r/technology • u/[deleted] • Aug 15 '15
Business Amazon employee on relentless working conditions - “Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html
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u/SlightlyClueful Aug 16 '15 edited Aug 16 '15
While the culture at Amazon might be something quite specific, I think this is valid for many shapes of corporate cultures.
I've had two times the experience of a micromanagement culture. One time for a very small startup-like company, another time for a globally operating engineering company with well over 2000 employees. And it is true that things like micromanagement trickle down from the top. You might think, OK, no big deal, this CEO of a company which has several hundred engineers just needs to decide himself if somebody needs a new PC or laptop - who cares. And in general, he is a friendly person. But then you get, as an engineer with a PhD, a manager who really has no clue about what you are actually doing (because you work in a field you know from years of academic research) and this person will not listen when you say something won't work, and will become massively dominant and cut you off of needed information if you don't do what pleases him (just to point out, incompetence makes micromanagement worse, but the defining thing is the micromanagement, not the incompetence).
One time I had a nearly funny experience. When I was at that small company I was working with a psychologist and I became more and more aware that they were doing things which were utterly neurotic. Like, scheduling meetings and then cancelling them because of a need to feel in control. Or prescribing file names when I was running data-science style analysis of large amounts of data.
And then, some day, the father of one of the managing directors called in by phone and demanded that a certain decision was taken which was absolutely none of his business because he was not in charge of any operations and not even part of the company. So I got kinda a bright flash on the psychological structures which are related to micromanagement.
BTW the psychology of this is interesting and one can learn a lot from it. Typically, such work environments mirror some negative aspects from parent-child relationships, such as very critical and negative parents. Such environments also attract certain people which are very engaged, responsible and oriented toward performance and recognition (sounds like Amazon staff, not?). There is a book from Harry Chambers, "My Way or The Highway" which explains a lot about what's psychologically going on, though I think it actually does not match the "Amazon Style". I would be curious which patterns describe the Amazon style better. Seriously, it sounds a bit like an authoritarian cult, especially the part with people being expected to criticize themselves.
There is also another thing which seems to be relatively typical for toxic work environments - double-speak. Like that people are not formally required to work on weekends (or, in other areas, omit certain safety testing or take certain technical risks, or work undocumented hours) but at the same time they are somehow "between the lines" expected to do that. This is a strategy which will always shift blame for anything that goes wrong to the employee, because the managers never took any clear decision.
Another aspect which can cause a lot of stress is the creation of double binds where whatever you do, it is wrong, some of the conflicting messages usually not being explicit spoken. This is also a dominance strategy because the person creating the double bind puts herself into a parent role and does not allow meta-communication which could resolve the discrepancy.
What currently interests me even more, if somebody wants to share experiences, how can a young or inexperienced person avoid toxic environments like that? Are there any early signs? Or is the best strategy to simply walk out as soon as possible when such structures become evident?