HR to get rid of even terrible employees. They suck, but it's a cover-your-ass tool so that the company has explicit proof the manager communicated problems with the person and tried to get them to change their behavior.
In most companies it's actually pretty difficult to fire someone unless they do something obviously illegal.
A Performance Improvement Plan is not the same thing as documenting an employee's misdeeds. Yes, you need to document to protect yourself legally, but what you don't need to do is put them on a rigged "plan" that is intentionally engineered to fail.
Collecting evidence to fire an employee is one thing - a PIP veers into manufacturing evidence to fire an employee.
It's because of stories like this that I'd never work at Amazon. They have a history of suing their own employees soon after parting ways.
Amazon ostensibly "supports" open source contributions, but all open source work (inside or outside of work time) must be approved by a committee that evaluates OSS projects to ensure they do not compete or conflict with Amazon.
In reality though, since nobody wants to be the one that signed off on an open source project that later becomes a pain or a competitor, the committee veers extremely conservative in approvals (read: they don't really approve much).
So the net result is that, as an Amazon employee, your ability to work on open source in your own time is severely diminished.
Among the specific questions:
- Under what circumstances would I be required to repay relocation assistance?
- Would a non-compete agreement be required?
- Does Amazon use an employee evaluation system similar to Microsoft's old "stack ranking"?
- What is the median employee tenure (a.k.a. how bad is the turnover rate)?
The first recruiter pleaded ignorance for some of my questions, so I helpfully provided him with some links to articles still available on-line from nationally-known business publications. These claimed (with references and fact-checking) that Amazon had the second-worst turnover of all companies where that statistic could be calculated, it does employ a variant of stack ranking, and that Amazon frequently pursued former employees for their relocation and NCA after leaving, even when it was Amazon's decision to fire them.
As I already knew all this, my goal was mostly to help convince that guy to stop being a recruiter for Amazon, and go take an easier job recruiting for someone else. I didn't exactly consider that the company would probably sue him for leaving, or maybe even fire him for not getting me to apply, then sue him for getting fired.
Always do your research on the prospective employer, kids.
> "- What is the median employee tenure (a.k.a. how bad is the turnover rate)?"
When I was there, strictly limited to engineering roles, 18 months.
Honestly, any vesting schedule that is non-linear is just a plain ripoff and should be laughed out of the room - or at the very least approached with extreme caution.
Munira has retaliated against others, and it's my understanding she has had "high" churn in her org over the years. Hence throwaway/AC.
For those who want to see the advertisement creatives, they are available here:
https://www.behance.net/gallery/5329673/Discover-Card-Concep...
Also, note that while the copy on the ads talk about "Receive a $10 gift card when you spend $20 on your discovery card", it was widely understood that the actual goal was to get customers to set their discover card to 1-click. This was the working assumption across the team.
You'll note in the description of the campaign, below, the excellent designer confirms this understanding:
"Their main objective was to get customers to change their default payment method on Amazon.com to Discover."
Amazon Payments privately objected since Discover cards cost more to process than other cards, and so they contended that the advertising campaign would be a net loss for the company since the $500k or so in ad spend would not be made up by the $1MM or so in increased merchant costs. Since Amazon Payments and Amazon Ads are in different orgs and have separate budgets, only someone at Jeff's level or at Discover would see the net... and hence the reason Amazon Ads and Discover would do the deal.
The whole amazon ads program is one unmitigated disaster, both in terms of tech and business. It's a shame. So much of the rest of the company is really good, but it's the few bad orgs like this that tarnish what otherwise could be a neutral employment brand.
Why is this person still employed, let alone have any responsibility?
Also, forgive me, I don't know a universally inoffensive way to broach the subject, but people expressing a fear that minorities are receiving unjust benefits are often racist?
See what I did there?
Documentation of anything is the most difficult task, the most disliked task, and the most avoided. That's gotta be true no matter what anyone's job is, programmer or not.
LOLOLOLOLOLOL. I feel the number of top stories on HN are steadily moving away from programming, and that it is more about Entrepreneurship/VC/Business Management these days.
In other words, it's very hard to fire them.
This type of thinking in our industry needs to STOP. There is far too much evidence that women are treated like absolute shit pretty much across the board (don't bother pointing out your handful of CEOs and other execs, if you can't face this fact then you're part of the problem).
If it happens to women, it happens to others.
You sound like you've got some pretty sweet white, male privilege. If you aren't a member of that majority, well they've certainly got you on their side.
The only sane conclusion from this is you've misread antimagic's original comment.
For the record, I'm female, and member of a discriminated against minority, that has previously been fired for membership to said minority. And no, I don't think management in that case paused for even a microsecond worrying about potential backlash from firing a member of a minority (they stated quite clearly in the termination letter that this was actually the reason they were firing me - nice). If they were at all concerned about that, they certainly hid it well...
