Amazon NYT portrait depends on eye of beholder
An unflattering New York Times' portrait of online retailer Amazon as a workplace led to a variety of responses online.
The article, which ran in the NYT print edition this weekend, detailed several anecdotes from former employees who say they were pressured to forego family and personal health for the company. Employees also underwent extensive data monitoring on the job and were encouraged to report co-workers' shortcomings.
On Amazon's behalf, several executives quoted in the article supported the company's performance-enhancing principles. “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.”
However, many on social media empathized with former employees who said they were treated unfairly while dealing with family crises or upon returning to the job after medical treatment including for cancer and miscarriages. "Sounds like The Hunger Games," wrote Stacye Watson on Facebook. "A dystopian nightmare."
On Twitter, Amy Schatz, deputy tech editor at Politico, tweeted: "Never thought about working at Amazon and now I'm not sure I want to remain a customer either."
"Amazon sure sounds like a fun place to work," tweeted visual effects artist and supervisor Todd Vaziri.
In a response piece Saturday, Forbes contributor George Anders wrote that the story left out some crucial information in an anecdote about a young Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon. The story comes from Bezos' 2010 commencement speech at Princeton University.
After Bezos boldly challenged his grandmother to stop smoking his grandfather confronted him about the candor of his remark. The incident, Bezos said, led him to ask graduates: “Will you be clever at the expense of others, or will you be kind?”
Including that aspect of the story would leave readers with a more nuanced picture of Bezos, "as a relentless doer, periodically wrestling with his conscience," Anders wrote.
"I’ve talked to a lot of Amazon alumni over the years, and my sense is that the Times piece captures something fundamentally true about the Seattle company’s breakneck pace," he wrote. "All the same, there’s something worrisome when the discard pile tells a very different story than what makes it into print."
Current Amazon employee Nick Ciubotariu took to LinkedIn to defend the company and respond to the article, which he characterized as a "horribly misinformed piece of 'journalism'” that "slanders my company in public without merit."
Ciubotariu, who listed his job title as head of infrastructure development, Amazon.com Search Experience, said that the during his 18 months at Amazon, "I’ve never worked a single weekend when I didn’t want to. No one tells me to work nights. No one makes me answer emails at night. No one texts me to ask me why emails aren’t answered. I don’t have these expectations of the managers that work for me, and if they were to do this to their Engineers, I would rectify that myself, immediately. And if these expectations were in place, and enforced upon me, I would leave."
Follow Mike Snider on Twitter: @MikeSnider