Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
Join 350,000+ subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of
The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
You are now subscribed
Your newsletter sign-up was successful
Want to add more newsletters?
An account already exists for this email address, please log in.
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."
The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Join more than 350,000 subscribers and keep yourself informed with a selection of The Week’s most interesting, enlightening and entertaining stories - plus daily puzzles.
Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace — that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to "disagree and commit"...to rip into colleagues' ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision. [The New York Times]
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.
Sign up to get Today’s Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the day’s biggest news and analysis – and the best features from TheWeek.com
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.
