The company is conducting an experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
white-collar workers to get them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
Amazon employees entering the company’s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country.
SEATTLE
— On Monday mornings,
fresh recruits line up for an orientation
intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.
They
are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one
employee recalled. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace,
there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. To be the
best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles,
14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later,
those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m
Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace
conventions.
At
Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in
meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by
text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards
that the company boasts are “unreasonably high.” The internal phone
directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one
another’s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage
others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned
about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”)
Many
of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years.
The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a
quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock.
Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff — “purposeful
Darwinism,” one former Amazon human resources director said. Some
workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises
said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given
time to recover.
Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button,
it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push
white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable.
The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the
popular management bromides that other corporations at least pay lip
service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate
machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezos’ ever-expanding ambitions.
“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.”
Bo
Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book
marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep
in the office, a sight other workers described as well. “You walk out
of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face,” he
said. “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
Thanks
in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is
stronger than ever. Its swelling campus is transforming a swath of this
city, a 10-million-square-foot bet that tens of thousands of new workers
will be able to sell everything to everyone everywhere. Last month, it
eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a
market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the
fifth-wealthiest person on earth.
Tens
of millions of Americans know Amazon as customers, but life inside its
corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is required; even
low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement. The
company authorized only a handful of senior managers to talk to
reporters for this article, declining requests for interviews with Mr.
Bezos and his top leaders.
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
Bo Olson, worked in books marketing
However,
more than 100 current and former Amazonians — members of the leadership
team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and
engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to
the recent mobile phone launch — described how they tried to reconcile
the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called
its thrilling power to create.
In
interviews, some said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it
pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees are
motivated by “thinking big and knowing that we haven’t scratched the
surface on what’s out there to invent,” said Elisabeth Rommel, a retail
executive who was one of those permitted to speak.
Others
who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in
their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few
who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s
way of working.
“A
lot of people who work there feel this tension: It’s the greatest place
I hate to work,” said John Rossman, a former executive there who
published a book, “The Amazon Way.”
“It would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”
Tony Galbato, Amazon vice president for human resources
Amazon
may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has
just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work
world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously,
come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global
competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the
vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more
nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.
“Organizations
are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money,
either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the
executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps
old-line businesses become more responsive to change.
On
a recent morning, as Amazon’s new hires waited to begin orientation,
few of them seemed to appreciate the experiment in which they had
enrolled. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an
M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old,
lumbering company for a faster, grittier one.
“Conflict brings about innovation,” he said.
A Philosophy of Work
Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early.
He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton.
He didn’t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating
that every puff cost her a few minutes. “You’ve taken nine years off
your life!” he told her. She burst into tears.
He
was 10 at the time. Decades later, he created a technological and
retail giant by relying on some of the same impulses: eagerness to tell
others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on
confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics,
buoyed by his experience in the early 1990s at D. E. Shaw, a financial
firm that overturned Wall Street convention by using algorithms to get
the most out of every trade.
According
to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from
the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought
sapped businesses over time — bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of
rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the
workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions
simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to
the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and
stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.
The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith
that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies
where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes,
Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used
in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at
lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.
The
guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: “Hire
and develop the best”) who hold one another to towering expectations and
are liberated from the forces — red tape, office politics — that keep
them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit “ownership”
(No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and “dive
deep,” (No. 12) or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or
identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.
The
workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who
is really achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are
often described as “athletes” with endurance, speed (No. 8: “bias for
action”), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits
(No. 7: “think big”).
“You can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you can’t choose two out of three,” Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to
shareholders, when the company sold only books, and which still serves
as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he
warned them, “It’s not easy to work here.”
Mr.
Rossman, the former executive, said that Mr. Bezos was addressing a
meeting in 2003 when he turned in the direction of Microsoft, across the
water from Seattle, and said he didn’t want Amazon to become “a country
club.” If Amazon becomes like Microsoft, “we would die,” Mr. Bezos
added.
