Top Digg: August 2015

Thursday, August 20, 2015

How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election

Google has the ability to drive millions of votes to a candidate with no one the wiser.

Are Lawyers Getting Dumber?

Yes, says the woman who runs the bar exam

Photographer: Meredith Jenks for Bloomberg Businessweek

Last August, the tens of thousands of answer sheets from the bar exam started to stream into the National Conference of Bar Examiners. The initial results were so glaringly bad that staffers raced to tell their boss, Erica Moeser. In most states, the exam spans two days: The first is devoted to six hours of writing, and the second day brings six hours of multiple-choice questions. The NCBE, a nonprofit in Madison, Wis., creates and scores the multiple-choice part of the test, administered in every state but Louisiana. Those two days of bubble-filling and essay-scribbling are extremely stressful. For people who just spent three years studying the intricacies of the law, with the expectation that their $120,000 in tuition would translate into a bright white-collar future, failure can wreak emotional carnage. It can cost more than $800 to take the exam, and bombing the first time can mean losing a law firm job.

When he saw the abysmal returns, Mark Albanese, director of testing and research at the NCBE, scrambled to check his staff’s work. Once he and Moeser were confident the test had been fairly scored, they began reporting the numbers to state officials, who released their results to the public over the course of several weeks.

In Idaho, bar pass rates dropped 15 percentage points, from 80 percent to 65 percent. In Delaware, Iowa, Minnesota, Oregon, Tennessee, and Texas, scores dropped 9 percentage points or more. By the time all the states published their numbers, it was clear that the July exam had been a disaster everywhere. Scores on the multiple-choice part of the test registered their largest single-year drop in the four-decade history of the test.

“It was tremendously embarrassing,” says Matt Aksamit, a graduate of Creighton University School of Law, who failed Nebraska’s July bar exam last year. “I think a lot of people can relate to what it’s like to work hard for something and fall short of what you want.” (Aksamit took it again in February and passed.)

Panic swept the bottom half of American law schools, all of which are ranked partly on the basis of their ability to get their graduates into the profession. Moeser sent a letter to law school deans. She outlined future changes to the exam and how to prepare for them. Then she made a hard turn to the July exam. “The group that sat in July 2014 was less able than the group that sat in July 2013,” she wrote. It’s not us, Moeser was essentially saying. It’s you.

“Her response was the height of arrogance,” says Nick Allard, the dean of Brooklyn Law School. “That statement was so demonstrably false, so corrosive.” Allard wrote to Moeser in November, demanding that she apologize to law grads, calling her letter “offensive” and saying that the test and her views on the people who took it were “matters of national concern.” Two weeks later, a group of 79 deans, mostly from bottom-tier schools, sent a letter asking for an investigation to determine “the integrity and fairness of the July 2014 exam.”

Moeser wasn’t swayed. She responded in December, saying she regretted offending people by characterizing the students as “less able”—but maintained that they were relatively bad at taking the exam. In January, Stephen Ferruolo, the dean of the University of San Diego School of Law, asked Moeser to explain how the NCBE scored the test. Moeser rebuffed him, instead inviting Ferruolo to consider the decline in his students’ Law School Admission Test scores in recent years, which, she wrote, “mark the beginning of a slide that has continued.” The implication: Ferruolo and the rest of the people running law schools not named Stanford or Harvard should get used to higher fail rates.
“The response is to stonewall,” Ferruolo says. “Where’s the accountability? I’m not looking to find more information so I can attack the NCBE. I am looking for more information so I can do my job as a dean.”

This year’s results, which will start coming out in September, may be the most critical in the exam’s history. Lawyers and those who hope to join their ranks will soon know if last year was an aberration or a symptom of a worsening problem. Critics of the bar exam say the test is broken, while Moeser maintains the reason so many students are failing is that they are less prepared. “You can squawk loud and long about what’s happening,” Moeser says, “but you’ve got to look at who your student body is.”

