Disrupt shittingEven more alarming was the bathroom culture. I can only speak to the men's room, most of which each had two urinals and two stalls. I come from a background where a bathroom is a place where you do a certain kind of business, in silence, and you leave. At Amazon, the men's room is an extension of the office. People chitchat about work in the bathroom, as if it is just another meeting room where you can piss everywhere.
The most horrifying moment of my employment at Amazon was the time I was using the toilet and a coworker began talking from the stall next to me. He asked me why I had not responded to his very pressing email. I closed my eyes and pretended this wasn't happening. What email could be so important that it could not wait five minutes for me to use the bathroom? He began tapping on the wall between our stalls, asking why I wouldn't respond, as if inter-stall conversation should be a totally normal, not disgusting means of communication.
He became more specific about what he needed -- referencing a project I'd never heard of, nor would I ever have involvement in -- and I realized he had misidentified me from my shoes. (Many brown dress shoes look alike, apparently.) We both exited our stalls around the same time, and he realized his mistake. He didn't apologize, only explained that he thought I was someone else. As we washed our hands, he just laughed, and I vowed I would never use the stalls on that floor again.
This is distinctly unholy.
It's bad enough to be talked at while using a urinal ("Hey, buddy, I got my dick in my hand. Let's not ruin this magic moment with words."), but while using a stall?
Stalls are sacred, to be used only for quiet excremeditation, and fapping on the company's dime. It's a basic principle of human decency, and I'm pretty sure violating it was what brought about the fall of the Roman Empire.
In the building where I work I try to flush the toilet or do otherwise noisy things if people take a phone call in there.
Crucial Conversations
Amazon does not sound in any way creepy, cultish, scientoligyisticish or anything like that. From the top, Jeff Bezos sets a confident, free-people, free-world, prosperity-for-all culture that is not at all steeped in paranoia and pointlessly competitive gladitorial wastes of lives. It seems like an encouraging, stimulating place to work that only brings out the highest achievement and fulfillment in everyone.
You're using "fulfillment" incorrectly, according to the AMZ Bible.
Imagine the horror of a whole building full of adult spergmen wearing backpacks and yelling at you about ten minute old emails. I'd be arrested for assault.
The guy in the pic forgot to drop his drawers. rad
Disrupting pants.
Last 48 hours on the internets: the rest of the world finds out that AMZN is exactly the kind of cultish burnout factory that its rep inside the industry has always loudly proclaimed.
One of these days, wall street's apparently infinite patience with their inability to actually turn a profit is going to end. (And/or enough California tech companies who have realized that you literally can't pay people enough to afford an apartment in SF will start drastically expanding their Seattle and Austin hiring efforts so that the chumps working there realize they have better options: god knows we did.) That's gonna be fun to watch.
but, but Bezos said they were all wrong...
I'll be honest, here between the title and the tagline I thought there would be a kickstarter for a donut shaped papasan chair.