Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
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Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#2Not surprising. Likely he knows exactly what is going on in his company (known as a micromanager) but can't stand criticism. But like the titans of old (Rockefeller, Carnagie etc) employee happiness doesn't register as important to him.
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#3"In Mr Bezos' memo, he encouraged Amazon employees to read the article, and email him directly if they recognised any of the "shockingly callous management practices" it described."
Oh well, this seems to be a bit hypocritical. ("Hey Mr. Bezos, my boss, John Doe (cc'd!) wants me to do this task until tomorrow, but it's 8 pm. What do you think about this?")
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#4The fact that he has to defend their culture says a lot to me.
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#5This BBC article isn't really about Jeff Bezos. The bulk of the text is about Nick Ciubotariu's blog post. Just read the source directly:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-am...
Understandably, a story that could have been titled "Nick Ciubotariu from Amazon responds to criticism" is not as eye-catching as "Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace"
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#6There's a bit of a divide that no one seems to be touching on - most of the issues talked about in the NYT article seem to be from non technical folks, while engineering tends to be a little happier for precisely the reasons Bezos mentions.
Amazon and most other companies have separate staff, culture and levels of morale for engineering and non engineering divisions. Can't really compare them directly.
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#7The fact that he has to defend their culture says a lot to me.
You never see posts about people at Google or Facebook saying they're abused and overworked. Even with Microsoft, you read about political infighting and stack-ranking being stupid, but not downright emotional abuse or on-call madness. With Amazon, it's quite a regular occurrence.
Where there is smoke...
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#8[deleted]
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#9This BBC article isn't really about Jeff Bezos. The bulk of the text is about Nick Ciubotariu's blog post. Just read the source directly: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-am... Understandably, a story that could have been titled " Nick Ciubotariu from Amazon responds to criticism " is not as eye-catching as " Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace "
Additionally while there IS a response from Jeff, its full text is actually available here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10071600
Re: Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company's workplace culture
#10> Amazon's boss Jeff Bezos wrote in a memo to staff that the "article doesn't describe the Amazon I know".
I'm not surprised he feels this way, being solely unaccountable in the way that his employees are and primarily responsible for both denying and preserving the culture.
> Mr Ciubotariu invoked the company's culture of fun in his LinkedIn post. "We have Nerf wars, almost daily, that often get a bit out of hand," he wrote.
Did this make anyone else cringe? You couldn't pick an example that better demonstrated an awkward, forced element of corporate "fun."
I have to wonder, though, what he means by them getting "a bit out of hand":
- "fun" exhaustion?
- loss of place in stack ranking system?
- injuries? deaths?
- productivity lost to spontaneous bouts of letter-writing from employees to their friends about how much fun it is to work at Amazon?