Whether or not the profession is in crisis—a perennial lament—there’s no question that American legal education is in the midst of an unprecedented slump. In 2015 fewer people applied to law school than at any point in the last 30 years. Law schools are seeing enrollments plummet and have tried to keep their campuses alive by admitting students with worse credentials. That may force some law firms and consumers to rely on lawyers of a lower caliber, industry watchers say, but the fight will ultimately be most painful for the middling students, who are promised a shot at a legal career but in reality face long odds of becoming lawyers.

As the controversy raged on into this spring, Moeser’s detractors seized on an irony of her résumé. Wisconsin is the only state that doesn’t require its local graduates to take the bar exam in order to practice law. Moeser never sat for it. “The person who is the czarina, who determines more and more every year what Americans have to learn to pass the bar to become licensed lawyers … never took the bar,” Allard says. “Who is she to say what the standard is? Who is she?”

“You can squawk loud and long about what’s happening, but you’ve got to look at who your student body is”

From a conference room in Madison, Moeser watches a thick layer of smoke on the horizon, traces of a fire raging in Canada. It’s early July, the start of her annual high season, when the NCBE sends the first copies of the bar exam to state officials across the country. After a moment her gaze shifts to her assembled employees, asking them how the day is going. She has more imminent threats to consider.
Moeser is warm and intimidating at the same time, speaking slowly and pausing to stare at the person she’s talking to, like a pitcher guarding against a stolen base. She’s wearing a denim shirt decorated with “NCBE” in gold stitching.

After graduating from the University of Wisconsin Law School in 1975, Moeser took a job at the state bar, partly because she had just given birth to her first son, she says, and the organization promised flexibility for its first nonsecretarial female employee. For 17 years, she administered the Wisconsin bar exam for out-of-state grads. In 1994 she moved to the national level, taking over the NCBE. “It’s an irony that I got to do this and I personally have never taken the bar exam,” Moeser says.

Her eyes shift to the ceiling when considering the hits the test has taken over the past year. Those arguments are like clay pigeons, she says: “You shoot them and they splinter, but the fact is, they are going to get up there and get some attention.”

In a typical year, about 50,000 people take the exam, which is created by a team of academics, judges, and lawyers that the NCBE enlists as volunteers. The organization itself has about 85 employees, including a team of Ph.D.s who spent their time in graduate school on the unenviable mission of studying standardized tests.

Sample questions on the NCBE’s website ask whether a hypothetical lawsuit is destined to fail or why a company’s courtroom strategy is bogus. One particularly intense problem concerns a father who killed his crack-addicted son and whether he should be allowed to argue self-defense in court. State officials score the essays, while the multiple-choice answers are routed back to Madison for Moeser’s organization to grade.

Moeser says underqualified law grads don’t deserve to pass the bar just because they earned a J.D. Her role, she says, is to protect consumers. “Would most people say, ‘Oh, we ought to lower the standards so we can have more pediatricians?’ You’d say, ‘Not with my baby, you can’t,’ ” she says.
The July 2014 exam was controversial even before the results came in. On Tuesday, July 29, after spending the first day of the exam furiously writing, some law graduates who tried to upload their essays were met with error messages. The software that thousands of test takers used for the exam in 43 states had failed. The malfunction was dubbed “barmageddon” and “barghazi” online.

Students spent hours frantically trying to load their essays into the system, and several states had to push back the deadline. Students took to Twitter (after leaving their testing rooms) in all-caps cries for help that ranged from cutesy to apoplectic. ExamSoft, the software maker, ultimately settled with graduates who brought a class action against the company and agreed to pay each member of the class $90. ExamSoft declined to comment for this article.

One of the first steps in evaluating the exam is comparing this year’s results with those of previous aspirants’. The NCBE looks at how the graduates performed on several questions that have appeared on previous exams. If the current test takers did worse, that’s a sign that previous cohorts would have done better on the test overall than the current group. The NCBE converts raw results into scaled scores based on that process.

When the 2014 results came in, pass rates were down across-the-board in states that used the software and those that didn’t. Deborah Merritt, a law professor at Ohio State University, is convinced that the tech problems are partly responsible for the low scores. “You can’t explain that big a gap with the quality of students,” she says.

