Tim Harford’s FT reading of the recent New York Times Amazon exposé is, well, subjective.

Most of us probably recognized a place in which workers are asked to surrender their lives for a corporation, given impossible goals and abused and undermined when they prove human. Making it worse, there would seem to be a thick air of paranoia in the offices because a good percentage of the criticism is rooted in power consolidation, not job performance. It sounds like the Hunger Games with an on-campus farmer’s market, a place where sociopaths thrive. As anyone who’s worked in Internet companies (myself included) knows, these types of outfits are toxic and meant to be avoided, stock options or no stock options.

Harford’s take is different, and to me, puzzling. He sees a culture in Amazon that may actually be refreshingly straightforward, a paragon of things improving through workplace honesty. Perhaps its candor just being misinterpreted as rudeness because the company embodies a rare virtue? If only that were so. That kind of arrangement would be great. 

His opening:

Last month’s Amazon exposé in The New York Times evidently touched a white-collar nerve. Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld described what might euphemistically be called an “intense” culture at Amazon’s headquarters in a feature article that promptly became the most commented-on story in the newspaper’s website’s history. As Kantor and Streitfeld told it, Amazon reduces grown men to tears and comes down hard on staff whose performance is compromised by distractions such as stillborn children, dying parents or simply having a family. Not for the first time, The Onion was 15 years ahead of the story with a December 2000 headline that bleakly satirised a certain management style: “There’s No ‘My Kid Has Cancer’ In Team.”

Mixed in with the grim anecdotes was a tale of a bracingly honest culture of criticism and self-criticism. (Rival firms, we are told, have been hiring Amazon workers after they’ve quit in exasperation, but are worried that these new hires may have become such aggressive “Amholes” that they won’t fit in anywhere else.)

At Amazon, performance reviews seem alarmingly blunt. One worker’s boss reeled off a litany of unachieved goals and inadequate skills. As the stunned recipient steeled himself to be fired, he was astonished when his superior announced, “Congratulations, you’re being promoted,” and gave him a hug.

It is important to distinguish between a lack of compassion and a lack of tact. It’s astonishing how often we pass up the chance to give or receive useful advice. If Amazon encourages its staff to be straight with each other about what should be fixed, so much the better.•