I read the New York Times piece about Amazon's office culture on Sunday morning with coffee, the way you're supposed to read the Sunday Times, and then I read Jeff Bezos's memo to the whole company on Monday morning with coffee too, except by then I was annoyed about it in a completely different way.
Quick recap for anyone who missed it, though it's been hard to miss this week: Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld wrote a long piece for the Times about what it's actually like inside Amazon's corporate offices. The anonymous peer-review tool employees use to flag each other's weaknesses. People crying at their desks in meetings. Emails expected to get answered at midnight, then a follow-up text if you're too slow. Bezos wrote back to the company Sunday night saying he didn't recognize the Amazon being described, and that anyone who'd actually witnessed something like what the article laid out should escalate it to HR or just email him directly.
I've never worked at Amazon, so I can't tell you which version is the real one. Probably both are, honestly, it's a company with over a hundred thousand corporate and warehouse employees and I'd bet the experience swings wildly by team and by manager. But the memo bugged me anyway, and it took me until I was walking to the train to figure out why.
Then I remembered: I did about five months at a startup in Chicago back in 2009, maybe forty people total, and it was basically the article in miniature. A leadership team that bragged about who'd slept at the office the most nights that quarter. An unofficial, deniable, everybody-knew-about-it ranking of who sent the earliest morning email. A manager who once forwarded me my own 1 a.m. AIM message back to myself on Monday morning as a kind of gold star, this was before Slack existed so it really was AIM. I left because my back started hurting from the chair, and I was twenty-four. Not exactly a great sign for the chair or the job.
What gets me about the Bezos memo isn't really whether it's accurate. It's the reflex, the instant "that's not who we are," instead of "okay, some of that's probably real, here's what we're actually doing about it." I've gotten a smaller, quieter version of that same memo from three different bosses over the years. It's always some flavor of I don't recognize the place you're describing, please, tell me your specific examples, by name, directly to me. Which if you sit with it for even a second is a strange thing to ask of the people who feel least safe in the building.
None of this is really about Amazon specifically, and I'm not trying to pile on a company I have zero inside information about. What I keep chewing on instead is how normal it's gotten in this industry to treat exhaustion like a performance metric. Windows 10 shipped three weeks ago and everybody's still arguing about the new Start menu, and I'd put real money on more than a few of the people who shipped it on time doing the same midnight-email thing that startup did to me in 2009. Every launch has one of these underneath it somewhere. Nobody writes the article about the launch. They write the article about the after.
I don't have a clean fix here, and I'm suspicious of anyone running a forty-person company or a forty-thousand-person one who tells you they do. I'll say this much: the year after I left that Chicago job, I slept about four more hours a week on average, and I know the exact number because I was tracking it in a spreadsheet like some kind of lunatic. It was worth it. Go read the actual Times piece if you haven't, it's long but it holds up, and then maybe take a walk instead of drafting an email to your CEO about it.