(NB: I'm still uncomfortable with how we're discussing her employment as if we were a gossip site, but this is a general policy.)
You cannot fire for wrong reasons.
Although companies need to worry when firing members of a protected class, and we can debate whether that level of worry is underblown or overblown, lying about your educational record is a smoking gun that would make it trivial to dismiss the employee on the spot if the company wanted to do so.
There is level fascination to mis-direct the causes, let me assure you if people of ethnic backgrounds are so protected - we would not be scratching and clawing at the lower rungs of corporate ladder.
It's possible, but thus far there is no evidence to suggest that is the case(unless I missed something). Suggesting that, 'maybe they didn't fire her because she's a minority' is exactly the kind of unfounded bias that underrepresented groups have to deal with all the time. If Munira were a white male no one would be saying, "Well maybe he didn't get fired because he's a white male, in a white male-dominated environment."
Jumping to the accusation that this is about race is exactly the kind of thing that makes it difficult for underrepresented groups in tech.
She put herself in a position where someone higher up in management knew that her Stanford degrees were fake, but nobody else knew. So that someone totally owned her - they could use her as the "dark hand" for literally anything (putting inconvenient people on PIP, fudging inconvenient metrics to advertisers / business partners / executives / etc).
That is probably why she was not fired. If this is actually true, it suggest extreme disfunction in management as well.
IMO it isn't more unethical than what big businesses typically do, like take advantage of unfair tax loopholes. Someone else pointed out that requiring a degree is illegal; if so, I'd say it's ethical for people to lie about their credentials when businesses engage in unlawful behavior by screening for them.
Now that this is public, things will change for her, for sure ...
She is still employed for sacrificial purposes. Not saying she is innocent or guilty... just saying that she needs to know, regardless of what happens, the target is on her. She comes across, based purely on the article, as a deceptive/cover-my-butt person who tried to fleece one of their top customers. Easy PR shot for Amazon.
I remember michaelochurch making almost exactly this point about PIPs on HN in the past - that it was far too easy for them to be used a tool for employee abuse & finding yourself under a PIP was a strong signal that should move on as soon as possible, regardless of the professed reasoning behind the PIP.
I think it's pretty much harmonized across the entire EU.
It'd be really nice if some hacker would put together a comprehensive map/list of non-compete status per state (or if they have) since there are a few states outside of California too. Wikipedia seems to do OK in this regard, but it seems like there should be a lot more info out there.
Sure, it's a bit naieve not to read a job offer carefully enough, but on the other hand you'd kind of assume a company as large as Amazon, employing so many knowledge workers, would not offer their applicants extortion rackets disguised as job contracts to begin with.
1) Most people accept them because they never actually read their contracts fully.
2) They are told that it is a non-negotiable condition of employment and they really want the position.
3) They are aware that non-competes are unenforceable in their jurisdiction (assuming they are in a jurisdiction where non-competes don't stand up in court).
4) They assume the company is unlikely to spend the money required on lawyers to actually come after them if they violate the non-compete in the future.
2) Something like that should be a dealbreaker. No matter how much you want the job, it's effectively saying that you can never leave.
3) In the case of the letter here, he tries to negotiate it after he was fired. If he knew it was unenforceable, then he could have quite simply said so.
4) On their part this is a stupid assumption. You should always assume that a company is willing to back up their threats. Especially a company the size of Amazon.
This isn't to attack your answer, just to put my views on those points.
Based on your username I'm going to assume you're not used to conditions in the US. In my experience, working for 2 megacorps and a startup, this is pretty standard. So if that is a deal breaker good luck finding a job without moving to California. I think I read a story on HN a few weeks ago that said Jimmy Johns was enforcing non-compete agreements. The last one I signed basically said the company owns all work I do, even work I do in my own time (OSS, side projects, etc). I also am required to get permissions to contribute to OSS projects should I want to do that. I also cannot work for competitors (which is like everyone in the industry). I signed it because I don't think it is enforceable and I don't think the company would waste resources trying to enforce it on me.
There needs to be a federal law limiting the scope of these agreements. Preferable modeled after the CA laws.
These people are students who just finished their graduate or under-graduate studies and have most likely taken huge education loans in a currency which is weaker than the dollar. In that situation one really just wants a well paying job at a company which is recognized by the general population (especially your parents and peers) as a good one. Given that, the person signing the contract is unlikely to give the non-compete too much thought. And even if they did, verbal rhetoric from the HR is good enough to lead them to signing.
There were no complaints.
Sometimes you just have to push it.
Plus there's the uncertainty of not knowing whether or not you'll be able to find a job with comparable pay.
> Gardening leave means you still have a fully paid job
I'm thinking that people that can't afford to get paid their current salary for 6 months while not actually working for the company are in the minority, unless I'm missing some angle to this.
