I see this letter as an attempt at vindication for the controversy sparked by the NYT article on Amazon's corporate culture. Jeff Bezos was clearly affected and I see this as a defense of their "distinctive culture". "For better or for worse" that culture got them to $100 billion in annual sales faster than any company in history.
I live in Seattle and am friends with a lot of Amazon folks. Most work very hard and complain from time to time, but I only know one who left for another job because most who are there now actually really like their jobs.
One friend put it best after he transitioned from a small department in the ecommerce side of the business to one of AWS's early-ish hires, that most young departments have the thrill of working at a startup but with some very supportive corporate backing (as long as things are growing).
I know a lot of people who have left Amazon, and are very bitter about how it was to work there. I know some who are waiting out their signing bonus. I also know a lot who've left Microsoft, but they definitely have a lower average bitterness about the company.
If you don't work at Amazon, there's a pretty big sampling bias in your data. (You are wildly more likely to work with someone who has left Amazon than someone who has happily stayed there, and in casual interactions, you're more likely to hear from the strongly disgruntled than the happy. In the same way, current Amazon workers are likely to know a higher than average percentage of long-tenured and happy Amazon employees than is reality in overall population.)
Owed them for moving expenses, etc. but I really didn't care.
I spent 6 months doing nothing before I even considered getting another job.
Easily the worst experience in my life and completely colored my entire impression of the tech industry negatively. I went from loving what I did to just doing this as a job for a paycheck (even at another company now that is leaps and bounds "better") with an ever-present need to get out of the industry entirely (but no real plan to do so).
Based in Seattle (well, probably a fairly obvious point there). I shifted offices once while I was there, but spent the most time in Varzea (where everyone was packed like Sardines).
I'll echo that from personal experience. I left AWS to start my current company. I had a regret-prevention imperative to do so, but it was still the toughest call.
Amazon's culture is highly polarising. The emergent properties of which are all the truths and lies you ever read about the place.
My views don't represent that of my employer yada yada yada.
Anything in the NYTimes piece that wasn't a personal story was grounded in truth, but spun as bullshit. It was a hit piece. There are bad teams, but at a company of this size, there will always be bad teams, and I am sorry for the poor experiences that people seem to have had, but I would hardly call them widespread. The entire article has really become a bit of an internal joke. That is how ridiculous many people find their claims.
I also live in Seattle and worked at Amazon. When I was interviewing, a conversation I had often went something like this.. "Oh, I see that you were at Amazon; we've interviewed many people from there. I'd ask you why you left but I think I already know."
I think it really just depends on your team though. Most of the people I worked with didn't particularly like Amazon (or working in general) but it was a job and paid (relatively) well. They don't pay as well as Google/FB but they still pay much better than most companies in Seattle and as far as I can tell it's easier to get into Amazon.
Amazon's job levels outpace others fairly quickly I've found. If I were to ask for my salary at Google or FB, I'd probably get laughed out the door. You start lower, but if you work at it, you'll surpass what you'd be paid elsewhere. Benefits however is another story...
You are literally the only person I have ever heard say they make more money at Amazon than elsewhere, and this is counter to my experience working at Amazon.
You might be surprised if you were to actually have that conversation with a competitor.
What other big companies are hiring in Seattle besides Amazon, FB, and Google? The only ones I know of are Zillow and Expedia.
I just assumed they paid relatively well because there was a salary spreadsheet on here a few weeks ago and doing a ctrl F for Seattle, the salaries seemed lower.
For me amazon just seems like a bad deal compensation wise compared to other BigCos like facebook, google, apple, msft . Back loaded stock grants, lower pay, etc. Then add a high pressure big-company culture on top of that. I'll be pleasantly surprised if I'm wrong!
The thing that I like about working at Amazon is that they don't push the "Kool-Aid" culture that I sense from Facebook, Google, and Apple. I come to work, I feel proud of what I've done, I go home. That is it. That is what I want out of a job. I don't want to be a "Googler," or be told that I'm "changing the world" as I deploy a new sticker pack of poop emojis to Messenger. I want a job, not a cult.
The funny thing about your statement is that you are drinking your own version of koolaid at Amazon.
FWIW, there is definitely koolaid mentality at Google and Facebook (source: worked at, and have lots of friends at both), but it's not the same way as you think. People are proud of what the company has accomplished as a whole in changing the world, but they aren't as blind to think that the feature that they added to a product is world changing in itself.
Employees of other companies are not a cult, though this perception is common internally to Amazon. It discourages you from quitting, and stigmatizes people who leave.
Think about this next time you have a conversation where everyone quotes the leadership principles.
I left AWS after 7 months full time and 3-4 months internship. Almost everyone I worked with (~30 people) either stayed put, or left the team but stayed within Amazon.
We venerate leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt because they inspired millions of individuals to act directly against their self-interest and in favor of the organizations that those leaders own and manage. "We will fight on the beaches" sure sounds inspiring, but if it was my intestines bleeding out onto the sands of Normandy, at that exact moment, it wouldn't have quite the same ring. Yet these inspiring words still convince millions to follow them, and so we have warehouse workers dropping from heat stroke and programmers sacrificing their personal life to fix that bug into the late hours, all so people like Bezos can live the high life, rake in millions, and write some pithy emails. Works for them I suppose, and it seems to be human nature for such type of organizations to arise and dominate. Amazon is a great company that makes a lot of money, no doubt about its success. Me? I'll try to keep my intestines _inside_ my stomach.
Churchill [...] inspired millions of individuals to act
directly against their self-interest
If a Brit is equally happy living under the Nazis or a British government; or if military victory is impossible for the Brits; yes.
But if most Brits would prefer to live under British rather than Nazi rule, you have something game theorists call a "Cooperative game" and it may well be more profitable on average for /everyone/ to fight rather than for /no-one/ to fight. It can even be in the self-interest of a /coalition/ to fight, tolerating non-fighting free riders, as long as the coalition remains large enough to win.
In other words, Churchill convinced millions of people to act in their /collective/ best interests, rather than their /individual/ best interests.
That's kind of a ridiculous comparison. Those men didn't fight on the beaches because Churchill made a nice speech, they did it because they could see very clearly what the approaching Nazi army would do if they weren't stopped. Nice speeches from inspiring leaders helped - a bit - but frankly I think things would have worked out the same anyway. We tend to look at Churchill with rose tinted glasses because the Allies won the war, but he got booted out pretty quickly once the war was over for being, essentially, a bad prime minister.
WWII is like the one war you could pick where it was not against the soldiers' self-interest to fight. With most wars you could argue it's more about rulers fighting over power than it is about people defending themselves, but not WWII. It's the most morally straightforward war I can think of.
Most of his shareholder letters are like this. Even the 1997 reprint they put in every year as part of the letter talks a lot about the company philosophy and culture. Certainly some of the stuff at the end about new programs for parents and students is from NYTimes, but I think the rest of it is consistent belief/action since the start of the company.
This is just how Jeff Bezos writes those letters, and those letters need to be written regardless of if the public is currently discussing of how poorly Amazon treats its employees or not.
The last part about "pioneering new programs" though, that's very likely related to the public's new awareness of how frustrating it is to work there.
I agree. I think these lines are directly related to the NYT controversy:
"""
If it’s a distinctive culture, it will fit certain people like a custom-made glove. The reason cultures are so stable in time is because people self-select. Someone energized by competitive zeal may select and be happy in one culture, while someone who loves to pioneer and invent may choose another.
"""
