Capitalism and lack of freedom

Corporate horrors of the IT industry in Amazon and Konami

In mid-August, stories appeared in the American press about the working situation in two large IT companies-the Amazon online store and the famous Japanese game studio Konami. To become the best in Amazon, you need to spread the ideas of colleagues to the fluff, adhere to prohibitively high standards, knock on each other and be prepared that you will never be praised. Konami is not in Japanese strict surveillance of subordinates, more similar to North Korean methods.

Amazon: "Everyone with whom I worked was crying at work"

Dozens of millions of people face Amazon daily, this is one of the largest Internet companies in the world and the most popular online store. Corporate morals at Amazon became known from the publication of The New York Times, released on August 15.

Amazon forces even small clerks to sign long non -disclosure agreements, so there was little known about the conditions in the company’s work before the New York Times. The corporate culture of Amazon is work at the limit and sometimes beyond the limits of opportunities with the aim of getting a maximum benefit from each office employee. The company encourages the most harsh criticism of the ideas of colleagues and denunciations to the higher authorities in order to increase efficiency. “You can work for a long time, hard or be smart, but in Amazon.com you can’t only choose two points out of three,” the founder of Jeff Bezos wrote in a letter to shareholders back in 1997, explaining the company's ethics, and later promised that Amazon would die if he turned into a “outbred club” following Microsoft.

Work in the Secttle Campus of Amazon is completely different from the life of Google employees who are sitting in an office with a good design and are provided with everything necessary - from scooters to free food of a restaurant level. Amazon does not believe that feeding employees is the care of the company. There are no snacks in Amazon’s offices, employees often pay on business trips from their pockets and cover accounts for mobile phones. This, however, is compensated by prizes in the form of Amazon shares.

Jeff Bezos at the head of everything puts efficiency and success and expects exactly the same attitude to work from his subordinates. “If you are a good“ Amazon ”, you will eventually become Amabot,” says one of the company employees. Amabot is a person who has completely become part of the Amazon system, a system that is arranged in such a way as to motivate people to work as much and efficiently as possible.

The effectiveness of employees is evaluated by a special program that connects the success of the work of a particular “Amazon” with the results of the project in which he is busy. This creates a sense of personal responsibility for projects and makes you work all the time. The company annually dismisses employees whose results are unsatisfactory; One former head of the personnel department called this approach in an interview with Nyt "deliberate Darwinism."

At the same time, it is not customary to praise employees in the company. One of the employees of Amazon tells how one day he received a promotion - at first his boss mentioned every failed task for half an hour and every skill that he did not possess, and reported for shortcomings. When the man already imagined what would tell his wife after dismissal, he heard: "Congratulations, you will go to increase."

“You leave the meeting room and see how an adult is trying to cover his face. Almost everyone with whom I worked was crying in the office, ”says former Amazon employee Bo Olson. One of these employees was himself.

After the publication of the article, Jeff Bezos said that he would not recognize the company described in the material and asks all employees who faced the attitude described in the note, to contact him. “I am completely sure that anyone who would be in the company described in the article NYT would be a madman if he had not left her. I know that he himself would have quit from such a company, ”the Bezos wrote in an appeal to the Amazons. In preparing the material, he refused to give an interview to The New York Times.

Konami: Ineffective developers are transferred to guards

On the account of the Japanese game company Konami are dozens of incredibly popular games for different consoles, including the Metal Gear, Castlevania series, Silent Hill horror, classic Contra Arcade and much more. Konami began to develop games back in the 1970s, now it is one of the most famous publishers and developers in the game industry. In early August, the American edition of Kotaku published excerpts from the investigation of the Japanese Nikkei magazine about the corporate culture in Konami - as it turned out, to work in the company is much harder than to take their games at the highest level of complexity.

The developers in Konami working on the new part of Metal Gear Solid do not have access to the Internet at work - they can only exchange messages in the corporate network. Staying at the workplace is tightly controlled, and the names of those who have been at lunch for too long are announced by speakerphone.

Not very effective developers in Konami are punishable by transferring to another job-for example, they offer to become a guard, a cleaner in the company's fitness club or go to the slot machine factory. Such a translation can threaten not only recruits, but also developers who were busy in the most important projects of the company. Once, as Kotaku writes, one Konami employee wrote a post on his dismissal on Facebook. All colleagues who were overwhelming his post were then transferred to other positions.

Konami has their own analogue of the secret police, whose employees follow colleagues in all possible ways, including reading corporate correspondence and studying records from surveillance cameras. Moreover, this “secret police”, according to unofficial information, is often associated with new employers of former Konami employees and talks about how badly they worked.

Every Monday at Konami is a meeting of the company's management, which is broadcast on the internal site. All employees are required to watch these meetings, strictly monitor this, and the names of the violators are announced by speakerphone.

Kotaku contacted representatives of several Japanese gaming companies, where the publication confirmed that the orders adopted in Konami are abnormal even for the known strict corporate norms of Japan. Kotaku twice unsuccessfully tried to get a comment from Konami about the corporate culture of the company.