If you're in California, where you can leave your company and start working in the next one in a matter of hours, there'll likely be an expectation by the company hiring of a fast start.
At the same time, depending on the company, the hiring process can stretch for months before getting an actual offer.
I want to believe that most employers you'd like to work for are understanding that "life" might happen and you can't start two weeks from the moment you first met them.
Sometimes companies will make you sign a noncompete if you accept a severance from them.
A family member asked his new company if they would match the severance so he wouldnt have to sign a non-compete. The new company agreed and he was able to keep his clients and got a signing bonus!
My manager did not communicate to her management chain the positive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “You’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”.
"Make me look good" doesn't mean "do stuff and I'll take all the credit" -- at least not with a good manager. It's about meeting/exceeding your goals, which helps your boss meet/exceed his goals, etc. and makes the organization stronger.
That said, this is not something you would plainly state to your direct report...
I find this sentiment horrifying. When I hire people, I don't want them to spend one second thinking about how to make me look good. I want their brainpower entirely devoted to things like serving the customer, improving the company, and helping their colleagues.
Admittedly, give that so many companies are dysfunctional feudal empires, it is often good career advice. But I still find it horrifying.
Don't you think all those things make you look good if you are the hiring manager? Conversely, if the employee you hired fails to perform those duties, you look bad.
Again, "making your boss look good" is NOT supposed to mean "do specific things for your boss that will impress his boss", it's supposed to mean that the employee meets or exceeds the expectations of the job which _in turn_ makes the hiring manager look good because his group is meeting or exceeding their goals, and so on up the line.
But of course, they're not. This whole mess at Amazon is an issue only because Kivin Varghese chose to do the right thing by his customer instead of making his manager look good. And look where it got him: screwed over and sued.
Regarding your claim that "make your boss look good" really means "do the assigned job well": I don't believe you. If that's what it meant, we could say, "do the assigned job well". What it actually means is exactly what it says. The reason that people say and mean that is that in organizations driven by power and appearance, making your boss look good is indeed a road to success.
Don't get me wrong, dysfunction at large companies is disproportionately large most of the time. But man, even smaller bits of nonsense can be extremely frustrating when you see them up close.
If the accusations here are accurate and at all typical of attitudes, and other accounts of bullying publishers (depending on your interpretation), and their at-a-distance treatment of their warehouse employees, then their value may not be as solid as they and others think.
I've been reading recently that Walmart sales are suffering, in part because the shopping experience has degraded due to strict corporate limits on employment. Sales are down, which means, all things equal in a recovering and not absolutely horrible economy, that those sales have gone elsewhere.
That could happen to Amazon too. Anecdote of one, I rarely buy from Amazon anymore, even less often than my going to Walmart. In Amazon's case, stories like this make me queasy whenever I buy there. My greatest interaction with them at the moment is to browse and read reviews, and I then use that information to buy elsewhere. They're a great recommendation service, and free.
And they know it, the cashiers are no longer asking if I could "find everything I needed", and a memo touching upon this has gone public within the last few days.
Amazon still has my business because they're still playing straight with me as a customer, and that's vanishingly rare (outside of small companies that tend to have fragility issues). But I pay attention to stories like this because the potential for losing their customer first culture is there.
It actually gets data from social networks for aggregation of social data into the blur app.
> Why is this person still employed, let alone have any responsibility?
It should be remembered that this is an accusation, and potentially fabricated or editorialised. It's probably ruined this woman's career by now and doesn't justify a witchunt or personal abuse.
The author, having been fired, has a very good reason to seek revenge, and we shouldn't take his word as gospel.
That said, I tend to side with underdogs, and have been in a couple similar situations at large companies - nothing this severe, but none of the behavior seems beyond the pale for mid and sr execs at a large company (sad to say). I've worked with some really good ones too, but just because someone has risen to an SVP position doesn't mean they can't also act unethically (or even illegally).
Going public is a double edged sword, if someone is willing to stick their head this far above the parapet there must be something going on. I'd say both parties have some explaining to do, and a fair amount of it. The evidence is compelling, I wonder if the other parties have evidence that is as compelling?
It's not as if they're unsubstantiated accusations. Even if a significant portion of the document is completely fabricated, the bits based on emails & deposition are pretty damning.
To be honest, I don't believe he's lying. But I also think it's bad behaviour to condemn someone after hearing only one side of the story, which is what some people are doing.
Anyone who will steal for your company, will steal from your company.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-23238531
That's old news. Gov. party treasurer is jailed for stealing from. The party believed he was stealing for.
The most interesting part to me is the lack of foresight by Amazon. Obviously this is a pretty big coverup, but with a pending lawsuit, and obvious wrongdoing to Amazon's 2nd biggest ad revenue generator, I'm particularly surprised more work wasn't put into solving/covering up this issue as soon as it started blooming. I know Bezos is crazy in his desire to make Amazon the biggest giant on the block, but it doesn't take a genius (which Bezos probably is) to realize a potentially huge problem when it happens.