While
the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants — with
its dog-friendly offices, work force that skews young and male, on-site
farmers’ market and upbeat posters — the company is considered a place
apart. Google and Facebook motivate employees with gyms, meals and
benefits, like cash handouts for new parents, “designed to take care of
the whole you,” as Google puts it.
Amazon,
though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority.
Compensation is considered competitive — successful midlevel managers
can collect the equivalent of an extra salary from grants of a stock
that has increased more than tenfold since 2008. But workers are
expected to embrace “frugality” (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to
the cellphones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. (No
daily free food buffets or regular snack supplies, either.) The focus is
on relentless striving to please customers, or “customer obsession”
(No. 1), with words like “mission” used to describe lightning-quick
delivery of Cocoa Krispies or selfie sticks.
As
the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his
original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have
worked closely with him say. “My main job today: I work hard at helping
to maintain the culture,” Mr. Bezos said last year at a conference run by Business Insider, a web publication in which he is an investor.
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” (No. 13) —
to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the
point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.
“We
always want to arrive at the right answer,” said Tony Galbato, vice
president for human resources, in an email statement. “It would
certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and
not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.”
At
its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision
come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by
stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most
committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions
in the leadership principles like “never settle” and “no task is beneath
them.” Even relatively junior employees can make major contributions.
The new delivery-by-drone project announced in 2013, for example, was
coinvented by a low-level engineer named Daniel Buchmueller.
“I was so addicted to wanting to be successful there. For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from.”
Dina Vaccari worked on projects from corporate gift cards to sales of scientific supplies, 2008 to 2014.
Last
August, Stephenie Landry, an operations executive, joined in
discussions about how to shorten delivery times and developed an idea
for rushing goods to urban customers in an hour or less. One hundred
eleven days later, she was in Brooklyn directing the start of the new
service, Prime Now.
“A
customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all
of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23
minutes,” said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak,
still sounding exhilarated months later about providing “Frozen” dolls
in record time.
That
becomes possible, she and others said, when everyone follows the
dictates of the leadership principles. “We’re trying to create those
moments for customers where we’re solving a really practical need,” Ms.
Landry said, “in this way that feels really futuristic and magical.”
Motivating the ‘Amabots’
Company
veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to
drive themselves. “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,”
said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with
the system.
In
Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic
systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came
under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse
toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside,
taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)
But
in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data
and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar
employees to do more and more. “The company is running a continual
performance improvement algorithm on its staff,” said Amy Michaels, a
former Kindle marketer.
The
process begins when Amazon’s legions of recruiters identify thousands
of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by “bar raisers,”
star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that
only the best are hired. As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel
dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the
company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their
performance to the success of their assigned projects, whether selling
wine or testing the delivery of packages straight to shoppers’ car
trunks.
“When you have so much turnover, the risk is that people are seen as fungible. You know that tomorrow you’re going to look around and some people are going to have left the company or been managed out.”
Amy Michaels worked in advertising and marketing, 2012-2014.
Every
aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and
discipline the company’s marketers, engineers and finance specialists:
the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance;
and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or
improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.
Some
veterans interviewed said they were protected from pressures by
nurturing bosses or worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others
said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life
boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being “vocally
self-critical” is included in the description of the leadership
principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an
insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall
Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union
campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and
Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on
vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends.
“One
time I didn’t sleep for four days straight,” said Dina Vaccari, who
joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once
used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in
India to enter data so she could get more done. “These businesses were
my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.”
She
and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had
internalized Amazon’s priorities. One ex-employee’s fiancé became so
concerned about her nonstop working night after night that he would
drive to the Amazon campus at 10 p.m. and dial her cellphone until she
agreed to come home. When they took a vacation to Florida, she spent
every day at Starbucks using the wireless connection to get work done.
“I would see people practically combust.”
Liz Pearce, worked on Amazon’s wedding registry
“That’s
when the ulcer started,” she said. (Like several other former workers,
the woman requested that her name not be used because her current
company does business with Amazon. Some current employees were reluctant
to be identified because they were barred from speaking with
reporters.)
