[joesmo]

Sounds like Bezos is just doing damage control. The original article is somewhat interesting but hardly novel. I've never talked to a single person who worked at Amazon who had anything positive to say. You have recruiters recruiting for Amazon who are basically saying, "Do not work there." They are being paid on commission to get you to work there and they're telling you what a horrible place to work it is, killing any chance of moving forward. I find that quite telling of what kind of place Amazon is.

[bananasNfucku]

Right?

For someone many folks refer to as "a very smart man" it's obvious this is just damage control. It was probably prepared as soon as they found out NYT was going to run the piece.

180,000 employees. He'll only ever interact with a tiny portion of those people, and even then it's mostly going to be the sycophants and a few alpha-crony confidants. Shocking he has a radically different experience.

His company sued (and won) to prevent warehouse workers from collecting money for the time they stand in-line being frisked.

Not only do we shuffle them through our fascist security machine with little trust, or dignity. We also refuse to give them just a bit more, so that King Bezos can continue to drink their babies tears lest the sheen on his bald head dim just a bit.

I mean they're already near the bottom of the totem pole. Surely one more kick to the stomach shall barely be noticed.

Such empathy.

[adventured]

And yet Amazon (3.4) rates comparable on Glassdoor to many other important technology companies, including: Oracle (3.3), Yahoo (3.5), HP (3.3), IBM (3.1), eBay (3.5), Tesla (3.4), Dell (3.4), Cisco (3.7).

That's with 5,800+ reviews. Something doesn't add up.

[MCRed]

Yeah, one thing is, negative reviews on Glassdoor seem to get killed.

I reviewed Amazon negatively, and of course it's no longer there.

I don't know if Glassdoor is doing like Yelp is alleged to be doing, but I've seen this with other companies as well, where the negative reviews get spiked.

[drzaiusapelord]

How reliable is glassdoor as a metric? Personally, I would never, ever post anything negative there due to the fear of retaliation. I suspect truly bad companies never get their comeuppance because at the end of the day, you need some kind of reference and positive job history from your previous employer. It may not be that hard to trace a review to a specific employee due to timing, title, salary, etc information.

[DaveWalk]

According to the dozen seasoned job-hunters and recruiters that I know, Glassdoor is absolutely rotten in my industry (biotech). The selection bias is heavy-handed at best. Even Amazon's 5,000+ reviews represent a very small fraction of it's employees globally. These are futher selected as the kind who would review a job online pseudoanomyously.

Furthermore, one doesn't know the age of a review -- is this a current employee, a previous one who left last week or a review of a the job from 10 years ago? It's entirely possible that every problem addressed in a negative review has been since addressed. You just don't know.

[taternuts]

I've seen plenty of instances where the Glassdor listings were really a red flag. In these cases, there are several negative reviews focusing on similar cons, then several other glowing (and obviously planted) reviews to combat it.

[abandonliberty]

It depends on the team and department in every company.

You can always find one or two terrible anecdotes.

[MCRed]

Does 300 people count as more than "one or two" terrible anecdotes? Cause thats how many were in the group that were having a miserable time when I was at Amazon... it was a significant proportion of the engineers at HQ at that time, possibly %60.

[abandonliberty]

That's quite worrying. I wonder why they haven't made a bigger hit in the glassdoor rating.