The mentioned book "The Everything Store" gives hundreds of examples of this corporate culture, culminating in the quote:

>"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."

It's a good read on how not to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe based on Bezos' enormous drive.

I would never work there.

"It's a good read on how not to lead a company"

But they are very successful. People say the same thing about Jobs, and again, they are very successful. People that say, "this is no way to lead a company" have to have counterexamples of equally successful companies that aren't run this way.

Yeah but with apple you hear people loved working there even if jobs was harsh. Looks like there's a balance between getting the most out of people and just creating a toxic work atmosphere.

The Roman Empire was very successful, maybe that's the best way to lead too? Of course that's ridiculous. If you have a big house, a big salary, and you're miserable, are you successful? Amazon has a nice stock price, good technology, and (allegedly) broken employees, is it successful?

so you don't have a counterexample?

He generally sends it to a group email for all the Senior VPs. Based on the question in the email, 1 or more of the Senior VPs will take the issue and forward it onto their VPs, which gets forwarded to GMs, directors, etc. and finally ends up in the mailbox of a developer.

This is based off my knowledge from late-2003 through 2008. It may have changed by now.

That's almost worse. So instead of nameless Joe E. Dev getting a chewout from Bezos, his boss's boss does, who in turn chews out his boss, who in turn is furious at Joe E. Dev for causing the ruckus. Ouch.

Edit: Wait, I just re-read that. You mean each time Bezos receives a credible complaint from the public, he personally forwards it to all his VPs? Isn't that a massive time hole for his VPs? I'm sure it focuses people on random complaints, but then they spend much less time focusing on making their service(s) better for everyone.

I don't know. I can only comment on the "?" that I received and answered. Looking through the email headers, it started with Jeff, went through a few different groups, my manager, and finally me. I don't know if it was like this for all complaints.

And the lack of focus was the problem. Depending on when I got the email, I would look for root cause and other affected customers. But there were times I was operating on 2 maybe 3 hours of sleep and was just like "fuck it. I'm fixing this single order and moving on".

Please take into account, I was in Supply Chain and it has (had?) probably millions of lines of legacy code. Even after being on the team for 4 years, there were parts of the code base that were just voodoo. I would look at the code and be like "this can't possibly work".

Edit: fixed some autocorrect mistakes