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What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

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Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#191

Post by GabrielF00 »

zaphos wrote: post #183
zaroth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regarding sharing employee evaluations, two things; if you go on the record with press discussing your evaluation and says it says one thing, but it actually says another, I think the company is entitled to respond. Anyway, it's not clear to me if the employee isn't on Amazon's side here (angry at being misquoted) so how do we know this wouldn't have been after getting permission from the employees in question? Obvio…

fwiw, the NYT response points out that the quote from Dina does not contradict the reporting. * NYT response: https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-...

The impression that I got from the Times article was that excessive workload led her to go for four days without sleep and to hire someone overseas to do part of her job for her. The fuller story from her LinkedIn post was that she was working, getting an MBA part time, and getting over a breakup, and that her coping mechanism for the breakup was to work long hours. Also, she hired the person overseas to scout leads because she wanted to try out an idea from The Four Hour Work Week. So the LinkedIn article certainly gave me a very different impression of her experience than the Times article, even if what the Times article said was factually accurate. The Times left out the parts that didn't fit into their narrative.

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#192

Post by exodust »

mbca wrote: post #185
danso wrote: post #129

The NYT editor in chief has responded via Medium: https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-... > In response to your posting on Medium this morning, I want to reiterate my support for our story about Amazon’s culture. In your posting — as well as in a series of recent email exchanges with me — you contested the article’s assertion that many employees found Amazon a tough place to work. Specifically…

Public mudslinging between big names ... does that make Medium the new Twitter?

Medium seems to be a reasonable neutral ground for such a show-down. No distractions, just words on a page, fighting it out, gladiator style.

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#193

Post by bluishgreen »

Someone walks to me and says things like this(the original NYTimes article) about say...Facebook, I will double check. If someone says what they said about Amazon, I won't double check (I know, I should). But you know what, I have heard so many anecdotes from people who have no reason to lie, that for me personally at this point, I have much better things to do than double check the obvious. Someone with a fancy university grant will do that, I have other stuff to do, like ignore all those amazon high-volume-recruiter incessant emails.

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#194

Post by suprgeek »

If anything, such a cynical and mean-spirited "reply" makes it absolutely and positively certain that working at Amazon should be the last thing any half-way competent Tech person should consider.

This piece reads exactly like an oppo-research piece that you would use as a hatchet-job on a political opponent. I had to check twice to ensure that this was not some kind of satire (it is getting harder for me to tell these days). It goes into great detail making personal attacks against the "complainers" while doing nothing to address the substantive allegations made by the articles.

So 1) yes there is a "snitch" tool that amazon encourages employees to use 2) the people identified have all quit after complaining of excessive work one way or another 3) when the initial story came out Almighty Leader Jeff even wrote a memo "please be more considerate" 4) PR flunky now makes sleazy attacks on ex-employees to blunt the negative perceptions.

Updated to add- You want an unsubstantiated ad-hominem here you go: "Jay Carney was encouraged to quit his white-house posting because of his incompetence. Also how seriously can you take a PR guy with the last name of 'Carney'? He had to go!"

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#195

Post by caskance »

lpsz wrote: post #62

One can like or hate Amazon, and it may or may not be a crappy place to work. That said, it sounds like NYT (a newspaper of record, btw) did more than reasonable selective reporting, to evoke certain feelings in the readers, to get clicks, to start a conversation, or what the reason may be. And it's lousy to see this in modern news reporting. Even the respectable publications err on the side of sensationalism, and it…

Why would such a place exist? The more unbiased a news outlet is trusted to be, the higher the incentive to subvert them to show bias towards you.

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#198

Post by ninv »

whiteboarder wrote: post #190
russelluresti wrote: post #178

I love how the start of this article reads like something out of Character Assassination 101. Step 1: start by bringing up something negative about a person that has absolutely NOTHING to do with the issue at hand. Okay, so the guy resigned because he did something bad. How does that make what he experienced while there not true? Oh, that's right, it doesn't. And the admission of fraud isn't a "crucial piece of conte…

And the fraud thing doesn't even look to be true. The NYT writer responded and said that was false.

I think Mr. Olson should sue Amazon now.

Re: What The New York Times Didn’t Say About Amazon

#200

Post by ucaetano »

danso wrote: post #159
ucaetano wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"you can be sure that this is, for better or worse, the official company response" Quite the opposite: there's absolutely nothing official about it. It isn't published on an amazon domain, doesn't carry any signature as amazon, and the only evidence that this is in any way related to amazon is that the guy works at amazon.

"there's absolutely nothing official about it"...except that it's coming from Amazon's Jay Carney, who is described as "Senior Vice President for Global Corporate Affairs at Amazon". Could his Medium site use a custom banner to show Amazon's letterhead? Sure (I don't know, I haven't logged into Medium in awhile to know its design/customization options). But this message is signed by him, acting in his role as Amazon…

There's a difference between Elon Musk speaking as CEO of Tesla and as Elon Musk. Or pretty much anyone else.
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