What It's Like To Work For Amazon

Here is a revealing report about Amazon from The New York Times:

On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)

You can read the rest @
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

This sort of "prison work camp" mentality will soon spread to the rest of the corporate world. Corporate overlords need to see how far they can push humans to determine the relative cost-benefit ratio between human workers and robots. Once they have determined that robots are superior in all respects, human workers will be eliminated.

And Jeff Bezos will be even more wealthy.

Update: Bezos apparently is clueless about what it's like to work for his own company:

Amazon.com’s Jeff Bezos has responded in blunt terms to a New York Times exposé about his company, firing back that he would resign if working at the e-commerce giant were as awful as the article suggests.

The Times piece, published on Saturday, put a fresh spotlight on the work environment at the hard-driving company.

“I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be crazy to stay,” the Amazon AMZN, +0.50% founder and CEO wrote in an email to employees that was obtained by MarketWatch. “I know I would leave such a company.”

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/jeff-bezos-says-hed-quit-the-amazon-described-in-new-york-times-bombshell-2015-08-17

Sorry Jeff, but I find it difficult to believe that you are telling the truth.

Second Update: Here is a link to the letter Bezos wrote to his employees:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/business/amazon-chiefs-message-to-employees.html

Neither I nor my wife have EVER worked for a company which wanted outsiders to know what was really going on at their facilities. We both would be astonished to learn that Amazon was any different.