Daily Pulse: Amazon's Work Culture in Question, AT&T Cozies up to NSA, Good Jobs Go to College Grads
Isabelle Roughol
Building news organisations where people love to work｜Journalist & media executive｜Public historian
Does Amazon live by the law of the jungle? The New York Times unleashed a whale of a story on Amazon over the weekend, detailing the gruesome working conditions for white-collar employees at the company, “the place where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.” The whole story, for which Jodi Kantor and David Streitfield interviewed more than 100 current and former employees, is well worth a read. What transpires is a high-pressure work culture that pushes a bunch of Type A people to give the best performance of their careers – even if that means there’s only a shell of them left at the end.
There’s a lot to unpack in this story. Part of it seems to be newspaper reporters na?vely discovering how Silicon Valley – or brethren in Seattle – works: you don’t disrupt retail, publishing, logistics, video, cloud computing and more in just 20 years by putting in a 9-to-5. It’s not for everyone and it’s not for a lifetime. In most people’s careers, there will only be one or two such sprints. Or none at all. (The writers would also be more credible if they spared us the snark whenever they mention Amazon’s mission of delivering Cocoa Krispies or Elsa dolls on time. Not every company can put out fish wrap every day…)
“Amazon runs like a giant startup. If the description of Amazon’s culture makes you cringe, startup life is most definitely NOT for you. And that doesn’t mean that it’s brutal, necessarily, but wait, yes it does, sometimes. Businesses don’t just start themselves.”
- Rita J. King, co-director at Science House
The other part of it is Amazon pushing that startup ethos to the extreme. The descriptions of 80-hour weeks, midnight emails and workers put on “performance watch” after being distracted by a cancer diagnosis or the death of a parent are chilling. LinkedIn Influencer Rita J. King, co-director at Science House, mapped Amazon’s corporate culture (and confirmed with her own source the bias against cancer patients.) Its three main traits: “obsessed with the customer, speed to market and data.” That’s the kind of corporate culture that’s second to none at getting things done, but rarely warm and fuzzy.
Or is it? Amazon employee Nick Ciubotariu takes the investigation apart paragraph by paragraph: “The Amazon described in this article may have existed, in the past. Certainly, I’ve heard others refer to “how things used to be” but it is definitely not the Amazon of today.”
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos wrote a memo to employees, encouraging them to read the article and report such cases to HR and to him. But, he added: “The article doesn’t describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with every day."
Further reading on LinkedIn
- The Amazon Experience, by Stephen Avalone, an employee who breaks down Amazon's HR structure.
- The Amazon Exposé and the Inconvenient Truth, by IT manager and tech blogger Neil Hughes, on how technology betrayed workers.
- Amazon and the NYT: When journalists try to shoot down a successful business, by Enrique Dans, an IE Business School professor in Madrid who teaches a case study on Amazon.
- Again, Rita J. King on the Culture Controversy at Amazon, Decoded
- And Nick Ciubotariu's can't-miss essay, An Amazonian's response to "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace"
Let me know in comments if I've missed valuable pieces...
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AT&T had an “extremely collaborative” relationship with the NSA, says a New York Times investigation. The operator’s “extreme willingness to help” netted the intelligence agency, among other things, access to billions of emails and the wiretapping of Internet communications at the UN headquarters in New York, an AT&T customer, the Times reports, based on documents it obtained covering the 2003-2013 period.
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The death toll keeps climbing and questions keep surfacing around the chemical explosion in Tianjin, China. At least 114 people are now dead, with 700 still in hospital and dozens missing. Local media reported that as much as 70 times the authorized limit of sodium cyanide was stored in the warehouse that exploded. Unaware, firefighters initially used water on the chemical fire, which only helped it spread. Now the people of Tianjing are wondering what exactly they’ve been breathing and drinking for days.
#Quote
“We owe the families of victims, Tianjin people and all Chinese an answer.”
- Chinese PM Li Keqiang, visiting the site of the explosion on Sunday
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China is sending agents to the United States to pressure high-profile expats to return home, the New York Times reports. (The Times was on fire this weekend.) The White House has privately demanded Beijing halt Operation Fox Hunt, the code name for a mission to intimidate fugitive expats in the US, many of them wealthy businessmen accused of corruption, into going home by threatening their families there.
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Asia’s economic powerhouses are lagging. Japan’s GDP recorded a 1.6% contraction in the second quarter (annualized rate) despite a promising first quarter. Part of what ails Japan, besides low domestic demand, is the slowdown in China. Bloomberg surveyed economists who estimate the Chinese economy grew by 6.3% in the first half of the year and bet on 6.6% for the full year. That’s the lowest figure yet and far below the official target of 7%.
