This past Saturday, the New York Times published a long, damning critique of retail giant Amazon’s corporate culture and employee policies. The article describes a company that abuses employees with almost single-minded purpose—pitting them in Thunderdome-style combative decision-making, stack-ranking for performance evaluations and culling the low scores, and even disciplining or firing them for taking personal leave to undergo medical treatment or to visit dying relatives.
Characterizing Amazon’s internal policies as "an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers," the article includes interviews with current and former Amazon employees. The current employees were authorized by Amazon to speak to the press and sound almost breathlessly enthusiastic about the company and its leadership principles, while the former employees paint a picture of office workers driven to sobbing on their desks and being put on "performance improvement plans" for taking too much sick leave—all the while stabbing each other in the back via an anonymous feedback tool in order to climb in the employee rankings.
Not long after the article was published, Amazon CEO and president Jeff Bezos sent an all-hands e-mail refuting the Times’ claims—the wholly sociopathic, Kafkaesque Amazon described in that article, he said, isn’t the Amazon he manages.
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