Merritt says the process punished last year’s test takers. She contends that the glitch skewed the curve, because people in several states may have done worse on certain questions after they spent a night in panic. “If you give one exam where people sit down and another where they stand up for six hours, of course the results will be different,” she says.

Moeser won’t even entertain that analysis, which she calls baseless. “I am not in a position to spend time analyzing results for which I lack respect,” she says. “We’re not in the blogging business.”
Besides, Moeser says, there will always be people who deal with stress better than others. The questions about ExamSoft did pique the interest of her test director, Albanese, who wrote in a June publication of the organization’s magazine that “the glitch cannot be ruled out as a contributing factor.”

“The problem I have is the complete denial on the part of the NCBE that this is a possibility worth considering,” says Jerome Organ, a law professor at the University of St. Thomas at St. Paul (Minn.) who studies bar pass rates. “It’s hard to acknowledge a mistake. It’s really hard to acknowledge one when you’re claiming to be the experts and your credibility and cachet depend on it.”

Since 2008 partner earnings at firms of all sizes have decreased 9 percent in constant dollars, according to federal tax filings. Solo practitioners have been struggling for much longer. Since 1988 earnings for standalone attorneys, of which there are about 354,000 nationally, have declined 31 percent. The legal industry has shed more than 50,000 jobs in the past eight years. The decline began decades ago. Solo practitioners began floundering in the late 1980s. Their average income, adjusted for inflation, was $71,000 in 1988; it was $49,000 in 2012.

Even as business was tanking for a lot of lawyers, American law schools happily welcomed more students. In 1987 there were 175 accredited American law schools. By 2010 there were 200, and after steadily increasing for years, enrollment peaked at 52,000 that year. “There was willful ignorance in what was going on,” says Benjamin Barton, a law professor at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville and author of a recent book on the profession, Glass Half Full.

When Wall Street imploded in 2008, law schools soon took a hit. Hearing that there weren’t enough jobs for all fresh J.D.s, college grads abruptly turned away from the profession. In 2014 enrollments reached their lowest level in four decades. In 2015 fewer people are expected to apply to law school than at any point in the past 15 years. “There was a heyday, and it’s now enduring a correction,” Moeser says. The trouble arises when the people running law schools try to intervene in that correction, she says. “The economics that are driving law schools are scary.”

Big law firms say shrinking law school classes and less qualified graduates haven’t cut into their talent pool. Boutique shops might not be so fortunate, says Tom Henry, the vice chair of Willkie Farr & Gallagher’s Professional Personnel/Legal Recruiting Committee. “It may further constrict those smaller firms’ ability to compete for the same type of business,” he says.

Young people’s aversion to law school is a natural reaction to a saturated job market, says Jim Leipold, the executive director of the National Association for Law Placement, which tracks employment outcomes for recent law grads. “There was definitely an oversupply of law students,” Leipold says.

On the day the first exams are leaving her fiefdom in July, Moeser wants to talk about the LSAT, the law school entrance exam. She pulls out a magazine page. “This is my favorite chart.” One axis shows the change in law students’ LSAT scores at the 25th percentile since 2010, meaning the people who were at the bottom quartile of test takers. Most schools have seen scores at that strata decline. The other axis shows change in enrollment over the same period. Almost every school has lost students, as fewer and fewer young people apply. Some places, Moeser suggests, are dropping their standards dramatically in the interest of stemming that tide. “Feast your eyes on New York,” she says, flipping to a table that has the scatter plot’s data. Her finger lands on Brooklyn Law School, where Allard, her loudest critic, runs the show. In five years the bottom quartile of Allard’s students saw test scores drop 9 points—a steeper decline than at 196 other law schools.

In a pinstriped charcoal suit and purple tie, Allard is the most formally dressed person in the classroom. Eighteen Brooklyn Law students are here for a special course to guide them through summer jobs at law offices. One student volunteers that she failed to finish an onerous one-day assignment to summarize a deposition hundreds of pages long. “How did you sleep that night?” Allard asks. Just fine, the student responds, not understanding his implication. “Well, maybe that’s a bad thing,” the dean mutters.

