15 Reasons Why Amazon Might Be The Most Terrifying Employer In The World

According to a report in New York Times, when they join, Amazon employees are given 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. But Amazon isn¡¯t peculiar, it's terrifying.

1. No personal life

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Employees are expected to 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."

2. Teaching employees how to secretly complain about each other

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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.")

3. Annual firings - even if you get sick

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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.

4. It makes grown men weep, and that's perfectly normal

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Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said 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."

5. Secrecy

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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 Bezos and his top leaders. "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."

6. There are rules that Amazon employees even teach their kids

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.

7. No luxuries

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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. Workers are expected to embrace "frugality" (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to the cellphones and travel expenses 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.

8. "Disagree and commit"

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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.

9. Becoming a Amazon robot

"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.

10. "One time I didn't sleep for four days straight"

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 startups 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."

11. Being 100% accountable for thousands of data points

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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.

12. "Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves"

Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough. 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. 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 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."

13. Employees fight each other

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 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 colleagues called "the full paste."

14. The gender gap is very much alive here

Amazon does not have a single woman on its 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.

15. 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.

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."

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 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.

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."

(Originally published in the New York Times | Inputs from Times Of India)