Terrible places to work - Amazon

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings, toil long and late (emails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are “unreasonably high. "Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves". “When you’re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness.”

Amazon employees are held accountable for a staggering array of metrics, a process that unfolds in what can be anxiety-provoking sessions called business reviews, held weekly or monthly among various teams. A day or two before the meetings, employees receive printouts, sometimes up to 50 or 60 pages long, several workers said. At the reviews, employees are cold-called and pop-quizzed on any one of those thousands of numbers.

Everyone has access to the "Anytime Feedback Tool," which lets employees criticize or praise their coworkers discretely. The feedback makes it to upper management, and can often be used in Amazon's standard weekly or monthly performance reviews. Employees are also routinely ranked, and managers are forced to fire a certain amount of the lowest-scoring workers every time to fulfill quotas.

Perhaps worst of all is Amazon's approach when its employees need help. The Times has uncovered several cases where workers who were sick, grieving, or otherwise encumbered by the realities of life were pushed out of the company. A woman who had a miscarriage was told to travel on a business trip the day after both her twins were stillborn. Another woman recovering from breast cancer was given poor performance rankings and was warned that she was in danger of losing her job.