I roughly 2006 I planned to leave my job and go to a new city, and Amazon was the first company I considered working for because the Pacific northwest interested me.
Some light research online indicated that Amazon would not be a good place to work. It was just anecdotes, but I had a nagging feeling that these negative anecdotes about Amazon were easier to find than for other large companies I was considering. I decided against pursuing Amazon, but wondered if I had put too much weight on this research.
It stuck in my mind and all the other negative things I've heard about Amazon between 2006 and now sort of snowballed for me. How they treat their corporate employees, how they treat their warehouse employees. How they treat their business partners. How they treat their sellers. (Hint: the opposite of how they treat their buyers.) And so on.
So the recent NYT article told me nothing new. I had already realized that Amazon had this definite pattern. Whereas the occasional anecdote you hear about other companies just remains a few anecdotes, it doesn't become a pattern.
For most readers of Hacker News, though, I suspect that they see these anecdotes rarely, and for many the NYT article is the first one... yet they have seen press releases from Amazon that are designed to tout it as a tech company and Jeff Bezos as the next Steve Jobs, every month, like clock work for the past decade. (and we'll get even more of them now.)
The anecdotes are hard to find. Glassdoor promotes positive reviews over negative ones, effectively burying them, even when the negative ones have more up votes and you're looking at reviews ranked by vote!
Most people Amazon is hiring aren't exposed to the negative reviews of the company.
> Most people Amazon is hiring aren't exposed to the negative reviews of the company.
Yeah, that's why it's so important for people to gain awareness of this while it's so visible. It's not just anecdotes, it's a pattern. Every large company has things about it that suck, every company has its former employees with complaints about it. But Amazon is in a qualitatively different category. Other companies don't get such a bad overall reputation.
After all of the excitement of the keynotes and the dazzling new hardware and software products are released, few forget that Steve Jobs was also a very authoritarian and abusive figure, and that Apple is a company just like any other.
Even before getting to anecdotes about the experience of working there, I was put off by the interview process. They have asked me to drive from Indianapolis to Chicago to interview with a large group of people.
Glassdoor's revenue comes from companies advertising to job seekers. It would not surprise me if this comes with a handshake deal to make the advertiser look good.
Glassdoor's entire revenue stream is dependent on having a user-base visit them to generate the impressions that comprise their inventory of job seekers.
That user-base will only continue to visit Glassdoor if they maintain their reputation of having credible reviews around companies. It really does not seem in their best interest to shoot themselves in the foot in that regard. Of course Yelp was accused of similar things (whether true or not) and I'm not sure it really hurt them, so who knows.
