Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

minyanville.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 45 posts

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#11

Post by a_bonobo »

sgbenson wrote: post #9

So out of curiosity, which major tech companies operate on a stack ranking system? It seems that Microsoft has gotten the most flack for it in the past, but it seems that many other companies also have it. Here's what I've heard, from different employees at different companies: * Amazon - top 20%/70%/bottom 10% buckets * Facebook - definite bucketed review system every six months * Google - unsure if bucketed, but pe…

Valve has an annual peer view, it's described in the leaked Valve Employee Handbook.

Summary:

>There are no professional reviews by supervisors (because there are no supervisors). Instead, Valve uses a system of anonymous peer reviews, conducted once a year, where employees give their opinion of everyone they work with. Every Cabal is asked to rank the people they work with. No one ranks themselves. Results are delivered anonymously, and it’s up to the individual to decide what to do with the information. One concrete change that comes out of peer reviews is compensation adjustments. Valve goes out of its way to pay its people what they deserve, according to “who’s providing the most value at the company.”

http://www.forevergeek.com/2012/04/10-things-learned-from-va...

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#12

Post by apetresc »

For what it's worth, as someone who did two internships there, the whole "Amazonians hate their job" thing is way overrated. With the exception of pager duty, most of the legitimate complaints employees used to make have long been addressed. I've interned at other big tech companies too, and Amazon stands out in my mind as having some of the highest morale.

Here's another interesting data point: both of my teams at Amazon are still pretty much 100% intact after 3-4 years – whereas my team at Google, to take one example, have almost all left the company since 2011.

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#13

Post by greenyoda »

The original article on which this article is based[1] has an interesting chart of median employee tenure for various companies. Amazon is at the bottom, with the median employee leaving after only one year. Google is not much better, with a median employee staying 1.1 years. In contrast, Microsoft employees stay 4 years and IBM employees 6.4 years.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-a...

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#14

Post by colechristensen »

jshen wrote: post #5
a_bonobo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The mentioned book "The Everything Store" gives hundreds of examples of this corporate culture, culminating in the quote: >"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground." It's a good read on how not to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe b…

"It's a good read on how not to lead a company" But they are very successful. People say the same thing about Jobs, and again, they are very successful. People that say, "this is no way to lead a company" have to have counterexamples of equally successful companies that aren't run this way.

The Roman Empire was very successful, maybe that's the best way to lead too? Of course that's ridiculous. If you have a big house, a big salary, and you're miserable, are you successful? Amazon has a nice stock price, good technology, and (allegedly) broken employees, is it successful?

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#15

Post by skj »

sgbenson wrote: post #9

So out of curiosity, which major tech companies operate on a stack ranking system? It seems that Microsoft has gotten the most flack for it in the past, but it seems that many other companies also have it. Here's what I've heard, from different employees at different companies: * Amazon - top 20%/70%/bottom 10% buckets * Facebook - definite bucketed review system every six months * Google - unsure if bucketed, but pe…

Google's performance reviews are every 6 months. No bucketing.

Well, you get to know if you are "needs improvement", "meets expectations", or "exceeds expectations", and you can pretend those are buckets if you try hard enough.

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#16

Post by greenyoda »

kirubakaran wrote: post #4

Is there anything wrong with the CEO forwarding an email, adding just a question mark? It is shorthand for "Can you please tell me what is going on here and how it can be taken care of?". It isn't like if he typed out a whole sentence, it would cause the person who panics at a "?" to somehow not panic. They'll probably just read too much into the sentence and panic even more.

If you're asking someone to look into something, putting a "please" in there somewhere would probably be considered a bit more polite. Or are CEOs too busy to treat their employees like actual people as opposed to APIs for processing e-mails?

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#17

Post by jtwarren »

apetresc wrote: post #12

For what it's worth, as someone who did two internships there, the whole "Amazonians hate their job" thing is way overrated. With the exception of pager duty, most of the legitimate complaints employees used to make have long been addressed. I've interned at other big tech companies too, and Amazon stands out in my mind as having some of the highest morale. Here's another interesting data point: both of my teams at A…

I also did two internship at Amazon and had a different experience.

There's probably a ton of people who love their job and a ton who "hate" their job -- it's a huge company and you're gonna find everyone. However, I do think that the culture has it's flaws, namely that the core values include frugality.

Working at other startups and large companies I've seen a new way, a much better one. Amazon cuts on the expenses to save their bottom line. Other companies do as much as possible for their employees. It leads to a much happier person (IMO). Free food, nice perks, etc. I'm more productive and work much longer (at my last internship I spend 12 consecutive nights at work). I distinctly remember everyone on my team being jealous of other companies and their free food/drinks/perks and always talking about how nice it must be there.

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#18

Post by jw2013 »

Someone here mentioned Amazon's core value on frugality:

"We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."

But isn't making the employees happy directly and indirectly influencing the product and service the customer is getting at? I understand the business Amazon is in is of low-margin profit. But still, high employee turnovers may cost more than the extra-money the company can spend on making the employees happy. Not to mention the employees productivity can increase when they are happier, so the ratio of (productivity/salary) still increases even though salary increases. May be now Amazon can have less number of employees, but each doing more productive work because they are happy.

Re: Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

#19

Post by blindhippo »

Ahh, this explains why I, a web developer in the middle of the Canadian Prairies keeps getting hit up by Amazon's recruiters. Quite possibly they've poisoned their local talent pools so much they have to pull in naive people from out of market.

Glad I saw this article - now I don't need to fret about whether I should respond to the email. Just the very fact this article was written signals enormous alarm bells for anyone considering moving to work at Amazon.

Post reply on HN