Brooklyn Law opened in 1901 as a night school for working-class strivers, but it’s become a full-time, standalone school and earned a solid reputation. Allard and his allies say the most recent bar exams are stacked against some of their students. “We live in a society where there is an increasing gap between the rich and the poor,” says Ferruolo, the dean at San Diego. “We worsen that by this system that puts more and more emphasis on a testing regime which is biased.” The bias, he suggests, stems from the common practice of bar applicants spending as much as $4,000 on cram courses. Less well-off graduates, already burdened by tuition loans, can’t spend as much time or money preparing for the exam—and end up doing worse.

When fewer people pass the exam, Allard says, poor and working-class Americans suffer in another way: “Most people in America can’t afford lawyers. Most small businesses can’t afford lawyers. The biggest cause of that is that there are too few lawyers being produced.” The bar exam, he says, “perpetuates the status quo in a way that keeps qualified, motivated people from becoming lawyers and deprives most people of affordable legal services.”

Paul Campos, a professor at the University of Colorado Law School and author of the 2012 book Don’t Go to Law School (Unless), cannot suppress a laugh when presented with that logic. “There’s a shortage of lawyers in this country the same way that there’s a shortage of Mercedes-Benzes,” he says. “There are many people who want them who don’t have them.” He predicts that pumping out more J.D.s will only lead to more under- or unemployed attorneys.

That’s part of why Moeser says schools should take their students’ professional prospects into account long before they take the bar. The problem, she insists, isn’t that her test discriminates but that law schools looking to put butts in seats are lowering their standards. In the process, she says, they create false expectations. “You’ve got this underclass in law schools who are really keeping the lights on but not reaping the benefit.” Moeser expects the reckoning to continue. “I would anticipate the scores will drop again, if I had to guess,” she says, her mouth drawing a straight line across her face. “I don’t anticipate a rebound.”

A Half-Day At The World's Largest Drugstore

A game I sometimes like to play with people is called Guess What BeyoncÃ© Is Doing Right Now. I am reasonably certain I invented this game, which is actually two games. The first game is to guess what American celebrity BeyoncÃ© (net worth ~$450 million) is doing at any given moment. The second game is to estimate the likelihood that your guess is correct. I believe I can predict with about 85% certainty what any of my close friends is doing at a specified point in time. When they are not working 9-to-5 office jobs, they are generally eating food (at home or in public) or using a computer (at home or in public). For BeyoncÃ©, my certainty drops to about 4%. At noon on a Tuesday, you might find her on a private jet to Ibiza, or caring for Blue in one of the 14 homes allegedly maintained by her and Jay-Z, or up in the studio recording her next triple-platinum album. Maybe she's in an underground government lab testing a great new drug that's yet to be released to the public. Maybe she is sleeping. I couldn't possibly know.

More than 59 million Americans live in the areas with fewer than 2500 residents that the Census Bureau classifies as rural. On my 629-mile eastbound drive across Wyoming into Wall, South Dakota, I did not see a single one of them. If I can predict the daily routine of BeyoncÃ© with about 4% certainty, I suspect my odds of guessing the current preoccupation of a rural-dwelling American are even lower. Statistically, citizens of the Great Plains either drill oil, farm corn for Monsanto, or do an administrative task that contributes to either effort.
Even knowing this information, I have no mental template for what their daily lives might look like. If you, like me, are a part of the 80.7% of Americans who did not grow up in an area classified as rural, then the drive into Wall is difficult to reckon with. First, there is the very blue sky, which is the same sky as any other American sky, except big. This Great Plains interstate sky is porn-knockers big, or cartoon-sandwich big, or any of the other types of overblown big which demand some skepticism about reality. The mid-grass prairie below is similarly uncanny, a shade of green so dense and bright I felt new sympathy for the ambitious projects undertaken by the artificial greens of lime-flavor and St. Patrick's Day and the plastic grass that garnishes takeout sushi. We are on holiday in a desktop wallpaper, and for half a day we point our car at 90 mph towards a horizontal seam between blue and green, for high velocity is the only sane way to make sense of such alien scale. The surface of the moon might have seemed more familiar.