To
prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail
operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed
metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers
do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers
reach the “abandon point” in a Kindle book; and what they will stream
based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not
building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does
not have enough gardening gloves in stock.
“Data
creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,” said Sean Boyle, who
runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by
the company to speak. “Data is incredibly liberating.”
Amazon
employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a
process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called
business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or
two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50
or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are
cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.
Explanations
like “we’re not totally sure” or “I’ll get back to you” are not
acceptable, many employees said. Some managers sometimes dismissed such
responses as “stupid” or told workers to “just stop it.” The toughest
questions are often about getting to the bottom of “cold pricklies,” or
email notifications that inform shoppers that their goods won’t arrive
when promised — the opposite of the “warm fuzzy” sensation of consumer
satisfaction.
The
sessions crowd out other work, many workers complain. But they also say
that is part of the point: The meetings force them to absorb the
metrics of their business, their minds swimming with details.
“There’s no reward for not speaking up. ‘Good backbone’ is a compliment. It’s a very seductive quality about the organization because people want to contribute.”
Stephenie Landry has worked on projects from grocery delivery to sales of books and baby gear since 2004.
“Once
you know something isn’t as good as it could be, why wouldn’t you want
to fix it?” said Julie Todaro, who led some of Amazon’s largest retail
categories.
Employees
talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough. One Amazon
building complex is named Day 1, a reminder from Mr. Bezos that it is
only the beginning of a new era of commerce, with much more to
accomplish.
In
2012, Chris Brucia, who was working on a new fashion sale site,
received a punishing performance review from his boss, a half-hour
lecture on every goal he had not fulfilled and every skill he had not
yet mastered. Mr. Brucia silently absorbed the criticism, fearing he was
about to be managed out, wondering how he would tell his wife.
“Congratulations,
you’re being promoted,” his boss finished, leaning in for a hug that
Mr. Brucia said he was too shocked to return.
Noelle
Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a
saying around campus: “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad
about themselves.”
A Running Competition
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. After she
had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m.
to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop
later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues,
who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback
accusing her of leaving too soon.
“I
can’t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying you’re not
doing your work,” she says he told her. She left the company after a
little more than a year.
Ms.
Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the
widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or
criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends
the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the
subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at
the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to
outperform everyone else.
Craig
Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to
provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s
office. Most comments, he said, are positive.
However,
many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described
making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or
to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet,
described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified
colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism
was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy
Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the
full paste.”
Soon
the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices.
Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product
called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual
performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of
Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns
The Washington Post.)
The
rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees
say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas
compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even
when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership
principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.
“You can feel comfortable that if there’s a flaw in your plan someone will tell you to your face.”
David Loftesness worked as a developer and manager on Amazon’s internal search capabilities, 2003-2006.
Resources
are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are
especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions.
To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes “you drown someone
in the deep end of the pool,” then take his or her subordinates. Ideas
are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear
speaking up.
David
Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but
could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment
echoed by many others.
For
years, he and his team devoted themselves to improving the search
capabilities of Amazon’s website — only to discover that Mr. Bezos had
greenlighted a secret competing effort to build an alternate technology.
“I’m not going to be the kind of person who can work in this
environment,” he said he concluded. He went on to become a director of
engineering at Twitter.
Each
year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open
tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate
subordinates’ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a
matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies,
including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have
dropped the practice — often called stack ranking, or “rank and yank” —
in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just
to meet quotas.
The
review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees,
whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the
hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that
those who remain will determine their fates.
Preparing
is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid
losing good members of their teams — which could spell doom — they must
come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and
incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of
choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. “You learn
how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,” said a marketer who
spent six years in the retail division. “It’s a horrible feeling.”
Mr.
Galbato, the human resources executive, explained the company’s
reasoning for the annual staff paring. “We hire a lot of great people,”
he said in an email, “but we don’t always get it right.”