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GE’s expected to get the green light for its Alstom deal. The $13.8 billion purchase of the French company’s power business would be GE’s biggest deal ever. The EU had warned of anticompetitive issues that could block the deal, but GE has reportedly made the necessary adjustements.
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97% of the good jobs created since 2010 went to college grads. That’s according to research by Georgetown University, which defines “good jobs” as those paying at least $53k a year for full-time work. Workers with a high school diploma or less have on the contrary lost 39,000 “good jobs.” The study also shows the recovery has created more of those good jobs than middle- or low-wage ones. The section that’s really hurting is the middle-wage jobs – and with them, the middle class: there are still 900,000 fewer of those opportunities than before the recession.
#Chart
Credit: Georgetown University Center on Education and the Workforce
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Director, Engineering & Product Development, US, at Boldyn Networks
9 年If you think working conditions are harsh at Amazon, try working for the factory that made the shirt you're wearing. I think that much of this perceived horror is actually embedded in the DNA of start-up companies -- they're snake pits, pure and simple. Eighty hour workweeks and midnight emails are a fact of life when there's a lot of investment capital and the future potential of the business and your employment at stake. And typically, the cream rises to the top, as the old saying goes. Now I realize that Amazon does not fit into the start-up "box" in the eyes of most. However, if you consider the various businesses activities that Amazon is engaged in, and understand that each activity was cultivated like a standalone start-up company, you may start to appreciate why Amazon has "start-up business culture" in its own DNA. And let's be honest, you don't have to go far to find someone that had a bad experience in Corporate America -- so why single out Amazon?
This is why I love shows such as The Undercover Boss. It opens Executives, CEOs, and other people in leadership roles into a whole new world. If your day is spent looking at numbers on whether or not you are meeting goals, etc., then employee unhappiness and harsh mistreatment is often overlooked or goes unnoticed. I've worked at large organizations and have seen so much disconnect between teams, departments, and leadership that resulted in a lack of communication and disorganization. It felt as if there were multiple companies under one roof. I think the bigger a business grows, the more disconnect it can become. I think there should be a department or team at corporations that focuses on culture and leadership orientation and skills to ensure things described in this article are dealt with or doesn't happen. And not Human Resource either. My question is, does Amazon create a culture that fosters this sort of behavior? Employees' experience can vary widely but the 'bad experiences' should not be discredited or swept under the rug of denial.
Independent Software Consultant and founder of Topstone Software
9 年The idea that Amazon is like a startup is completely misplaced. Startups demand a lot, but they also have high rewards. The NYT article and many of the reader comments on the article and in venues like Slashdot and Hacker News describe an environment where employees stab each other in the back. Meetings are described as brutal cage matches where one person attempts to gain advantage over another or another group. Amazon salaries are, by their own description, competitive, but not near the top. Employees who work 80 hours a week and risk their personal relationships and even their health have little financial upside. In contrast, a startup must have employees who collaborate and support each other. If the startup is a "home run" then everyone benefits. Employee turnover at a startup is also toxic. Hiring is very expensive and time consuming. No startup could have the "pipeline" model that Amazon has. I have built a large scale web application (https://www.nderground.net) on Amazon Web Services. I chose AWS because it is far and away better than the competition. Because my application is constructed with Amazon web services like DynamoDB and relies on the extremely fast Amazon internal network, it would be difficult to move. Reading this NYT article I am worried that the carnage of Amazon culture will hurt AWS and they will lose their lead. It has not happened yet. But I have to wonder how long Amazon can feed the "pipeline". Especially when people have read about what the culture is like.
Sales and Strategy Leader. Mastercard International ServiceNow, Broadridge, Adobe, PayPal Alum Start-Up Mentor and Advisor.
9 年I am not sure why interviewing 100 employees is considered investigative journalism? Was the reporter aware they could find over 5000 employees reviews, past and present, on Glass Door? Could have saved them a lot of legwork. We used to be jokingly called a cult when I worked at Enterprise. 80-100 hour weeks was the norm. Washing cars in freezing temps in our suits all day long was as well. Everyone started at the bottom to move to the top. Competitive athletes faired the best. I would not trade those days for anything. I loved it. Worked hard and played hard. That being said, we were a family and the Taylors cared very deeply about employees and giving back, and were very clear that if we take care of customers, take care of employees, then profits will follow. Whether or not all the things listed are true, caring for your people in their time of need is always right. What you give, you get. And no culture should say they promote direct and honest communication, and yet encourage tattle telling at the same time. That does not jive.