If you miss your first billboard for Wall Drug (you won't), do not fret, for there are hundreds more. They populate the 650-mile span of I-90 that connects Montana to Minnesota, and each new sighting feels as thrilling as the last, a welcome commercial break from the stress of processing so much big. Sometimes the billboards ask, Have you dug Wall Drug? or implore things like DON'T MISS OUT. Other times they advertise amenities (Hot Coffee 5Â¢), or assert relevance (WALL DRUG as told by Good Morning America), or shout timely slogans out into the empty plains (YOLO Wall Drug). The first sign for the drugstore was erected in 1936 and advertised Free Ice Water to weary motorists. Before this sign, Wall Drug was a dying pharmacy in the dying town of Wall, South Dakota (population 326, and waning). After the sign, the store survived as a result of a geographic coincidence that happened to situate Mount Rushmore 76 miles to the west. The nationalist road trip pilgrimage site opened in 1941 and provided Wall Drug with a consistent stream of thirsty passers-through. Today, however, the megastore thrives as a destination in its own right, a 76,000-square-foot, self-sustaining monument to something, though the nature of that something is not immediately clear.
We arrive feeling not thirsty, but bitchy. The day before, a rock from a passing dump truck had shattered our sunroof, and nothing manufactures gratuitous resentment like having to yell for no reason over the flapflapflap of a duct-taped tarp in high-speed wind. With no rational recourse for our irritation, we drink the free paper cones of water curatively and set to planning our visit. First, we'll eat breakfast in the 520-seat Western Art Gallery Restaurant. Then, we'll part ways and wander the store's 20+ departments alone.

My first impulse was to understand the Western Art Gallery Restaurant as a sort of wild, wild counterpart to Cracker Barrel's gimmicky southern fare, but a survey of the menu makes clear that western modifies art gallery, not restaurant. On the eatery's walls you will find oil paintings of cowboys and Indians, as well as wooden plaques featuring local cattle brands; on the menu, you will find 75 food items, 68 of which feature a carbohydrate in the starring role. Of the seven non-carb food items, one is ice cream, five are side dishes (green beans, cottage cheese, garden salad, baked beans, cole slaw), and one is a crispy chicken entree salad. Though it is 1400 miles to the nearest ocean, the Western Art Gallery Restaurant proudly offers a fish and chips platter featuring deep-fried cod. Vegans, however, will be pleased to find a suitable garden burger. The point of including this list is not to play the part of an Evian-drinking cartoon New Yorker, but instead to illustrate two truths that would become increasingly evident as my day there progresses: 1) Wall Drug meticulously casts the widest possible net in hopes of capturing the interest of every conceivable American tourist, and 2) whatever Wall Drug commemorates, it extends far beyond the classical tropes of the American West.

