As a follow-up to the Amazon article, the NY Times public editor, Margaret Sullivan, has criticized the Amazon article for several possible flaws:
http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/08/18/was-portrayal-of-amazons-brutal-workplace-on-targetThere was a comment to this article that also resonated with what I wrote above:
Recent Hire Seattle, WA 16 hours ago
I’ve worked at Amazon for a few months now, in the AWS (cloud services) group. I’m an African-American female who very recently graduated from a top university. Here’s the thing my friends and I have found since graduation: a lot of jobs are really boring for us. Unless we’re being consistently challenged to learn and grow, we don’t thrive.
This job is so challenging and rewarding that it’s exhilarating. I learned more in my first month at Amazon than I did in ten months at my old job. My colleagues are brilliant people who are genuinely excited about the work they do, and are never too busy to help me. My manager has been incredibly flexible with respect to my work schedule, and has been nothing but open and responsive when I’ve brought up issues pertaining to race and gender in the workplace.
For a lot of employees, the challenges are too tall an order, and they leave. For a whole lot of other employees, though, the challenges can be likened to a really difficult math or science problem: it’s frustrating working through it, but once it’s done you feel like your effort has paid off tenfold.
Ms. Sullivan has hit the nail on the head here. If you’re going to do an “expose” on a company using only anecdotes, choose anecdotes from different sectors: people from across the organization (Amazon is so much more than Retail and Kindle), who have been here different periods of time, and/or people who, like me, actually really very much like their job.
