Piranha-ville
Piranha-ville
The marketing moguls tell us all press is good press, but I never quite believe them. For instance, the recent dispatches on Amazon couldn't have been too good for the company's image, despite the sudden high volume of attention. In the news was the New York Times exposé, which described the company as a "bruising" environment, where management goes well beyond just asking employees to work hard. The report describes a culture of long hours and conflict, in which employees inform on one another anonymously and workers with health problems are summarily marginalized.
The marketing moguls tell us all press is good press, but I never quite believe them. For instance, the recent dispatches on Amazon couldn't have been too good for the company's image, despite the sudden high volume of attention. In the news was the New York Times exposé, which described the company as a "bruising" environment, where management goes well beyond just asking employees to work hard [1]. The report describes a culture of long hours and conflict, in which employees inform on one another anonymously and workers with health problems are summarily marginalized.
Jeff Bezos responded in a letter to his employees [2], assuring them that Amazon isn't supposed to be the way it is depicted in the NY Times article and encouraging them to report to him directly with any stories of management misbehavior. In truth, he really might not know about this kind of behavior going on in his company. (Who would take the risk of telling him?) Still, corporate culture is vastly complicated, and one memo from the boss can't change it any more than one newspaper article can define it. What is Amazon? It's a high-tech company, but it's also the modern-day Sears catalog. How would one operate such an empire?
In fact, Amazon has enshrined a bit of its philosophy in a document called "Our Leadership Principles," which is available online [3]. The principles are much like the nuggets of new age wisdom one encounters in other corporate personnel handbooks, with no hint of the barbarism depicted in the Times article, save for a few ever-so-slightly menacing flourishes in the commentary (e.g., "Leaders do not believe their team's body odor smells of perfume").
[...]
Buy this article as PDF
(incl. VAT)
Buy Linux Magazine
US / Canada
UK / Australia
Subscribe to our Linux Newsletters
Find Linux and Open Source Jobs
Subscribe to our ADMIN Newsletters
Support Our Work
Linux Magazine content is made possible with support from readers like you. Please consider contributing when you’ve found an article to be beneficial.
News
-
Red Hat Releases RHEL 10 Early
Red Hat quietly rolled out the official release of RHEL 10.0 a bit early.
-
openSUSE Joins End of 10
openSUSE has decided to not only join the End of 10 movement but it also will no longer support the Deepin Desktop Environment.
-
New Version of Flatpak Released
Flatpak 1.16.1 is now available as the latest, stable version with various improvements.
-
IBM Announces Powerhouse Linux Server
IBM has unleashed a seriously powerful Linux server with the LinuxONE Emperor 5.
-
Plasma Ends LTS Releases
The KDE Plasma development team is doing away with the LTS releases for a good reason.
-
Arch Linux Available for Windows Subsystem for Linux
If you've ever wanted to use a rolling release distribution with WSL, now's your chance.
-
System76 Releases COSMIC Alpha 7
With scores of bug fixes and a really cool workspaces feature, COSMIC is looking to soon migrate from alpha to beta.
-
OpenMandriva Lx 6.0 Available for Installation
The latest release of OpenMandriva has arrived with a new kernel, an updated Plasma desktop, and a server edition.
-
TrueNAS 25.04 Arrives with Thousands of Changes
One of the most popular Linux-based NAS solutions has rolled out the latest edition, based on Ubuntu 25.04.
-
Fedora 42 Available with Two New Spins
The latest release from the Fedora Project includes the usual updates, a new kernel, an official KDE Plasma spin, and a new System76 spin.