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Widespread Layoffs: Hiring the best, the brightest and the highest number of employees was a badge of honor at tech companies.

“Conflict brings about innovation,” he said. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old, lumbering company for a faster, grittier one. On a recent morning, as Amazon’s new hires waited to begin orientation, few of them seemed to appreciate the experiment in which they had enrolled. “Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight.

“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.”Īmazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazon’s way of working. Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. Many employees are motivated by “thinking big and knowing that we haven’t scratched the surface on what’s out there to invent,” said Elisabeth Rommel, a retail executive who was one of those permitted to speak. In interviews, some said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. However, more than 100 current and former Amazonians - members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch - described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: “I felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.”) Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.

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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.Īt Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, 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.” The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one another’s bosses. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported. They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. SEATTLE - On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazon’s singular way of working.

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