Former Amazon employees just explained how terrible working there can be in painstaking detail
The New York Times dug deep Saturday into Amazon's work culture, and the results aren't pretty. They interviewed more than 100 current and former employees, many of whom had damning things to say. Conference calls on national holidays and the expectation of constant WiFi access on vacation don't even scrape the surface.
"Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk," said Bo Olson, a former Amazonian who worked in book marketing.
Founder Jeff Bezos' philosophy encourages hostility and confrontation in the office, the Times reports, to the point where other Seattle recruiters sometimes avoid hiring potentially toxic former employees, nicknamed "Amholes."
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The report also points out Amazon's top leadership team is all men. Several female employees said they felt pushed out of the company after creating work schedules around childcare, tending to ill relatives, or even recovering from cancer, miscarriages, and other health concerns. And fathers are out of luck, too: The company doesn't offer paid paternity leave.
Amazon's high turnover rate is starting to make a lot of sense. Read the full report here.
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Julie Kliegman is a freelance writer based in New York. Her work has appeared in BuzzFeed, Vox, Mental Floss, Paste, the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact. Her cats can do somersaults.
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