Dick
Finnegan, a consultant who advises companies on how to retain
employees, warns of the costs of mandatory cuts. “If you can build an
organization with zero deadwood, why wouldn’t you do it?” he asked. “But
I don’t know how sustainable it is. You’d have to have a never-ending
two-mile line around the block of very qualified people who want to work
for you.”
Many
women at Amazon attribute its gender gap — unlike Facebook, Google or
Walmart, it does not currently have a single woman on its top leadership
team — to its competition-and-elimination system. Several former
high-level female executives, and other women participating in a recent
internal Amazon online discussion that was shared with The New York
Times, said they believed that some of the leadership principles worked
to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions
because of intangible criteria like “earn trust” (principle No. 10) or
the emphasis on disagreeing with colleagues. Being too forceful, they
said, can be particularly hazardous for women in the workplace.
Motherhood
can also be a liability. Michelle Williamson, a 41-year-old parent of
three who helped build Amazon’s restaurant supply business, said her
boss, Shahrul Ladue, had told her that raising children would most
likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long
hours required. Mr. Ladue, who confirmed her account, said that Ms.
Williamson had been directly competing with younger colleagues with
fewer commitments, so he suggested she find a less demanding job at
Amazon. (Both he and Ms. Williamson left the company.)
He added that he usually worked 85 or more hours a week and rarely took a vacation.
When ‘All’ Isn’t Good Enough
Molly
Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings
for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was
suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her
status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less
pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was “a
problem.” As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him
and never returned to Amazon.
“When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,” she said.
A
woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after
she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while
she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee
who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had
surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she
said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a
family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”
A
woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a “performance
improvement plan” — Amazon code for “you’re in danger of being fired” —
because “difficulties” in her “personal life” had interfered with
fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who
had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly
instead of being given time to recover.
A
former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman
who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another
who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans,
accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. “What
kind of company do we want to be?” the executive recalled asking her
bosses.
The
mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. “I had just experienced
the most devastating event in my life,” the woman recalled via email,
only to be told her performance would be monitored “to make sure my
focus stayed on my job.”
“The joke in the office was that when it came to work/life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last.”
Jason Merkoski worked on projects including Kindle and the Fire TV device. Employed at Amazon 2006 to 2010, then again in 2014.
Mr.
Berman, the spokesman, said such responses to employees’ crises were
“not our policy or practice.” He added, “If we were to become aware of
anything like that, we would take swift action to correct it.” Amazon
also made Ms. Harker, the top recruiter, available to describe the
leadership team’s strong support over the last two years as her husband
battled a rare cancer. “It took my breath away,” she said.
Several
employment lawyers in the Seattle area said they got regular calls from
Amazon workers complaining of unfair treatment, including those who
said they had been pushed out for “not being sufficiently devoted to the
company,” said Michael Subit. But that is not a basis for a suit by
itself, he said. “Unfairness is not illegal,” echoed Sara Amies, another
lawyer. Without clear evidence of discrimination, it is difficult to
win a suit based on a negative evaluation, she said.
For
all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or
unwilling to further endure the hardships for the cause of delivering
swim goggles and rolls of Scotch tape to customers just a little
quicker.
Jason
Merkoski, 42, an engineer, worked on the team developing the first
Kindle e-reader and served as a technology evangelist for Amazon,
traveling the world to learn how people used the technology so it could
be improved. He left Amazon in 2010 and then returned briefly in 2014.
“The
sheer number of innovations means things go wrong, you need to rectify,
and then explain, and heaven help if you got an email from Jeff,” he
said. “It’s as if you’ve got the C.E.O. of the company in bed with you
at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.”
A Stream of Departures
Amazon
retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their
signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty
relocation fees if they leave within two years. Several fathers said
they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses
or peers to spend less time with their families. (Many tech companies
are racing to top one another’s family leave policies — Netflix just
began offering up to a year of paid parental leave. Amazon, though,
offers no paid paternity leave.)
