"Customer obsession" is something everyone can grasp however. Everyone can relate to this; many of us are customers of Amazon ourselves. "Is this helping our customer?" "Is this something the customer wants?" "Do I have the customer's interests at heart?" When those are the questions being asked, then values such as honesty and integrity come out naturally.
That, to me, is probably the most enjoyable thing about working here. There is plenty of disagreement and debate on how to fix an issue, what it would take, or what's the right way to go about it. We often don't get to address things as quickly or as decisively as we'd like. But I never feel like "no one gives a shit". Everyone believes customer obsession is the right thing to be. And they, we, are fanatical about protecting it.
Jeff's a good guy. I admire him too.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS)
This isn't the type of leader you want to be.
As a current employee at Amazon, that article might as well be fiction as far as I can tell. It describes nothing like what I or any of my co-workers have ever experienced here. We chuckle about it, occasionally, making jokes about crying at our desk, etc. But seriously, that article does not describe the place where I work.
When the article came out, Jeff sent a response to the company that has subsequently been published online. In it he said, paraphrased, "I would quit if my work environment was what the NYT article described, and I'm sure any of you would, too. If you're here, and you're work environment is anything like what the article describes, please _tell me_ so we can fix it."
You've mentioned elsewhere that Amazon has among the worst employee retention in the industry, but that's a fact that I'd also dispute. I've seen articles like http://www.slate.com/blogs/business_insider/2013/07/28/turno..., but as far as I can tell they're using median tenure as a proxy for employee retention. That's going to skew the results in any company that is hiring at a high rate. Imagine a hypothetical company that has gone from 50 to 100 employees in the past 12 months. Median tenure is only going to be less than 1 year at that company, regardless of whether or not anybody has quit. Amazon also hire lots of seasonal workers to handle shipping, customer support etc, which also very likely skews the results.
Glassdoor is filed with them too
I'm glad you are happy at your job. Many people disagree.
Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell? I don't.
Agreed that Glassdoor is an outrageously bad indicator about a company, taken in isolation.
> Do you really think Amazon could build things like AWS, Alexa, the Go Store, etc, if it was a sweatshop where everybody but Jeff was in hell?
Nobody is claiming that every single employee has a terrible life at Amazon. But new college grads who don't mind and/or mind but don't really believe better working conditions are possible can build most of what you referenced.
I have only anecdotal evidence, but the majority of ex Facebook, Apple, and Google employees I know say pretty balanced pro/con things about their former workplaces.
Of the six ex Amazon employees I know well enough to discuss this with, they universally decry the horrible work cultures they experienced there.
So, I'm glad you like your work culture, but I know I'd never even consider working at a Jeff Bezos company. Despite how awesome I thing Blue Origin is.
The counterargument is that of course the things which makes Amazon's work culture toxic to people are orthogonal to their success and not a cause of it. My former boss was very well aware that she could sometimes be downright mean and nasty to our staff, and I cringed every time she justified it by citing what people thought the same of Steve Jobs: While true, we can't avoid the fundamental problem of causal inference, and there is no saying that had Jeff been actively striving to make a more welcoming culture, or if Steve or my former boss were nice people, that they wouldn't have experienced even greater success.
Having "success" be the metric is a very slippery slope.
They have terrible retention. One of the worst and in many years the absolute worst.
A few years back workers were passing out from working in 100 degree temps. They were disciplined for performance and instead of installing air conditioning, they lined up ambulances and paramedics to take falling bodies to the hospital. https://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/09/19/inside-amazons-ver...
This is grotesque.
For their core engineering, BD etc... teams in Seattle, retention is great.
Low skill, yes, low pay, God yes, seasonal - not usually. At least where I am, they aggressively hire for full time positions, and clearly intend for non-temporary employees to consider it as a career. Retention is poor because of the environment and the workload.
And theft. Apparently there's a lot of theft. But that's bound to happen when you surround people with expensive merchandise, work them like dogs and refuse to pay them a decent wage.
This is pretty good rant from the technical\engineering side: https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX
There is no need to fetishize amazon and if amazon is your model I feel sorry for your employees.
The hardest part of running a marathon is training -- hitting mileage goals, pushing yourself during workouts, prioritizing running above social outings, staying injury-free, and staying healthy. Not to mention the occasional psychological hurdle and hormonal changes. It really lines up quite well with the startup experience...
What Jeff is basically saying here in this letter is that the pedal is to the metal, forever: We can't have process as the foundation because it ossifies the organization! Be nimble to the rules of the game.
When translated however, that means you are either empowering your organization to change and make new processes at scale and speed, or you have whatever the default process of solving problems from scratch each time. It's the anarchist's dilemma. That is a tough organization to live under if you aren't built for that, and one that only a certain type of people can thrive in.
I mean the majority of people, leaders even, when they get to some level of success will put the brakes on and coast, doing exactly the things Jeff describes: building processes to take the cognitive load off of decision making and making life just slightly easier. They build processes for "efficiency", so that they don't have to go back and do all the hard work of understanding the problem from scratch each time. The problem though, as Jeff points out is that "The process" becomes an 80% solution to 80% of the problems it's applied to (leading to 36% failure rate).
So just think about how you could - for 23 straight years - recruit, retain and develop a cadre of managers, engineers, interns, staffers etc... that in the majority of cases fall into the mindset of constantly sprinting - basically an Olympic marathoner running a 5 min mile marathon. As a leader I admire that ability.