However, the fact that this wasn't dealt with in a better way, AND Bezos ignored emails from Kivin [0], leads me to two possible conclusions.
A. Bezos didn't know the full situation, and Blackburn deceived him.
B. Bezos knew the full situation, but chose to side with Blackburn (I suspect Munira didn't even cross his mind) because he values Blackburn more than morality.
Either of these situations show that there was a decision made by Blackburn that this could be covered up cheaper than it could be remedied--a decision I find to be Occam's Razor here. The reason I think it was Blackburn, is I think Bezos is smart enough to just remove Kivin's non-compete just to make it go away without even costing Bezos any of his precious little revenue.
I tend to evaluate companies based on how they treat their employees and if Munira and Blackburn are the typical managers and VPs at Amazon, then I think really find myself not needing Amazon's services anymore. Let's hope this hasn't happened to anyone else.
[0] "I’ve sent two letters to Jeff Bezos (as these are serious issues that I believe he would care about as the founder of the company and keeper of the culture)" (pg 2).
Interestingly Kivin sounds like the type of person you ideally want working and managing your product but most corporations are actually staffed by people like Munira and Kotas.
My assumptions here: NCA - not relevent. This gets agreed upon in advance (cont...) complaining about this after the fact changes how professional I view the writer.
Discover - Unless Kivin was the owner of this relationship, I don't believe he had enough information to go on here.
Team - Priority on needing to fess up to the client immediately is different from fixing the issue. I don't think these are the same issue.
Departure - Kivin entered negotiations on severeance here. Im
edit: I somehow submitted incomplete response then got distracted.. added (cont..) to denote separator of edit.
I really don't understand your perspective.
To me it seems:
He couldn't build consensus within the org around his opinion (critical skill in a Senior PM role). Regardless of the underlying issue, it seems he can't rally people around his idea. That makes me think either A) the idea is no good or B) you can't rally people very well.
He didn't look ahead - His actions and disagreement with his manager led to his departure. We only have one side of the story here but im guessing him and his manager didn't get along often.
After departure( i get that he's bitter) he decided to release this confidential information. Even communications from Discover personnel that have nothing to do with the issue - I have an issue with that and would not trust this individual.
I am not defending Amazon or Management, merely disagreeing with the notion that this is an individual you want as a Senior PM. All in all, it seems this employee/manager relationship failed big time, and I would put some blame on both sides.
I subsequently became friends with her, and I can personally vouch that she took all the requisite CS classes, and she was pulling all-nighters in the same lab as me, writing code for her classes. I remember Munira being wicked smart - and an honest conscientious person.
Now, she may not have officially graduated - but keep in mind that she was finishing Stanford in the heady dot-com days, and she was likely a few units short of getting a full degree when Epiphany (a high-flying startup at the time) lured her in, and she never went back to finishing it. Similar story happened to me - i was 3 or 4 units short of required 45 units to get my CS Masters when i was graduating (I did the same co-term program where you get a BS and MS at the same time); and Stanford wanted me to pay the remaining $4k to get my degree. I paid, but quite possible that Munira was in the same boat, went to work for Epiphany and never bothered to finish her remaining units.
I don't work for Amazon, and I don't know the full details of the story - but it sounds a lot like ramblings of a disgruntled employee. I would definitely like to hear/see the Amazon side of the story before I draw any conclusions.
Keep in mind - I'm heavily biased, I was friends with Munira at Stanford and afterwards before she moved to Seattle, but i'm very skeptical to be taking all of the allegations at face value.
Official degree or not, I'd hire her to work at my startup in a heartbeat without any worries.
side note: Munira is not exUSSR from Tajikistan - good guess, but she just worked there for one summer. Nor Bangladeshi either. Either way, it's not in any way material to this conversation. I, on the other hand, am from former USSR, in case that makes any difference.
>My manager did not communicate to her management chain the positive impact I was having on the product - in fact, she once told me “You’re here to make me look good - you’re doing an awesome job”
Some readers have pointed out that Scribd is a venture backed by YCombinator. Don't know how significant that is.
It started off pretty bad just because their tech wasn't very good, but then it seemed to be getting better as they ditched their flash based reader for HTML. Now they just seem to be actively user-hostile in the name of growing the number of app installs. Naked user coercion is much less forgivable than just sucking.
Any of you who accept an unfunded non-compete clause are suckers and any of you who try to trick your employees into agreeing to them are ass pirates.
And thank goodness. One of the reasons the tech industry in California is booming is the large talent pool available to employers.
If you are subject to a noncompete & moving to a state where they aren't enforced, the smart thing to do is to get a summary judgment in that state. Otherwise jurisdiction is a matter of who shoots first.
