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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

#251

Post by jsprogrammer »

FussyZeus wrote: post #136
jsprogrammer wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon will state any "fact" that they think will turn your opinion.

I can't fathom a workplace where every other day 1/4 of the staff is weeping at their desks and anyone is still working there, especially when the tech market is so highly competitive for good people. Now does that mean it's as eased back as Bezos says? Highly unlikely. More than likely it's an office just like everyone elses, plus or minus a few amenities and a more intense corporate culture.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the specific claim that every other day 1/4 of Amazon's staff is weeping at their desk. Can you show me where someone has made that claim?

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

#252

Post by FussyZeus »

cwilkes wrote: post #223
FussyZeus wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two things: - I have zero problem with a company releasing info pertaining the character of an employee. - If you're an employee doing your job honestly, you shouldn't either.

I have zero problem with a company releasing info pertaining the character of an employee. I'm not sure what you are arguing for. That if a person complains about a company that company can instead of replying to the issue just bring up things it thinks are wrong with the character of an employee? I'm not sure how that makes anything healthier.

So in this situation, where this ex-employee's remarks are being used by a large media source to damage the reputation of the company, you don't think the company should have the right to say, "just so you know, this guy resigned after we caught him stealing from our vendors, so you might want to take his statements with a grain of salt."?

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

#253

Post by jessriedel »

dandare wrote: post #231
jessriedel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thanks for the pointer. Here's the comment you refer to:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10414033

As danso notes, the NY Times editor and Amazon's Carney have now made pretty unequivocal contradictory statements, with little room for them both to be right without one of them outright lying. (And I don't think either one would go on the record here with an outright lie.) Except that the NY Times says "But he [Olson] said he was never confronted with allegations of personally fraudulent conduct or falsifying records, nor did he admit to that... If we had known his status was contested, we would have said so". That is, they can both be telling the truth if Olson was lying to the Times about his departure.

That's my prediction for how this shakes out. And in that case, the Times will have egg on their face for having not properly vetted their sources.

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

#254

Post by pseudalopex »

ucaetano wrote: post #200
danso wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Senior executives are usually careful to point out when they're not speaking for the company. Carney identifies himself as an SVP at Amazon, uses "us" and "we" throughout the piece, and refers to internal records and emails he would have no reason to access otherwise.

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

#255

Post by cjbprime »

jessriedel wrote: post #232
cwilkes wrote: post #220

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. 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?

Alternative theory: the people commenting on HN are software engineers, who are treated better than average at Amazon because it is very easy for them to go work somewhere else.

I don't think any of the employees mentioned in the NYT article worked in software. It looks to me like the NYT found a statistically significant set of experiences that they wrote about while acknowledging that not everyone at Amazon would have these experiences.

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

#256

Post by hnamazon123 »

hnexamazon wrote: post #234
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 no…

That's cool, I'm glad you had a good experience.

Would have been great if things had worked out differently because the project I was working on was extremely cool.

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

#257

Post by FussyZeus »

jsprogrammer wrote: post #251
FussyZeus wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't fathom a workplace where every other day 1/4 of the staff is weeping at their desks and anyone is still working there, especially when the tech market is so highly competitive for good people. Now does that mean it's as eased back as Bezos says? Highly unlikely. More than likely it's an office just like everyone elses, plus or minus a few amenities and a more intense corporate culture.

Sorry, I'm not familiar with the specific claim that every other day 1/4 of Amazon's staff is weeping at their desk. Can you show me where someone has made that claim?

If you cannot make a point without resorting to semantics I'm not interested in hearing it. Either you knew exactly what I meant and are grasping at straws to continue arguing because you have an axe to grind with Amazon, or you thought I was actually referencing a report indicating 1/4 of their staff was weeping at their desks every other day and that somehow that company is still in business. Both possibilities are equally uninteresting.

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

#258

Post by School-Cotton »

marcosdumay wrote: post #171
jessriedel wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I remarked when it first came out, NYTimes article was almost completely anecdotal. That's not damning, but it does require you to trust the reporters to distill a large complicated mess to representative pieces. What part of Carney's piece do you think similarly depends on us trusting him? Do you think he fabricated the email from Kantor? Do you think he's outright lying about the context of Olson's dismissal to…

You know, the bias against anecdotal evidence is great and everything, but it only applies if somebody somewhere has a credible anecdote opposite to the claims. Otherwise, it's as good as data. So, look at the ex-employees opinions, and see if there's one. (And no, PR pieces are not credible.)

How's this for anecdotes? I'm an ex-Amazon employee and I've never seen anyone cry at their desk, and had in fact never heard of this happening until I read the NYT article.

My team was a mediocre place to work; better than some places, worse than others. Worlds away from the bizarro world depicted in the NYT.

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

#259

Post by hans »

Just love that Bezos quote: "that's not the amazon that i know" ... hmm gee uthink? billionaire founder has a different experience, wow who'd a thought?

glassdoor has spelled this out for a long time but its amusing that amazon doesn't admit they'll change.

my thinking is: a company that relishes in frugality = your machine your monitors and your coffee will suck, you will never get promoted, stack rank Plus all this bs about suing via nda and indebtedness around relo assistance etc sounds like the suck .. amazon is downright hostile

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

#260

Post by exodust »

lightbritefight wrote: post #244
exodust wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Grabs popcorn . Olson is clinging to a lie, trying to defend his reputation. Notice how he tries to blame Amazon for his departure, the "revolving series of bosses" and "overwhelmed" with work. "He and others couldn't keep up". Deflection. He's doing his best to construct a version of events where he is one of the innocents, caught up in the nasty Amazon shit-storm. I bet he got a shock to see Amazon reveal his fraud…

>I bet he got a shock to see Amazon reveal his fraudulent activity in a medium post! You think Amazon would make such a claim if it weren't true? So your stance is "it must be true, because it would be really stupid of them if it wasen't?" I think its equally valid to say they are acting stupidly, and counting on dollars and cents to keep any trouble off their door. The truth is, they have just claimed the above. The…

I'm pretty sure a lot of companies would choose to deal with these sorts of internal matters without involving the law.

When the NYT times story came out I remember thinking it sounded a bit spinny. "Let's find an angle" is symptomatic of a desperate click-baity news media industry. NYT isn't as guilty of this as other outlets by a large margin, but the story had what I perceived as fabricated bite.

At the time, I wondered if any Amazon employees would come out defending their employer. Took me 5 seconds to find something... https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2015/08/16/Working-a...

Are there others? Who knows, I don't care enough to search!

I'm not interested to take sides, but in big companies it's more likely there's pockets of problems, rather than company-wide problems.

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