Would you work at Amazon?

[Martinus]

You guys are weird. I thought HK was more Westernized than that.

[Darth Wagtaros]

You guys are weird. I thought HK was more Westernized than that.

It's the worst of both worlds.

[The Brain]

Everytime I shop at Amazon I kill a kitten.

Do they ship them to you live so you can get the thrill of hte kill? The self-hatred fades as you snuff the life from the little fluff ball, and you feel the exultation that only killing can give you. Though it can't match that of the timet hat that stupid bitch just wouldn't move out of the way of you car fast enough.  You are one sick bastard.

[DGuller]

Everytime I shop at Amazon I kill a kitten.

Do they ship them to you live so you can get the thrill of hte kill? The self-hatred fades as you snuff the life from the little fluff ball, and you feel the exultation that only killing can give you. Though it can't match that of the timet hat that stupid bitch just wouldn't move out of the way of you car fast enough.  You are one sick bastard.

You capture that feeling just right, it's so freaky.

[Zanza]

You'll soon be able to have packages delivered to the trunk of your car. The delivery person will be able to open it via mobile phone.

[garbon]

You'll soon be able to have packages delivered to the trunk of your car. The delivery person will be able to open it via mobile phone.

Owning a car? How provincial.

[Tonitrus]

You'll soon be able to have packages delivered to the trunk of your car. The delivery person will be able to open it via mobile phone.

Great, now I'll have to remove the dead hooker before I go to bed. 

[Monoriu]

You'll soon be able to have packages delivered to the trunk of your car. The delivery person will be able to open it via mobile phone.

Now that's a really cool idea.  I of course would love to see it happen.  Still, it is a question mark if the management company will let these guys through. 

[citizen k]

What Jeff Bezos learned from Chairman Mao
By Andre Spicer

"Andre Spicer is a professor of organizational behavior at Cass Business School, City University London. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of the author. "


(CNN)By now, you may have heard that Amazon is where "overachievers go to feel bad about themselves."

It's not surprising when so many bright people join the world's biggest online retailer. But what's surprising is the extent to which a company can be so soul-crushing.

The company's modus operandi is "purposeful Darwinism," according a recent in-depth New York Times article. Insights collected from more than a hundred former and current employees suggest that Amazon is a brutal workplace where taking weekends and evenings off, not working during holidays, or receiving some slack after a serious illness seem to be a problem.

Jeff Bezos, the company's founder and CEO, has responded to the Times article by saying, "I don't recognize this Amazon."

Bezos likes to portray Amazon as a machine for creating the future. This might be so. But like any vision of the future, it has some striking similarities to the past.

Amazon uses techniques that eerily resemble some of the tactics that Mao Zedong used during the Cultural Revolution in China.

Central to Amazon's performance management system is a process of continuous feedback and harsh criticism. Employees are given information about their performance using hundreds of metrics, and they have to submit themselves to barrages of criticism. Sometimes, employees are encouraged to submit praise or criticism of their co-workers to management through the Anytime Feedback Tool. Employees are even asked to critique their own performance.

Now, when we think about Chairman Mao, the image that comes to mind is his little red book, which was distributed all over China as a means of influence. While the book's slogans served to turn skeptics into ardent supporters, it was Mao's creation of a system of self-criticisms that made the Cultural Revolution so chilling.

Mao's system was based on simple principles. First, you encouraged any grievances against people who did not follow the Communist Party line. For instance, if you had a minor conflict with the local landlord, this flame was fanned. There were also intense group discussions where people were encouraged to expose all their inner thoughts and feelings. During these sessions, people were prodded to relentlessly criticize themselves and others.

When group members did expose themselves to criticism, leaders rewarded them. The small groups also served as a venue for people to relate Maoist ideology to their own lives. Behind all this lurked an unmistakable threat: If you did not follow the program, you would be expelled from the party. It also led to paralyzing factional struggles, public humiliation, shocking abuses of human rights and an overwhelming cult of personality around Mao.

If we consider the stories about life inside of Amazon, it seems as though Bezos may have unwittingly used some of Mao's ideas. Employees are told to forget the poor habits they learned from previous workplaces. There are intensive group discussions where employees are encouraged to tear apart their peers' ideas and engage in vocal self-criticism.

