Things deemed inconvenient if you are employed at Amazon: getting cancer, having a relative get cancer, miscarriages. If you are “selfish” enough to engage in these activities, you’ll be put on notice and likely reduced to tears. Jeff Bezos’ gigantic success has long been reported to be a ridiculously bruising and demanding workplace only a sociopath could love, a place that attracts the highest achievers and routinely lays them low. 

Tremendous job by Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld of the New York Times for the deepest profile yet of a company that’s the envy of the business world and a pretty horrible place to work. How can Amazon get away with such practices, a seeming social experiment that preys on workers psychologically? “Unfairness is not illegal,” is the way one lawyer in the piece puts it. The question is whether some of the tools used to quantify employees at the online retail behemoth will become common. Probably.

An excerpt about Elizabeth Willet, a former Army Captain who discovered a new kind of combat during her brief employment at Amazon:

Ms. Willet’s co-workers strafed her through the Anytime Feedback Tool, the widget in the company directory that allows employees to send praise or criticism about colleagues to management. (While bosses know who sends the comments, their identities are not typically shared with the subjects of the remarks.) Because team members are ranked, and those at the bottom eliminated every year, it is in everyone’s interest to outperform everyone else.

Craig Berman, an Amazon spokesman, said the tool was just another way to provide feedback, like sending an email or walking into a manager’s office. Most comments, he said, are positive.

However, many workers called it a river of intrigue and scheming. They described making quiet pacts with colleagues to bury the same person at once, or to praise one another lavishly. Many others, along with Ms. Willet, described feeling sabotaged by negative comments from unidentified colleagues with whom they could not argue. In some cases, the criticism was copied directly into their performance reviews — a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called “the full paste.”

Soon the tool, or something close, may be found in many more offices. Workday, a human resources software company, makes a similar product called Collaborative Anytime Feedback that promises to turn the annual performance review into a daily event. One of the early backers of Workday was Jeff Bezos, in one of his many investments. (He also owns The Washington Post.)

The rivalries at Amazon extend beyond behind-the-back comments. Employees say that the Bezos ideal, a meritocracy in which people and ideas compete and the best win, where co-workers challenge one another “even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,” as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.•