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
-
Plasma Bigscreen Returns
A developer discovered that the Plasma Bigscreen feature had been sitting untouched, so he decided to do something about it.
-
CachyOS Now Lets Users Choose Their Shell
Imagine getting the opportunity to select which shell you want during the installation of your favorite Linux distribution. That's now a thing.
-
Wayland 1.24 Released with Fixes and New Features
Wayland continues to move forward, while X11 slowly vanishes into the shadows, and the latest release includes plenty of improvements.
-
Bugs Found in sudo
Two critical flaws allow users to gain access to root privileges.
-
Fedora Continues 32-Bit Support
In a move that should come as a relief to some portions of the Linux community, Fedora will continue supporting 32-bit architecture.
-
Linux Kernel 6.17 Drops bcachefs
After a clash over some late fixes and disagreements between bcachefs's lead developer and Linus Torvalds, bachefs is out.
-
ONLYOFFICE v9 Embraces AI
Like nearly all office suites on the market (except LibreOffice), ONLYOFFICE has decided to go the AI route.
-
Two Local Privilege Escalation Flaws Discovered in Linux
Qualys researchers have discovered two local privilege escalation vulnerabilities that allow hackers to gain root privileges on major Linux distributions.
-
New TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro Powered by AMD Ryzen AI 300
The TUXEDO InfinityBook Pro 14 Gen10 offers serious power that is ready for your business, development, or entertainment needs.
-
LibreOffice Tested as Possible Office 365 Alternative
Another major organization has decided to test the possibility of migrating from Microsoft's Office 365 to LibreOffice.