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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

#231

Post by dandare »

jessriedel wrote: post #29
cjbprime wrote: post #22

> Here’s what the story didn’t tell you about Mr. Olson: his brief tenure at Amazon ended after an investigation revealed he had attempted to defraud vendors and conceal it by falsifying business records. When confronted with the evidence, he admitted it and resigned immediately. Together with the inappropriate disclosure of performance reviews, this statement just makes me think that Amazon probably has a culture of…

Let's assume both Amazon and Carney are evil. Do you think it was acceptable for the Times to not disclose the context of Olson's dismissal?

NYT disputes it, see one of the comments above: > Olson described conflict and turmoil in his group and a revolving series of bosses, and acknowledged that he didn’t last there. He disputes Amazon’s account of his departure, though. He told us today that his division was overwhelmed and had difficulty meeting its marketing commitments to publishers; he said he and others in the division could not keep up. But he said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that. If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so.

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

#232

Post by jessriedel »

cwilkes wrote: post #220
jessriedel wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard comments from a dozen ex-Amazon employees on HN, in this thread and in the one back on the original NY Times article. The large majority of them said the anecdotes described by the article were unrepresentative of their time at Amazon.

I've heard comments from a dozen ex-Amazon employees on HN, in this thread and in the one back on the original NY Times article. The large majority of them said the anecdotes described by the article were unrepresentative of their time at Amazon. Shouldn't that point to a problem of the HN crowd being homogeneous/type-A personalities and not representative of what most people see at Amazon?

Of course the HN crowd is not a perfect sample. But why on Earth would you think the NYTimes reporters, who are trying to write a compelling article, are more likely to get an unbiased sampling of Amazon employees than a sampling of the commentators on HN, who have nothing to gain?

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

#233

Post by zaphos »

oh_sigh wrote: post #221
whiteboarder wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Do you have a link to the response? That seems like a pretty serious allegation to drop. Also, how would the reporter know? Are they just trusting the Olsen guy?

The NYT response said that Olson said it was not true:

"But [Olson] said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that." "If there were criminal charges against him, or some formal accusation of wrongdoing, we would certainly consider that. If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so." - https://medium.com/@NYTimesComm/dean-baquet-responds-to-jay-...

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

#234

Post by hnexamazon »

hnamazon123 wrote: post #30

I recently quit Amazon. I don't doubt that New York Times purposely misrepresented or omitted facts to make this story. Their stories tend to be very agenda driven and the facts tend to be subservient to the narrative, a policy which is deemed acceptable because it "starts a conversation" or the story is "probably true for someone". This is typical of the left wing. However, I did in fact have an absolutely awful exp…

I also recently quit Amazon. I also worked within AWS. However, I absolutely loved it, and had the complete opposite experience to almost everything you are describing. My reasons for leaving had absolutely nothing to do with Amazon, and I would work there again.

My bosses were excellent and cared deeply about my personal and professional development. I never got the impression that I was viewed as a drone. I have nothing but respect for the members of upper management that I met, who came off as smart, driven, and truly passionate about their work.

I had worked at a few other companies before joining Amazon, and what I found most refreshing was that, even when I was an SDEI, my opinion about the direction of the team and the projects we were working on was sought and valued. I had never experienced that before at previous employers, where I was very much a "drone".

However, AWS does promote a blunt culture where direct feedback is encouraged. Having never been encouraged at previous employers to provide thoughts on high level design and strategic roadmap decisions before, the ideas I would present would often times be suboptimal, and a senior dev would be quick to point out the flaws in my approach. Let me be clear, however, that it was always the IDEA that was attacked and never ME, personally. I found this approach incredibly helpful in my journey to become a better software engineer. I got along incredibly well with my colleagues and at no point did I ever not feel like a respected and valued member of the team.

I am willing to concede that I was fortunate to have very good direct managers during my time at AWS, and while members of other teams around me also reported similar contentment when I talked to them, I did notice a team or two whose direct managers did not seem up to the task. I firmly believe your experience with a company is at least 80% your direct manager, and if I was reporting to one of those managers that I did not respect I would probably be telling a different story.

This is all to say, I believe you when you say you had a terrible experience, but I wanted to balance your negative anecdote with my positive one.

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

#235

Post by jsprogrammer »

Nadya wrote: post #130
swehner wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calling the NYT left-wing is pretty amusing.

Thinking the NYT isn't left-wing shows more how far left you must stand. Even the NYT calls itself liberal/left. Even after 11 years - and as an independent - I see the NYT as decidedly left. >“Of course it is....These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you’ve been reading the paper wi…

I think you're being downvoted because: left, right, these are meaningless bullshit distinctions (unless you can supply some very specific definition of "liberal/left").