I do believe that if everyone started refusing to work under NCAs then employers would be forced to change them but how many people have the ability to turn down so many jobs?
My hunch is this will at most be a subject of chuckle between Bezos and David Nelms (Discover CEO) on the Golf course.
Bezos might roll some heads, install some "supervision", give them a discount on a future campaign...
Advertising budgets are not an exact science anyway. And Amazon is still the largest online retail site in the world - where else would Discover go to spend their Ad dollars?
Could be related to this incident, could just be coincidence.
However, he includes an e-mail from Discovery in the letter, which says "I cannot express my disappointment on how this has been handled, nor can I stress enough how incredibly important it is that we get this resolved as quickly as possible."
It may not be a huge hit to Discovery's bottom line at the end of the day, but somewhere in there is a promo department for whom $500K is a significant chunk of their yearly budget.
Not a great resolution I know.
Varghese sued Amazon in 2012 following his termination
after seven months on the job. Although he won part of
his case in July 2013 — Amazon waived enforcement of an
18-month non-compete obligation and granted him all
rights to a patent application he’d filed — the trial
for the second part of the suit has been pushed back
until March 2015.Meanwhile, best people leave the company.
Those who focus on their position in the bureaucracy will almost always beat those who focus on the ostensible goals of it. Although in this case there were conflicting goals....
They should promote those that speak out about fraud that they witness and not fire them.
If people like Munira Rahemtulla and Paul Kotas are still employed, it suggests to me that advertisers should be very wary about the nature of their advertising relationships with Amazon and whether they're getting good value for their money.
We definitely like participation, but it took me a while to realize that you are the author, and that kvargs is your Twitter account.
All of this needs to be read with some measure of skepticism. However, the complaint provides a fair amount of evidence, not just claims of wrongdoing... that gives it a fair amount of credence in my eyes.
If so, that is very damning of the top-down, strongly hierarchical culture that Amazon is well-known for - but I would argue it is inevitable for any company that has a very hierarchical top-down culture...
You can't make up for the downsides of top-down management with pretty words and values and employee handbooks. Hierarchical, power-based management will always lead to serious ethical lapses like this.
Unfortunately skills are not all that relevant after all in our modern liberal society.
The document does acknowledge that the team responsible for forecast "ad execution team", admitting the fuck up and using amazon cash to fund the the remainder of the promotion. Meanwhile implementing the workflow to require ad click requirement.
Given the context that this was a secretive gen 1 kindle tablet project, people should have been working hard to pull it off by deadline. And you have this whistleblower shooting emails to SVP looking for "who is responsible for latency on amazon.com". I am an engineer at an equally big company in bay area, I hate to work with PMs like OP.
My wife's studying to go into this field and that's basically what she's taught - you're in HR for the company.
Obviously, a whistleblower like this is dedicated, passionate, and energetic. The question is whether they do this because of real dedication to the customer and good business practices, or whether they're just the sort of person that likes blowing shit up when they find a good excuse.
Some of the top-performing people on my teams have been seen as "difficult". But I don't particularly want to hire obedient people. I want to hire people who will tell me I'm wrong when I'm wrong.
> Though I was assured the internal investigation at Amazon was ‘independent and thorough’, we later found the investigation around the matters I raised while employed at Amazon was directed by the same internal Amazon lawyer that was helping my manager terminate my employment based on the same issues I raised in the internal complaint - so Amazon’s counsel was essentially directing the investigation around serious issues that she had been responsible for handling herself - far from ‘independent and thorough’ and a surprising lack of internal controls for a public company like Amazon.
I can't detect a larger issue involved here except that when people screw up in a way that loses money, they will sometimes try to come up with a way to cover their ass rather than admit it and attempt to rectify it and therefore show everyone that they messed up.
Whoever posted it has exposed Amazon to a lawsuit, though. When eventually negotiating to fix this quietly with Discover, Amazon will be at a serious disadvantage.
I would never do something like that.
Even if I was completely and horribly screwed over, I would only share information like this with my attorney.
Based off other former employee anecdotes, Amazon is starting to sound like the Walmart of the internet.
Managers look like complete shit if an employee leaves. They are judged based on their ability to control and have power over people. You have to understand, some companies have devolved so far that they behave like criminal gangs. If one drug dealer leaves his boss and goes to another boss what does that tell all the other drug dealers about the first boss?
It also has a more readable explanation of who/what/when than the linked pdf.
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com.au/amazon-employee-lawsuit-ki...
First, writing a letter to the board asking for their help while simultaneously threatening that you've filed it with the attorney general's office is disingenuous. While that will call attention to yourself it is unlikely to produce a positive outcome. Which seems to be a pattern at the heart of his difficulties.
Second, the initial incident of 5 second latency with displaying an ad was addressed prior to launch. He was reprimanded for sounding an alarm 3 levels up without first researching a solution.
