NYT on Working for Amazon


Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld offer an in-depth look at working for the retail goliath. I think there are some interesting parts worth celebrating, and I'd be surprised if some things weren't exaggerated, but mostly it paints Amazon as a machine that wrings all they can out of employees and spits them out. For a start-up, that's probably expected, but Amazon is a mature mega corp.

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.

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."