Inside Amazon: Conducting an Experiment in How Far it Can Push White-Collar Workers
Inside
Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
The company
is conducting an experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers to get
them to achieve its ever-expanding ambitions.
By JODI
KANTOR and DAVID STREITFELD AUG. 15, 2015
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.”
“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Bo Olson,
worked in books marketing
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.
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.
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 and LinkedIn 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.”
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