Amazon VP Insists it’s a “Magical” Company in Wake of Brutal Allegations

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Amazon Vice President and Distinguished Engineer Brad Porter has made a blog post in which he describes the “magical” meetings held by the company, claiming that the online retailer “absolutely runs better” than previous companies he worked for, in the wake of the brutal allegations leveled at them in a now-infamous New York Times article. 

The lengthy NY Times article, which detailed the allegedly awful working conditions the company promoted, saw former and current Amazon employees exposing the business, with one employee claiming that they had seen everyone in their office cry at their desk at some point during their career, while another said that “Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

But despite these allegations, which saw CEO Jeff Bezos issue a company-wide memo that encouraged employees to speak out about their experiences with the company, with him claiming that the article didn’t represent “the Amazon I know,” Brad Porter has thrown his hat into the ring and has claimed that, at least on a managerial level, Amazon flows fluidly. 

Specifically focusing upon Amazon’s meetings and how they influence the company, with the retailer having “fundamentally innovated in how to scale the process of bringing groups of people deeply up to speed in new spaces and making critical decisions based on that insight quickly,” Porter writes: “Imagine for a moment that you could go into a meeting and everyone in the meeting would have very deep context on the topic you’re going to discuss.  They would be well-versed in the critical data for your business.  Imagine if everyone understood the core tenets you operate by and internalized how you’re applying them to your decisions. 

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“How great would it be not to be constantly interrupted by clarifying questions?  How great would it be not to have the decisions in the meeting based on the social networking advocacy that happened before the meeting?  How great would it be if executives deeply understood your organization from your perspective before asserting they know better how to do it?  How great would it be to be able to review the core data going into a decision rather than have someone summarize it and assert that correlation is causality without revealing their work?  

“This is what meetings are like at Amazon and it is magical.”

He adds: “At previous companies I was constantly frustrated when decisions were made off of partial context without an opportunity to properly present the data.  I would see logical flaws and statistical flaws, but not have the opportunity to probe them because others in the room didn’t have the same context or the same data.  I would recognize that the team had flawed tenets, but couldn’t get the team to articulate their core decision criteria. 

“I never have these challenges at Amazon.”

CEO Jeff Bezos was accused of feigning ignorance when he claimed that he had never heard of some of the complaints leveled at Amazon as an employer. (Image Credit: David McNew / Getty Images)

Given the outrage surrounding Amazon’s company culture when the NY Times piece was first posted, aside from Jeff Bezos’ initial comments there has been little word on measures the company has put in place in order to ensure a better, less emotionally damaging environment for its employees. However, given our tendency to swiftly interchange the subjects of our ire, Amazon has mostly been allowed to continue working with its reputation scuffed, not dented nor particularly damaged. 

Porter’s comments are emblematic of this, with him being one of the major cogs in Amazon’s wheel but, despite the allegations leveled at the company, he still feels that him discussing the wonderful meetings he hold with Amazon’s other head honchos is appropriate. Put this in contrast with a quote from the NY Times article, referencing the events of the meetings attended by people who aren’t VP of the company, which reads: “You walk out of a conference room and you’ll see a grown man covering his face. Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” Suddenly it seems that not all of Amazon’s meetings are as “magical” as those experienced by Mr. Porter.

But of course, as someone who is most closely associated with the development of the likes of Prime NOW and Prime Air, Porter isn’t directly responsible for Amazon’s reportedly awful company culture. However, that doesn’t mean that comments such as these from someone in his position won’t lead to some pointing fingers, suggesting that rather than bragging about how smoothly the company operates at a managerial level, they should instead focus on working upon the negative facets of the retailer that caused such a stir when they were outlined by the NY Times piece. 

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