Third, and most importantly, his central ethics claim re: Discover is questionable. The promotion was to give $10 to people who used Discover. Much of his claim rests on his editorializing of the aims of the promo, specifically that it would be useless and mere "subsidy" unless targeted specifically at 1-click setting conversions. But that's debatable. He's the only one saying that. He admits the promotion was not set up that way, and Amazon reports that Discover was ok with it proceeding as long as it was narrowed to Fire users and capped at the original budget.
It doesn't sound like Amazon's finest hour but when you strip out the one-sided editorializing these break more towards bugs and campaign issues that occasionally arise and get addressed in the course of development / advertising, and he breaks a little bit toward a messiah complex.
I have experience with the Amazon advertising platform. Not on the Kindle side but what I'll call "Amazon main". And I can tell you it ain't pretty at all.
I don't know if I should characterize this as fraud. Not sure what the legal designation might be.
Here's a hypothetical example to try to explain the problem:
Imagine you are selling product on Amazon. Products you manufacture. And, in order to drive sales you purchase ads on the Amazon ads platform. You only pay when someone clicks. Ads accomplish two missions: sales and ranking improvement. Ranking on Amazon is important. The closer your product is to the top of page one the more sales you'll generate. Ads can help you accomplish this.
So far so good.
Now imagine someone is teaching a course on how to scam Amazon buyers and make money in the process. The course teaches you to find successful listings on Amazon and, effectively, add your name to the product page as an additional seller. Amazon encourages this. It's ridiculously easy. Once you have a seller account it takes all of one minute to pick a product and list against it.
But, wait, you don't actually make that product. You don't even have any in stock. How do you do this? Simple, when a customer makes a purchase you send them some crap product that is similar enough. If you do your homework your fake product will not be returned and you just made some money.
Here's the problem. The legitimate product manufacturer spent thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of dollars advertising the product on Amazon to get it well ranked and generate enough sales that the product has a good reputation (reviews, etc.). Amazon, in turn, allows ANYONE to list against ANY product and, effectively steal the time, money and effort expended by the rightful product producer in making that product a success in the Amazon ecosystem.
In other words, if you just spent $100K advertising your product on Amazon they allow Joe Blow to come in and take away 25% to 50% (or whatever) of the sales you generate with that ad spend. And there's NOTHING you can do about it.
Imagine Amazon spending millions of dollars to advertise their Kindle tablet during the Superbowl or the Olympics. Now imagine the TV network allowing Apple and Microsoft to display a link to their tablets FOR FREE within the Amazon Kindle ad. Crazy, right? Amazon wouldn't put up with that for a microsecond. They'd say: If Apple and Microsoft want to sell their tablets they need to pay for their own advertising on their own time slot. And they would be correct in pushing for this. The networks would, effectively, allow Amazon's competitors to steal Amazon's advertising budget for their own financial gains. Wrong. Well, this is EXACTLY what Amazon is doing today to every single one of their advertisers.
If you advertise on Amazon your ad budget is very likely to generate sales for competitors. That is wrong beyond description and Amazon seems to have zero interest in fixing the problem. The solution is very simple: A listing that has an active spend budget needs to be locked out from any other sellers. It becomes a single seller listing for as long as the seller is spending even a single dollar a day in Amazon ads. Problem solved.
After reading most of the posted letter I've come to realize that the problems within Amazon are much greater than I thought. You see two faces of this corporation when you work with them as a vendor. The public face looks clean, organized and inviting. The "back office" side is in constant chaos, is disorganized, has ethical problems, is clueless, does NOT have the seller's/advertisers best interests at heart and, it seems, is perfectly comfortable with conducting business in unethical and fraudulent ways, perhaps unintentionally due to dysfunction, yet the consequences to those engaging with that side of the organization are the same.
Where is Jeff Bezos in all of this? It would seem he needs to become very visible and push forward a major reform in a very public way, at least public to their advertisers. Almost like what Domino's Pizza did:
http://www.nbcnews.com/id/34812047/ns/business-us_business/t...
http://www.geekwire.com/2014/protesting-outside-amazon-hq-fo...
The correct answer is that that "Alumni card" is for the MFP (Mayfield Fellows Program), a nine-month program within Stanford that gives you some entrepreneurship experience. The alumni card is for that program, not Stanford itself.
That said, I only claim to have attended and done well, not graduated.
I wonder how AMZN employees feel, reading this.
Woah! I had no idea Amazon was making that much from advertising on the Kindles at launch (although I guess it's a little unclear what they are paying for there).
I wonder how many launch partners they had?
"I literally was sickened by what we were doing to Discover Card, one of Amazon’s largest customers spending over $13MM per year in advertising with the company."
They screwed up the promotion, to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, and 3-5s latency for ads? :P
That is the only part of this complaint I find interesting.
It's really hard to say from the given context that this was definitely engineering's fault.