In
interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them
with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were
sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork
them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this
spring, he wondered if Amazon would “bring in college kids who have
fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.”
Mr. Shipley is 25.
Amazon insists its reputation for high attrition is misleading. A 2013 survey by PayScale,
a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year,
among the briefest in the Fortune 500. Amazon officials insisted tenure
was low because hiring was so robust, adding that only 15 percent of
employees had been at the company more than five years. Turnover is
consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but
declined to disclose any data.
“Working at Amazon can be a bit of an acquired taste, because everyone has a different need for positive reinforcement. It was hard to feel like the work we were doing was satisfactory. There are not a lot of people that last even as long as I stayed.”
Chris Brucia worked at Amazon from 2005-2012, on projects from software sales to launching a new flash-sale site.
Employees,
human resources executives and recruiters describe a steady exodus.
“The pattern of burn and churn at Amazon, resulting in a
disproportionate number of candidates from Amazon showing at our
doorstep, is clear and consistent,” Nimrod Hoofien, a director of
engineering at Facebook and an Amazon veteran, said in a recent Facebook post.
Those
departures are not a failure of the system, many current and former
employees say, but rather the logical conclusion: mass intake of new
workers, who help the Amazon machine spin and then wear out, leaving the
most committed Amazonians to survive.
“Purposeful
Darwinism,” Robin Andrulevich, a former top Amazon human resources
executive who helped draft the Leadership Principles, posted in reply to
Mr. Hoofien’s comment. “They never could have done what they’ve
accomplished without that,” she said in an interview, referring to
Amazon’s cycle of constantly hiring employees, driving them and cutting
them.
“Amazon
is O.K. with moving through a lot of people to identify and retain
superstars,” said Vijay Ravindran, who worked at the retailer for seven
years, the last two as the manager overseeing the checkout technology.
“They keep the stars by offering a combination of incredible
opportunities and incredible compensation. It’s like panning for gold.”
The
employees who stream from the Amazon exits are highly desirable because
of their work ethic, local recruiters say. In recent years, companies
like Facebook have opened large Seattle offices, and they benefit from
the Amazon outflow.
Recruiters,
though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about
bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so
combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is “Amholes”
— pugnacious and work-obsessed.
Call
them what you will, their ranks are rapidly increasing. Amazon is
finishing a 37-floor office tower near its South Lake Union campus and
building another tower next to it. It plans a third next to that and has
space for two more high-rises. By the time the dust settles in three
years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more
than triple what it had as recently as 2013.
Those
new workers will strive to make Amazon the first trillion-dollar
retailer, in the hope that just about everyone will be watching Amazon
movies and playing Amazon games on Amazon tablets while they tell their
Amazon Echo communications device that they need an Amazon-approved
plumber and new lawn chairs, and throw in some Amazon potato chips as
well.
Maybe
it will happen. Liz Pearce spent two years at Amazon, managing projects
like its wedding registry. “The pressure to deliver far surpasses any
other metric,” she said. “I would see people practically combust.”
But
just as Jeff Bezos was able to see the future of e-commerce before
anyone else, she added, he was able to envision a new kind of workplace:
fluid but tough, with employees staying only a short time and employers
demanding the maximum.
“Amazon
is driven by data,” said Ms. Pearce, who now runs her own Seattle
software company, which is well stocked with ex-Amazonians. “It will
only change if the data says it must — when the entire way of hiring and
working and firing stops making economic sense.”
The
retailer is already showing some strain from its rapid growth. Even for
entry-level jobs, it is hiring on the East Coast, and many employees
are required to hand over all their contacts to company recruiters at
“LinkedIn” parties. In Seattle alone, more than 4,500 jobs are open,
including one for an analyst specializing in “high-volume hiring.”
Some companies, faced with such an overwhelming need for new bodies, might scale back their ambitions or soften their message.
Not Amazon. In a recent recruiting video, one young woman warns: “You either fit here or you don’t. You love it or you don’t. There is no middle ground.”
No comments:
Post a Comment