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

#236

Post by TravelTechGuy »

FussyZeus wrote: post #201
TravelTechGuy wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Several points on this privacy angle: 1. Many of the facts in your HR files are based on heresay - what your colleagues/managers/HR personnel think about you. These are highly subjective facts, very domain and company specific. Airing those out without context is a breach of privacy and can cause great damage to the employee down the line. 2. These files belong to the employer - he can alter them to show whatever he…

1. I agree, kind of. The documents if released publicly should be made available in whole so context can be seen. 2. This pushes into the conspiracy area though, you'd have to have an entire chain of staff (at least in a company the size of Amazon) that couldn't not know this had occurred, and somehow convince them all to be silent. Not impossible, just unlikely. 3. If the company is releasing info about whatever occ…

1. Not really possible: context potentially includes specific projects, specific privileged technology, customer information, not to mention private data of other people. Take for example the following: I use the reporting system to say that an employee is doing a horrible job on project X, using technology Y, therefore causing us to give customer Z a discount. Would you now reveal X, Y, Z, my name, my review, the entire project's status at the time of the review, and few other things that might cause the company many issues down the line? Or will you just say: "his colleagues reported he was lazy and disruptive, not a team player, not a good developer etc."?

2. Not far fetched at all, as I said, I saw it happen more than once. Usually we're discussing just the direct manager and one HR "specialist". I can put whatever I want in your file, whenever I want it. If it ever reaches a court, lawyers may discuss the what, why and when. But as someone else here mentions, people rarely sue their employers, so 99% of the time I can feel completely secure in retconning reality to fit my narrative.

3. Nope. Read through NDAs signed in big companies - they are very one-sided. Unless a court specifically negates an NDA, you may still be charged for violating it. Take again the case in point 1. Suppose said employee responds back to the leak about him being lazy by saying: "our project for customer Z was already behind schedule, due to us switching mid project from Java to Scala" - you just revealed privileged information: name of customer, status of project, technologies used. You may be sued for those. If customer Z decides to cancel their contract as a result of the leak, I'm sure the legal department of the former employer would be glad to talk to the employee about incurred damages.

Finally, remember that this is an uneven fight to begin with: ex-employees are usually in a vulnerable position (sometimes even financially), seeking their next job, and with no readily-available legal resources. Employers have legal departments, lawyers on retainer, and significant funds and time to tie you in court. That's why 99.9% of people keep below the radar even when they feel slighted.

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

#237

Post by vidarh »

Nadya wrote: post #218
vidarh wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe if you specified it being by "US standards". A lot of us live in places where NYT would be seen as quite right wing.

The Washington Post ranks it left-leaning up there with Al Jeezera which is so far left I can't stand to read it. >A lot of us live in places where NYT would be seen as quite right wing. Sweden? Half joking, but the "standing so far left that even the left looks right" is something I mentioned in another reply. I don't think being an extreme-left makes slight-left any less left. I don't feel it is a Fox News "Liberal…

I'm Norwegian, but live in the UK. Even by UK standards, that are fairly right wing for Europe, the NYT would be rather unlikely to be considered left wing by most. They might be accepted as "social liberal", which is traditionally centre right most places. The might have fit on the left before ca. 1870...

> "standing so far left that even the left looks right"

Except that it's the US that pretty much represents the big aberration in terms of what is considered left and right today. In part because it's in the US what almost everyone else considers their left wing was pretty much crushed from the 20's onwards, back when there were actual socialists running for office on a regular basis. The political centre in US politics slid to the right by virtue of your actual left disintegrating and never recovering, followed by the big democrat/republican switcheroo on civil rights.

Of course, these are all subjective measures, since by the original left/right measure, the split would be bizarre today (the original split was between supporters and opponents of the monarchy in the French national assembly).

> Even I can see the conservative slants on talking points in Fox news.

Meanwhile, most European conservatives would be embarrassed by being compared to the kind of stuff spouted on Fox News. Their talking points are in line with the kind of right wing populists that regularly gets compared to fascists here, even by many on the right.

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

#238

Post by ascagnel_ »

dragonwriter wrote: post #224
Nadya wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Washington Post ranks it left-leaning up there with Al Jeezera which is so far left I can't stand to read it. >A lot of us live in places where NYT would be seen as quite right wing. Sweden? Half joking, but the "standing so far left that even the left looks right" is something I mentioned in another reply. I don't think being an extreme-left makes slight-left any less left. I don't feel it is a Fox News "Liberal…

> The Washington Post ranks it left-leaning The 21st century Washington Post is pretty strongly right-leaning, and in 2014 visibly shifted farther to the right, so I'm not sure that says much.

To tie that back in with the original discussion, Jeff Bezos bought the paper in mid-2013 [0], so a change in ownership may reflect the paper's changed editorial direction.

[0]: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2013/08/05/statement-jeff-bezo...

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

#240

Post by dekhn »

Spooky23 wrote: post #188
dekhn wrote: post #4

There are several shockingly inappropriate things in this article. In particular, the PR person at Amazon is saying that they would have shared employee's personal records (including evaluations) as well as other employee's termination conditions (which I consider unrelated to their quotes). Amazon: what Carney just posted was very inappropriate. I am completely amazed you did this (assuming it was done with approval…

Employee reviews or reasons behind a termination for cause are not legally protected information. They are work product, owned by Amazon, subject to the contract with Amazon.

I don't think anybody is saying that Amazon didn't check with their lawyers before doing this and determined that it was OK.
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