You'll note that the various plans for resolving the issue involve updating the Terms & Conditions of the offer. That makes me think that accurate code was implemented against incorrect Terms and Conditions, rather than incorrect code was implemented against accurate Terms and Conditions.
So, the definition of goal subordination is an employee acting in a way that helps them but hurts the company. That is, the goal of helping the company is subordinated to, that is, made less important than, the goal of helping the person engaging in goal subordination.
In the case of the OP, it was not nearly just the fired employee who was hurt but 2-3 levels of management above that employee, the whole company, Bezos, and the stockholders.
Gee, some parts of the roll out were not ready on time! Like this is the first time in projects? Gee, even for the pyramids, the project leaders needed enough in workers, food, stone cutting tools, wood, rope, etc. -- lack of any one of these inputs could stop the whole leaders whole project. That's part of what we now call materials requirements planning, right, MRP. And for getting all the parts ready on time, there is methodology for that, in part, an application of linear programming with critical paths, etc. US aerospace got good at such things. So, that little project at Amazon fumbled the ball on having the ad parts ready? They hired the people straight out of what, kindergarten?
And, after the project went forward, Amazon sent in a staff group, in an independent part of the organization, to analyze what went right/wrong? In Tunisia, Ike did that after Kasserine and the other battles in the Tunisian campaign, and soon Rommel was permanently back in Berlin, and the Allies had captured about 300,000 Axis soldiers and driven the Axis out of North Africa, from Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, to Egypt and the Suez Canal.
Apparently in the US Army, such analysis of what happened is called an after-action review, e.g., as at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/After-action_review
not nearly new stuff, and Amazon should be able to do well with such a process.
Managing, planning, executing, reviewing projects is not nearly new stuff; Amazon just blew it. Not so good for Bezos.
The most serious sources of goal subordination are middle management: The worker bees don't have enough power seriously to hurt the company, and the work of the C-level guys is too visible to the CEO and the BoD.
It's totally dumb for the company to have HR blindly back middle management possibly engaged in goal subordination, playing politics to "look good" while, really, making a mess, etc. E.g., she was messing up and reported to a guy who knew her resume was wrong -- can anyone guess what might have been going on here? I mean, anyone who at least went through junior high? Bezos made it through junior high, right?
Also there needs to be a company culture of honesty, hard work, good ideas, etc. For such a culture, need to be sure that a middle manager won't dump on a subordinate who does really good work.
A lot is known about how to manage, e.g., to reduce goal subordination.
For the employee who got fired, when I get around to needing a guy to work with major advertisers, I'll consider him in a millisecond. "Black list"? Sure, fine with me; the other companies can black list him while I hire him!
But he might sue my company? If my company messed up as badly as it appears Amazon did, then he should sue us; if he didn't, that would be against him. I'd hope that we wouldn't mess up like that.
Yes, that ad guy might report some really great successes to me. Okay, I mean, terrific, if they are real. Of course, I'd also get independent confirmation, say, directly from appropriate people at the company paying for the ads. If he did really well, then, sure, presto, bingo, bonus time, say, early in December.
I know; I know; this idea of such a bonus doesn't go along with the Ben Horowitz lecture, just yesterday or some such, in Sam's course, right? Sorry, Ben. The US military can give battlefield promotions, decorations, etc., so I'll be willing to hand out a December bonus.
If the ad guy didn't do so well, then have a project to understand why and do better the next time. If he needs to go to a week long seminar "How to Be a Good Ad Exec 101", and it's actually a useful seminar, then fine. If he can't really do the job, then help him learn to do his job.
Why might he not be able to do his job? One reason: He worked really hard on some of his last jobs while the world changed. So, e.g., he needs to get caught up on, say, the business of mobile ads. Okay; let him get caught up.
Notice I said he's an "ad guy" and not an "Ad Exec". I just want him to do his job and not hang on titles that can cause problems (here Ben was roughly correct).
And the manager? Largely to heck with that nonsense: In a good university, usually a department chair doesn't get to rule over the professors as if they were subordinate worker bees. Instead, the chair does some coordination, etc., and the job is not always coveted and not necessarily a promotion!
Basic fact: Each instance of good work is first done between just one pair of ears. Sorry 'bout that. For a team, all the good work is of just this kind. What we really want now is just such good work. For the routine coordination, etc. can leave that to managers, but that is inferior work. E.g., the coordination needed to get all the pieces done on time for the big roll out is work that was done at least back to the pyramids and, thus, has to be regarded as routine.
Some of this is controversial? Yup. YMMV. Sorry 'bout that.
"The bad thing: a credit card company had a big promotion with specific rules. We mis-reported the success of that promotion which cost the advertiser a lot of money. I raised it internally, and escalated it, but nothing was done."
