Virtually everyone it seems has purchased something from Amazon.com – and in the tech space, Amazon’s success with the Amazon Web Services public cloud is unparalleled. But what does it take to work at such a company?
The answer may surprise you, according to a provocative New York Times article from August 15th by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld. The authors decried Amazon as a soul-crushing, dystopian nightmare of an employer, where one poor former ‘Amabot’ claimed that “nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
The article painted a desperate picture of a grueling, 80-plus hour work week, where employees must work nights and vacations. Maternity leave, such as it is, leads to questioning of the new mother’s dedication, and personal traumas like getting cancer or having a miscarriage are insufficient excuses for anything less than total commitment to the cause.
The day after the Times article hit the wire, Nick Ciubotariu, Head of Infrastructure Development at Amazon.com Search Experience, posted an extensive rebuttal on LinkedIn, where it has already gathered well over a million views. Ciubotariu painted an entirely different picture of life at Amazon, stating that “if Amazon was the type of place described in this article, I would publicly denounce Amazon, and leave.”
While working at Amazon is unquestionably hard work, he didn’t fault its work-life balance, as he had “never worked a single weekend when I didn’t want to. No one tells me to work nights.” He’d also never seen anyone cry at their desk.
Read the entire article at http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonbloomberg/2015/08/30/amazon-innovation-engine-or-spirit-crushing-hellhole-five-must-read-articles/.
Intellyx advises companies on their digital transformation initiatives and helps vendors communicate their agility stories. As of the time of writing, none of the organizations mentioned in this article are Intellyx customers. Image credit: James Duncan Davidson.