If people show they're willing to engage in this kind of process, they may be rewarded with positive performance appraisals by their managers. To fit in with this challenging culture, you need to buy into company doctrines such as the 14 Amazon leadership principles. You need to make them a central part of your life. Behind all this pressure is the constant threat that if you don't buy in, then you are likely to find yourself out of a job.

Clearly, there are also huge differences between Amazon and Mao's China. For one thing, the online retailer isn't anywhere close to violating human rights.

But Bezos and Mao have been amazingly successful with this recipe for converting people to their cause.

Bezos has built one of the world's most admired businesses. Mao created the world's largest modern state. The systems that both men produced have problems. Mao's Cultural Revolution profoundly damaged a generation of Chinese people. Amazon has created, according to reports, a cadre of conformist "Ambots" and nasty "Amholes."

We must remember that Mao Zedong's Cultural Revolution eventually gave way to its "great opening-up" and reforms under Deng Xiaoping. The big question is: Who will be Bezos's Deng?

[Syt]

An NYT follow up that concludes that even if the company were trying to implement kinder workplace conditions, the competition to work at high level jobs in coveted companies is so great that it would still be a highly demanding place to work at.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/business/work-policies-may-be-kinder-but-brutal-competition-isnt.html?ribbon-ad-idx=5&rref=business&module=Ribbon&version=context&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Business%20Day&pgtype=article

Work Policies May Be Kinder, but Brutal Competition Isn't

On Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, across the legal profession and the corporate world, a growing chorus of companies are singing the praises of a kinder workplace, announcing policies like generous maternity leave at Netflix, and Goldman Sachs's rule against investment-banking analysts working on Saturdays.

But a closer look at the forces that drive the relentless pace at elite companies suggests that — however much the most sought-after employers in the country may be changing their official policies — brutal competition remains an inescapable component of workers' daily lives. In some ways it's getting worse.

"Jimmy Carter tried to get a rule in place for his executive White House staff to be gone and having dinner with their family in the evening, and it broke down," said Robert H. Frank, a prominent economist at Cornell University who writes often for The New York Times. "In a competitive environment, that's what you get."

As Professor Frank, who has written a book about the phenomenon known as winner-take-all economics, explains, the basic problem is that the rewards for ascending to top jobs at companies like Netflix and Goldman Sachs are not just enormous, they are also substantially greater than at companies in the next tier down. As a result, far more people are interested in these jobs than there are available slots, leading to the brutal competition that plays out at companies where only the best are destined for partnerships or senior management positions.

This phenomenon was the focus of a recent New York Times article about workplace practices at Amazon. In the article, some current and former employees complained of 80-hour work weeks, interrupted vacations, co-worker sabotage and little tolerance even for those struggling with life-threatening illnesses or family tragedies. (Amazon has cast doubt on whether these practices are widespread at the company.)

The account appeared to put Amazon at odds with recent workplace trends, but the reality, experts say, is not nearly so neat: Grueling competition remains perhaps the defining feature of the upper echelon in today's white-collar workplace.

If anything, analysts point out, Amazon offers at least one major advantage over many other companies, which is that its founder and chief executive, Jeff Bezos, has created a culture in which employees typically know exactly where they stand. "It's a super attention-rich environment," said Marcus Buckingham, an author and founder of the firm TMBC, which advises large companies on employee evaluation and performance. "There's a lot of critical attention. They're almost never ignored."

The legal profession, one of the most brutal when it comes to pace and time commitment, illuminates the economic logic of a system where a large initial cohort of workers is gradually culled until only a small fraction are left. This small fraction then has access to the enormous wealth and prestige that survivors in this ultimate reality show are granted.

The so-called Cravath system, named after the prestigious New York law firm known today as Cravath, Swaine & Moore, began to be put in place in the early 20th century. The firm and its imitators hired a large class of entry-level associates from the top law schools in the country, then relentlessly sifted them out over a period of several years, at the end of which only the most brilliant and productive — historically about one in 10 or 15 — became partners.

Those who did not make partner got first-rate legal training along the way, though, and were almost always able to land respectable jobs at lesser firms or as in-house corporate lawyers. For Cravath, it was also a plus: The partners made good money billing out its associates at top-of-market rates.

Over the decades, an increasing number of young law school graduates have chafed at the punishing Cravath model. A recent report by the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California, Hastings College of the Law, cited survey data of big-firm lawyers showing work-life balance to be a top concern.

