Amazon boss Jeff Bezos defends company’s workplace culture

But if you know of any stories like those reported, I want you to escalate to HR.

Ultimately, though, Amazon’s culture is inseparable from its overall performance. Steady turnover is described as “purposeful Darwinism”. But hopefully, you don’t recognize the company described. When they took a vacation to Florida, she spent every day at Starbucks using the wireless connection to get work done. As a company with nearly 160,000 employees around the world, spanning e-commerce, cloud computing, logistics, and more, it would perhaps be more surprising if there weren’t disgusting situations as described by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld in their Times’ article.

A tweet from Fortune magazine – which notes that it’s “clearly why Amazon doesn’t make Fortune’s 100 Best Companies to Work For list – even seemed to mock the detail that Amazon employees have been seen crying at their desks”.

These are undoubtedly horrifying stories. I just don’t have a problem with a company that demands a lot from their employees.

Bezos also pointed them to a more positive profile of working at Amazon. One hundred is a vanishingly small percentage of that. The accusations contained within the NYT piece are reprehensible.

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. Free gourmet meals. Lavish benefits. Those who had the misfortune to suffer from cancer or miscarriages experienced even worse treatment. The sad, frightful fact is that similar anecdotes coming from ex-employees at Goldman, Skadden, Bain, or various fast-growing startups in Silicon Valley would probably be nonstories-that is, until someone actually dies.

In an internal memo sent to staff, Bezos said he does not recognise the “soulless and dystopian” Amazon the piece portrayed and that it didn’t “describe the Amazon I know or the caring Amazonians I work with”.

Today, like many out there, I’m struggling with remaining a customer of Amazon. In the future, I will be happy to pay an extra fee so that all parcels are delivered in brown paper by a courier driver bribed to look chipper and carefree as he or she works.

He wrote: “No one tells me to work nights”. Beyond a certain point, you’re so exhausted that you get much less done than you think you do. In the hellscape employee culture of Amazon, there is only one incubus and his name be Bezos.

The article ranges from describing approval-obsessed employees driven to work insane hours to describing a malicious-sounding system of employees ratting out one another to descriptions of employees penalized for taking time to care for sick relatives or raise a family.

Coming from Bezos himself, that sounds like a pretty open invitation for unhappy workers to depart.

During the 1990s, I cried sporadically in the loos at WH Smith’s when managers would scream at us about tills being 12p down on a £3,000 take.