There may or may not be long-term collateral damage. The alleged victim, Discovery, isn't talking and may already have settled with Amazon outside the context of litigation. The supervisor's fraudulent resumé is now a matter of public record. She will be kept on at least until this lawsuit is over because Amazon needs her as a witness. After the case is resolved, she will resign.
Could this matter have been resolved any other way? Probably not. It's sad to see that legacy companies are just as bureaucratic as legacy ones. Jeff Blackburn is culpable for not censuring Munira R. after Kivin V. brought this matter to his attention--after all, he was the one who insisted on a fix. Kivin should have tried to convince Munira R. to go with him to Jeff Blackburn. If she said no, then he would have to weigh her probable reaction. Clearly, Kivin miscalculated. He didn't realize how powerful Munira R. is at Amazon and what allies she had--and I say had because her time at Amazon is numbered. A person in Munira's position, who has to keep a secret, must weigh the possibility that secret will get out. Her miscalculation was thinking that Kivin would get fired and go away and her secret would remain hidden.
Matters like this are clearly not serious enough for board intervention. It's for that reason that you have management in the first place. The board does not manage day to day affairs of the business and relies on management to do so.
For Amazon, this squabble is a distraction that harms the company. What happens when companies get sued is that they circle the wagons. Whatever you might say about throwing attorneys at a problem, those attorneys know that because of Munira, their case is vulnerable. Munira's lies will be Exhibit #1 during her cross-examination. Indeed, her own attorneys will have to bring out her c.v. falsification--and not through the weasel-worded, "she had yet to complete the degree" nonsense spouted by Jeff Blackburn during his deposition. He was poorly coached by Amazon's attorneys. He should have simply admitted that she lied. Otherwise the follow-up--when you drag in twelve strangers off the street and make them sit together and call them a jury--will be, why can't you admit the obvious? Are you trying to hide something? What might that be? Amazon was probably blindsided by Munira's lies: as a top executive under a clear policy to tell the truth and an HR department that could easily have followed up, Amazon's general counsel and attorneys could not have expected that she would have lied. If you think you can't lose a case because a single witness lied about an unrelated matter, try rewinding the OJ tapes and listen to the cross of Mark Fuhrman.
So what now? Amazon's smart move is to ignore the sit-in because all an arrest or eviction will do is bring more unwanted attention to the case. They may ask the judge in the case for an injunction preventing the sit-in because it is arguably an unethical settlement move not provided for by the Rules of Civil Procedure, and Kivin agreed to follow those rules by filing suit.
Amazon has already backed down from the non-compete clause. I'm sure they would love to settle the case. But guys who camp out on your doorstep are usually difficult to settle with. Maybe Kivin sees millions of dollars--an executive paid $250k/yr. with thirty years of work, plus injury to reputation, plus interest would be entitled to a substantial sum. My guess is that Kivin doesn't want to settle. He feels hurt, wants to prove he's right, wants his day in court.
My advice to both sides: settle. Kivin: take less than what you think they owe you, get them to agree to give you a glowing reference (though in the publicity-heavy context of this case I don't know valuable this will be immediately) and agree not to disparage Amazon. Amazon: despite the fact that your lawyers have told you this is a winnable case, it will only get worse. You have nothing to gain.
To both of you: don't you guys watch Star Trek? Don't you remember the lesson of the Kobayashi Maru? Litigation is like that test that only Captain Kirk ever beat: the only way to win is not to play the game. If you win, you still lose heavily.
This past September, they had major server issues, which cost sellers lots of money in sales. They refuse to admit it.
As a seller, you also don't own your customers (you are given the privilege of selling to amazons customers). Which means that at any point in time, Amazon could take it all away and all of the hard work you put into pleasing the people buying your products goes to waste. They have been recently making it more and more difficult for the average user to even continue their business. So many people that have been selling for years are prevented from continuing without paperwork from distributors (which as I've seen in the past, is just a trick to find out where they can compete with you)
With thaw business practices, they should have been out of business years ago.
This all refers back to a 2012 lawsuit: http://www.geekwire.com/2012/kindle-ad-team-member-sues-amaz...
It takes a lot of guts to speak up on a huge company like Amazon, this should be valued. It shouldn't be dismissed with "well, it's a former employee, so of course he's not happy.."
Of course, if he was an employee at the time of filing the lawsuit (the act of filing it would presumably get him sacked immediately afterwards), it would be dismissed with "Well he doesn't feel that strongly about it if he kept working there"
Bravo for anyone standing up for ethics in corporations.
So, if consumers and other revenue streams are vastly more important, I'm not sure that the impact of ad sales due to a bad actor crossing someone who doesn't understand political acumen - come on, a desperate email to your bosses boss?? WE NEED THE MILLISECONDS!!! - is all that important. Easy enough to bump Munira (right thing), give Kivin shut-up money (right thing and expedient), and move forward steamrolling online retailing...