But because a partnership at the likes of Cravath, or Sullivan & Cromwell, remains such a coveted prize, the top firms can still count on a large surplus of young lawyers willing to defer their personal lives for the better part of a decade for a shot at a partnership.

"The model is alive and well and working wonderfully in major New York law firms," said William Henderson, an expert on law firm economics at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law. "You attract really ambitious people and thin them out."

The thinning process even has its own name among scholars of law firms: the tournament. "The tournament is designed to identify the owners of the firm and the people who will run major engagements, attract business," Professor Henderson said. "There is 15 to 20 percent of the law school population who want to play in that league."

Variations on the tournament are also the norm at elite management consulting firms and investment banks. It's one of the reasons that, when companies like Goldman Sachs and Bank of America Merrill Lynch adopted policies over the last few years that encourage young employees to spend more time away from work on the weekends, many skeptics rolled their eyes. As long as there are a large number of new employees competing for a limited number of highly lucrative positions, policy changes aren't likely to persuade many people to ease up.

The reality is not that different at many American corporations and technology companies that promote their employee-friendly practices.

Mr. Buckingham points out that companies like Microsoft may have made news in recent years by abandoning their "stack ranking" systems, in which managers produce detailed rankings of the members of their teams once a year, but they have not abandoned the practice of comparing employees to one another. They have simply tried to adopt less-biased systems for evaluating and promoting them.

"If the only way for me to get promoted is to suck up to a biased manager, I have to figure out any way I can to suck up," Mr. Buckingham said. "If you could remove the bias, I can find a reliable way to look at you."

Mr. Buckingham added that, in many cases, many of the overachievers who are candidates for upper management at companies like Amazon welcome the breakneck pace and unyielding expectations. They just want to know that the system will be meritocratic. "We don't mind competition," he said. "We mind unfair competition."

Even the steps that many tech companies take to make the workplace more engaging often result in employees spending more time consumed by their work. Increasingly popular workplace messaging programs like Slack and HipChat, for example, both increase the amount of casual, friendly interactions among co-workers, but these messaging systems may also have the effect of keeping employees on their computers or mobile devices at all hours of the day and night.

"We're constantly talking," said an editor at a digital media company who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid alienating his boss. "It does create a little more of an implicit pressure to be available."

But there are some signs of change, as more and more young highly credentialed workers acknowledge that they can't fulfill their responsibilities as husbands, wives, parents and friends while ascending through their organizations.

"Cultural change is a slog," said Stewart Friedman, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School who recently did a study comparing the views on work-life issues of Wharton graduates from 1992 with Wharton graduates from 2012. "There's been a genuine shift among workers. We as a society are struggling with this," he said.

As in previous decades, the legal profession may hint at what's to come. Alternative work arrangements are proliferating, and many previously elite firms are finding they no longer have the profits or the partnership slots to make the Cravath system work, abandoning the field of play to only a tiny number of ultrasuccessful firms.

"Amazon is at the top of the food chain," Professor Henderson said. "Maybe they can get away with it. But most firms can't rank and yank."

[Warspite]

Maybe I'm just awfully European about this, but having no life in the work/life balance looks like a terrible way to go through life. It's possible to work hard but efficiently; have time to pause, consider and self-reflect; and achieve big things without working 18-hour days.

[Brazen]

I work within the UK Prime Now purlieu, which is as close to a teleporter as you can get.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/b/ref=pn_uk_surl_lp?node=6584642031

[Martinus]

Maybe I'm just awfully European about this, but having no life in the work/life balance looks like a terrible way to go through life. It's possible to work hard but efficiently; have time to pause, consider and self-reflect; and achieve big things without working 18-hour days.

I would say this depends on the industry.

[Martinus]

For example, when you work in highly demanding service industry with clients located in all time zones, closing the shop at a given hour is simply not an option no matter how efficient you are.

[Zanza]

Maybe I'm just awfully European about this, but having no life in the work/life balance looks like a terrible way to go through life. It's possible to work hard but efficiently; have time to pause, consider and self-reflect; and achieve big things without working 18-hour days.

The company I work for has decided that it should no longer be called "Work/Life-Balance", but just "Life Balance" where work is just one of four components next to family&friends, health and lifelong learning. We have guidelines for managers called "Respect limits", "Switch off", "Conciously build in breaks" or "Reconcile work and private life".