Blue Mass Group

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The jungle behind amazon.com

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Jack Welch’s style of management (fire each year the bottom 5 or 10%) can’t hold a candle to the management style of Jeff Bezos.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

This is a report catching fire on the Internet about Amazon’s experiment – seeing how far its employees can be pushed for productivity. The cult of efficiency is as old as the Ford assembly line – in this case the widgets are engineers & managers & other workers, who are ingested, chewed and tossed out when they are unable to work 80 hours weeks, burn out, or become pregnant, or have to care for a sick family member.

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Here’s but an excerpt that would make George Orwell proud. (A Modern Animal Farm, if you will:)

“In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

““I can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

“Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

“Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

“However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

“Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)”

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  1. This article is unsettling in so many ways. You have a corporate culture from the leader on down that is abusive, almost sadistic:

    A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her bosses.

    And employees take it on as their own pride in the service of Amazon:

    “This is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things aren’t easy,” said Susan Harker, Amazon’s top recruiter. “When you’re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesn’t work.”

    Amazon has done a remarkable job in inculcating in its workers the idea that helping their profit margin (such as it is) is equivalent to improving humanity. That making it so someone can get a doll in 23 minutes is on par with fighting cancer or educating illiterates. And then when those idealists are burned up, they’re thrown away like a used tissue.

    The whole thing reads like Stockholm Syndrome — a whole company filled with overpaid Patty Hearsts flush with venture capitalist cash thinking that it’s a badge of honor to work like a fool and be treated like a piece of protoplasm-based machinery. Amazon isn’t going to like them, no matter how they try. I don’t mean to blame the employees for this — but I do blame components of that industry and our culture that glorify work at the expense of all. My cousin is like this, and swallows this brainwashing whole.

    If Amazon did this in service of a god, they’d be labeled a cult and hauled into court. But because it’s for profit, it’s seen as an example by so many.

  2. this is the dirty, ugly dark side of today’s capitalist reality. The stark brutality of pitting worker against worker like caged animals. Social Darwinism on steroids. The survival of the most cunning and cruel. The survivalist cult of the rat. Throw your co-worker under the bus, suck up to the boss, save your own skin at all costs.

    And remember — UNIONS ARE EVIL !

    Government regulation guaranteeing the right of workers to organize for fair wages, benefits and working conditions are baaaaaad.

    To make the rich work harder we pay them more — to make the poor work harder we pay them less. Madness.

    Fred Rich LaRiccia,
    Proud lifelong unionist now retired

    • While business owners have always pitted worker against worker, the embrace of this behavior by its victims began in the 1980s, during the Reagan administration.

      The mainstream media did its part to advance the Reagan agenda with “comedy“. One choice laugh-line (cued by the uproarious laugh-track):

      People with money don’t need money.

      At the time, I thought Alex Keaton was a caricature intended to skewer the Republican headset. I know better now— he was a role model for an entire society. Like Archie Bunker (who was similarly transformed from caricature into role model), Alex Keaton is not nearly as funny to me today as it was when first broadcast.

  3. I think a of us can talk about how poorly we are treated at work. The gist of it is we’re either too close to retirement to risk it all now or just starting out, or just starting a family, or have kids in college.
    We are never at an advantage.
    We eat our lunch at our desks, take the phone to the toilet and answer it when we’re “busy” there. We’ve looked elsewhere for work only to find that the other jobs are just the same. (Yes, small business owners do collaborate and we all know that the big businesses do as well)

    Unions are the answer, or in the least, the answer to a way out of this mess. Still, I see the young recruits enter the work force and without exception, they have a nasty opinion of unions, and people on welfare and any notion of togetherness and community. It’s up to the Democratic Party to change that, if they are willing to detach themselves from Wall Street and the big campaign donors. .

  4. Aren’t there laws protecting people who get pregnant or otherwise need to take family leave?

    Why couldn’t the boss of the woman whose colleagues saw her leaving early defend her if he knew the details of the situation and they didn’t?

    • Yeah, there are plenty of laws. There are laws against age discrimination but when I was 50 and looking for a job, for some reason, not a single recruiter would help me. Finally, I did meet with one who was honest, but only if I promised to never name him. In short, he told me this: “My clients never tell me not to bring them anyone over 40, but if I do, my clients always seem to switch to other recruiters…”

      There are laws protecting people who need to take family leave, I think, but even so, the employee would have to press charges and that takes time & money. Meanwhile they are out of work.

      There are lots of laws. Unenforceable laws as long as we have individual workers going up against large companies or corporations.

    • Discrimination — racial, gender, and age — is seldom explicit.

      The real world does not fit the neat categories you would have it follow. This is why it is so crucial to establish external standards of de facto discrimination.

      • Or if the media wasn’t being bought out by anti-worker tycoons like Bezos and Murdoch. Of course, Jeff loves gay rights and get’s invited to all the right cocktail parties so he must be a liberal. What a load of tripe.

        • You’ve hit on a key point, and one that is making it difficult for the Democratic Party to widen its appeal. As long as one is for “gay rights” and “pro choice” and gives lip service to “pay equity for women”, one is accepted into the tent without regard to how one views/treats the labor class and its values.

