Bezos Assails Callous Practices as He Rebuts Times Article

And if these expectations were in place, and enforced upon me, I would leave.

Saying that he was “horrified” by a New York Times article recounting callous behavior on the part of Amazon executives, company founder Jeff Bezos warned today that any employees found lacking in empathy would be instantly purged.

In a scathing and somewhat scary report written by The New York Times, some Amazon employees have revealed what it’s really like to work for the etailer, and it isn’t pretty. “It’s a very competitive atmosphere”, and this can create an uncomfortable working environment because “at Amazon, it’s particularly direct. Because, for example, you can send secret negative feedback about your peers to your peers’ bosses”.

On August 17, 2015 the New York Times published a lengthy article entitled “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace”.

He added: “I strongly believe that anyone working in a company that really is like the one described in the NYT would be insane to stay”. “It’s easy to get so hung up on statistics that you miss the value of what that individual brings to the table in terms of personality, connectivity and those intangible pieces”, said David Lewis, CEO of HR outsourcing and consulting firm OperationsInc in Norwalk, Conn. It had been mistreating low-wage workers who had few options, and it deserved to be shamed into changing its behavior.

Numerous responses to the investigation describe it as representative of a serious problem in worker treatment, especially in an age in which technology companies are trying more and more to breed comfortable environments. Whether internal customer-obsession exists already or whether Amazon undertakes one of the greatest brand transformations ever, it’s going to be one heck of a show.

There some who claimed Amazon edged out employees who were experiencing personal ordeals, including cancer and miscarriages. If there was anyone left who thought Amazon was a doe-eyed startup with a penchant for brightly coloured bean bags and office trampolines, they must have been shocked.

“Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves“, Noelle Barnes told the Times. This is this sort of intense culture that Jeff Bezos has been pushing at this company for two decades. They call their employees “athletes”. Whether a result of stress, my own mistakes, the mistakes of others, others taking out their stress on me – there have been times that work and the workplace was miserable for one reason or another.

From a mid-level engineer to the CEO, Amazon employees are fighting back hard against accusations that the company treats its workers deplorably.