Tuesday, August 18, 2015

America's Finest News Source vs. Amazon

August 18, 2015
The Onion: Jeff Bezos Assures Amazon Employees That HR Working 100 Hours A Week To Address Their Complaints

“Nothing matters more to me than the well-being of our employees, and our HR staff will continue to work their fingers to the bone—not seeing their families or friends or anything at all outside their offices—for as long as it takes to make this right.”

Nobody does hilarious satire better than The Onion. Hahaha!!

3 comments:

Rob Dawg said...

In the end the employees are likely to be working into the wee hours delivering their own apology gift from Bezos.

Stagflationary Mark said...

Rob Dawg,

At my last company, there were serious morale problems.

The general manager claimed to have an open door policy. Got a problem? Any problem at all? Come tell me.

So, one day I dropped by and said I had a problem. Morale is very bad. He got very angry and wanted to know who. Instead of giving him a list of names, I simply said, "Me." Wasn't hard to do, lol. He turned nice and said he was aware of the problems.

At some other point, he dropped by my office to vent. One of the other teams had horrible morale problems. The product was way behind schedule. There was a lot of turnover and heavy overtime. He said he just gave a "coming to Jesus" speech. If anyone wanted off the team, now was the time to ask. They took him up on it. Everyone wanted off the team, lol. He didn't actually let anyone off though. Go figure.

When I eventually quit, I wrote a burning bridges letter to explain why. I said that I just didn't think employees were a priority any longer. The letter made it to him. After reading it, he came to me and told me I was wrong. He said, paraphrased from memory, "Employees are our #1 priority, it's just that other things are more important right now." I waited silently until he conceded my point, lol.

Anyone who underestimates the power of bad morale is a fool. It spreads as a disease and is extremely difficult to cure. Further, sone of the best employees will use it as a reason to quit and move on. For some reason, the worst rarely seem to leave by choice though. It's like reverse Darwin in action.

The day I quit, another lead engineer quit. We both had been working there 8 years. Neither of us knew the other was quiting. Neither of us had the next job lined up. HR found that "very disconcerting." I opted to retire. I was burned out and demoralized.

Stagflationary Mark said...

*some
*quitting

I wish the comments had spell checking.