I like a good scary story as much as the next person, but I can’t think of any piece of horror fiction in recent memory that has frightened me more than last week’s New York Times feature article about Amazon.
Anyone who has had a white collar job within the last 10 years is familiar with some of the workplace hazards alluded to in the article:
- the annoying coworkers who like to email people at 2 am on weekends to prove/time stamp their dedication;
- others who show up at the office at the crack of dawn and/or stay late;
- the busybodies who like to provide unsolicited “feedback” (usually negative) about colleagues to superiors; or
- colleagues who feel that humiliating you in meetings will spur you to achieve workplace excellence (this is usually the public explanation; the real reason is they either resent you or don’t like you).
Individually, these behaviors are annoying, but when they are ALL part of a company’s corporate culture…even codified in the employee handbook (check out Amazon’s 14 leadership principals), then you’re hitting horror story territory.
Bezos responded to fallout from the Times article by saying that he wouldn’t want to work for a company like the one described in the article. One can argue that he doesn’t, really, since as CEO, he isn’t subjected to the annual “culling” of staff, and no one in their right mind would dream of submitting secret feedback about him via the company’s Orwellian Anytime Feedback Tool (a widget in the company’s directory that employees are encouraged to use to submit praise or criticism about colleagues to management). Of course, Feedback Tool submissions are factored into the decision-making at the annual culling of Amazon’s overworked herd. Double-plus ungood.
Bezos likes his Feedback Tool so much, he’s invested in an HR software company that makes a similar product. So, in the near future, if you find yourself on the wrong end of a crappy performance review and lose your job, it may just be because the office psycho who doesn’t like you colluded with other office misfits to funnel tons of real-time negative feedback about you to your boss. Creepy, huh? Get ready; it’s coming.
So, is Bezos a driven visionary…a textbook bipolar CEO…a sadist…or all of the above? Who can say for sure? What is obvious is that, in his infinite, algorithm-loving mania, Bezos (whose name literally means “kisses” in Spanish) has reworked the KISS principle (Keep it Simple, Stupid) to mean, Keep it Stressful, Stupid. His fiefdom is truly a Darwinian dystopia on steroids.
I guess while we wait for the robots to take our jobs, corporate overlords like Bezos are going to bide their time by making us work like robots. That way, they can literally work us to death and we won’t be around to complain about losing our jobs to C-3PO in the near future. A recent study shows this isn’t that farfetched a concept.
A stroke of bad luck?
In recent years, we’ve been hearing more and more about uncharacteristically young people…folks in their thirties and forties…having strokes. Why, we wondered? Well, it turns out that Amazon’s top performers aren’t thinking long term when it comes to embracing the 80-hour workweeks that are the hallmark of Amazonian excellence.
Less than a week after the Times/Amazon article appeared, the London Guardian reported that scientists at University College London found that if you put in more than 55 hours a week at work, you have a 33 percent higher stroke risk and a 13 percent higher risk of having a heart attack than “slackers” who work only 35-40 hours a week.
What I want to know is, if you stroke out at your desk at Amazon, will Bezos offer you free shipping to the funeral home of your choice?