  5. This article could really hurt their recruiting for experienced engineers. I get contacted by Amazon recruiters from time to time. I am quite happy with my job and have no interest in looking around, but if I were looking I previously would have had Amazon on my list of places to go. Now I am no so sure.

    • It filters out the engineers who would flame out there anyway. I think that kind of work environment is terrible, don’t get me wrong. But were I in HR at Amazon, I would want to go ahead and not get job applicants from folks like stomv, precisely because he wouldn’t stick around long anyway.

      Perhaps the number of applicants will fall, but the folks who read that article and don’t apply are exactly the folks HR doesn’t want to waste anybody’s time with anyway.

      • Running a software development organization as a burnout shop is a venerable tradition. Amazon was not the first and will not be the last. One canonical example was Microsoft in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Apple during the first Steve Jobs regime was another, although Apple was much better at glorifying the experience.

        This is a pervasive enough practice that it has always surprised me that software developers (and engineers in general) are so resistant to union organizing. Strong and effective unions are one of the more effective ways that workers in an earlier time put a stop to abuses like these. In my view, that’s a key motivator for the animus against organized labor.

      • That’s the problem. I am sure I would not “flame out” if I were to go to Amazon. However, I am not sure I would enjoy the BS described in this article, much of which has absolutely nothing to do with getting work done. Why should anyone have to worry about getting back-stabbed by overly competitive coworkers? How exactly is that expected to produce higher-quality engineering work?

        In my personal experience working too many hours usually does not lead to “innovation” but the opposite. Yes, sometimes you got “on a roll” and can spend extra work hours productively, but you can’t force it just because some manager thinks you should be working more. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen bad work produced by people working late hours or pulling all-nighters.

        • Had an article on the benefits of stepping away for a bit; that innovation comes when one steps back and lets the ideas percolate.

          http://goo.gl/5SU0ZW

          Nice counterpoint – if one could connect the dots between the gists of the articles.

  6. I’m going to pass this along to a few people I know to see what the reaction is. I wonder if it will change their shopping habits?

    I don’t shop at Amazon for other reasons, but I do know that the device I’m typing this note is made up of components that probably wouldn’t have made it together without some people working under conditions worse than those described in the NY Times article, I won’t be eating in Portlandia tonight, knowing the name of my chicken…

    I suppose I can’t claim ideological purity or stake out the moral high ground, but it still seems hard to excuse this kind of behavior.

    • It’s virtually impossible for individual consumers to have pure habits when it comes to supply chain assuming they want a modern lifestyle. Only by force of law can we insist that things not be made under these conditions here, and that we won’t import things made under these conditions elsewhere. There are areas such as this where the value of the prophetic voice outweighs the potential for hypocrisy.

      • Even if we can’t fix everything, we can still push back when we are confronted with some of the more egregious examples of greed run amok.

    • Interesting stuff. I read the NYT article with my usual cynicism wondering who at the NYT had fact checked the article that bad mouthed the owner of their primary competitor. This guy’s defensive, clarifying blog made sense to me but JohnMay’s comments speaking out of his own work experience in a like business were very compelling and more convincing frankly .

      It will be very very hard to organize these folk into a union.

      • …wondering who at the NYT had fact checked the article that bad mouthed the owner of their primary competitor.

        Is Amazon competing with the NYT? In what areas?

    • I read that article. He bravely defends his paymaster on a site for people trying to improve their careers. The Times interviewed over 100 people for this story…it’s only newsworthy because it’s a rare case of the media taking on a potential ad-buyer rather than a softer target.

  8. is available from MASSterList:

    …CEO Jeff Bezos responded to the story in a note to employees, saying he didn’t recognize the company that was described in the article. But the fascinating thing was how many readers of the story did. As of this writing, the Times’ article, some 5,900 words, has generated over 4,900 comments on the Times’ website as of this writing. Bezos can deny the conclusions of the Times after interviewing over 100 current and former employees. But he can’t argue past the collective experience of the legions of people who commented either on the Times or other websites saying, basically, what this commenter said on the NYT site: “Here in Seattle Amazon has a well-deserved reputation for being a sweat shop; work life balance does not exist. I’ve known ex-Microsoft colleagues, people who were smart, innovative, hard working and who thrived in Microsoft’s own brand of challenging work environment, who subsequently took jobs at Amazon, and who left after a year or two. All of them.” In other words, there are too many witnesses to be fooled. They give the story an extra level of credibility.

    The scary thing isn’t so much the callous behavior depicted in the article. What’s more frightening is the Brave New World aspect of the place. Amazon simply is slightly ahead of its time in using all manner of metrics to assess and promote top performers while weeding out underperformers. Bezos, even if he pretends otherwise, has figured out that creating a business cult focused relentlessly on performance is the way to win in the marketplace. Amazon’s stock went up $3.70 yesterday.

    • Sounds like Jeff Bezos is cast from the same mold as Bill Gates.

      A typical Bill Gates line, from the early 1990s was (my paraphrase): “the law is the way society tells me how it will try to stop me from doing what I’m going to do anyway.”

      We have known, for a very long time, that if corporations are personified (as they are in recent Supreme Court rulings and GOP dogma) then those people are sociopaths. The behavior of people like Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos is, in my view, an expected outcome of our current laws.

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