Here are some of the things for sale at Wall Drug:
Authentic Stetson brand cowboy hats in many styles; a wide selection of Levi's jeans; novelty yellow road signs featuring warnings like Prairie Dog Crossing and Caution: Wine Zone; several types of collectable hematite crystal; collectible Native American artifacts, as well as "collectible" "Native American" "artifacts"; a toy rubber band launcher in the image of an Uzi submachine gun; the $115.95 Kershaw Rainbow Leek three-inch spring-assisted knife (2002 Blade Magazine Overall Knife of the Year); Batman throwing stars; Spongebob Squarepants Band-Aids; an assortment of politically ambiguous one-inch buttons with sayings like MARRIED ONCE IS THE NEW VIRGINITY and Here's a hot stock tip: PRISON INDUSTRIES; Founding Fathers shot glasses featuring Mount Rushmore; original Founding Fathers shot glasses featuring four men in Native American dress superimposed on Mount Rushmore; a 10"x12" cast-bronze sculpture by American artist Frederic Remington (b. 1861) entitled Coming Through the Rye, which depicts four cowboys on horseback shooting guns into the air, which retails for $1100; Wall Drug baseballs; Wall Drug magnets; Wall Drug T-shirts; Wall Drug snowglobes; Wall Drug flyswatters (comically large); Wall Drug flyswatters (1:1 scale); a cookbook of Wall Drug employees' favorite recipes; 2mg Loperamide Hydrochloride anti-diarrheal tablets; a paperweight made from a tarantula encased in lucite; and fish scales excised from the largest freshwater fish in the Amazon rainforest, a comparably extreme biome located over 4000 miles south.In the department called "Camp and Trail"I buy a magnet, some postcards, and two plastic Wall Drug sun visors. The man behind the register makes small talk with a level of authentic-seeming enthusiasm that far exceeds the normal amount of affective labor you'd expect from a theme park employee, or from any employee anywhere. Salt of the earth does not begin to articulate his vibe; this man is MSG of the earth, he is Dorito of the earth, if I am ever diagnosed with cancer I will call him first. As he rings up my items, I ask about the legality of the various knives and sharp objects he sells.
"Illegal?" he asks, like he has never heard this question, or like maybe he has heard it one million times. "Everything is legal in South Dakota, except for maybe high-heeled shoes."
I am short-circuited by this show of folksiness. For most people over the age of 12, an enjoyable part of any tourist attraction is searching out the places where the managed experience breaks down. Certainly the Magic Kingdom is magical, but an even more magical adventure for me would be the chance to witness an in-costume Cinderella smoking a Newport out behind the Dippin' Dots stand. For the gently misanthropic vacationer, there is no greater souvenir than a condom in the lazy river or the memory of two colonial Williamsburg blacksmiths discussing MDMA. At Wall Drug, such seams are hard to come by. This is not to say that the store manufactures an airtight facsimile of the bygone American West, but rather the opposite:It is hard to tell which parts are real and which parts are for show. Is Wall Drug the Disneyland of the Great Plains? Is it the bootstrapped dream of two homespun pharmacy owners? Is it just a giant store?

Certainly, Wall Drug is a tourist trap, but it differs from other roadside attractions, like the World's Largest Ball of Twine, in that it makes no effort to hide its intention of separating you from your money. After all, it's a store, and a store by definition exists for the sole purpose of facilitating commerce. While the array of things to buy might be absurd and dizzying, prices at Wall Drug bear almost no resemblance to the $11 beer-type swindle we've been trained to expect at places where tourists tour. There is a satisfactory souvenir on offer at every price point. A traveler of average impulse control can expect to be on his way, thirst quenched, only $10 or $15 poorer. Wall Drug might be a scheme, but it's certainly not a scam. After wandering the various departments for an hour, and reading the myriad clippings from local newspapers that line the attraction's inner walls, I couldn't help but get the sense that the store was just an innovative answer to the question of how to survive on a plot of rural land that gold and oil forgot.

Differentiating Wall Drug from the town of Wall itself feels impossible. In 2013, the Census reported 876 permanent residents living in the town; a Harvard Business Review profile of the store estimates that in the summertime high season, as many as 1000 customers will pass through the restaurant in a single hour. This is not to mention travelers who visit but don't eat, or the seasonal employees who come from places as far-flung as China and Slovakia to work. These workers, typically students, pay $30 per week to live in one of the 28 proctor-supervised dormitories owned and operated by the store. I couldn't help but think of the paternalistic Pullman Company-type arrangements that organized rural economies in the early days of the railroad, and indeed Wall is a company town of this type.
Property records for Pennington County, South Dakota list Wall Drug Store, Inc. as owning 71 plots of land within the Wall city limits, but even the businesses that aren't owned by the company feel enmeshed in and even integral to its scheme. Across the street from Wall Drug, you'll find a slew of copycat operations willing to gamble on the existence of a person interested in visiting the second-, third-, or fourth-most popular tourist trap off a certain South Dakota interstate exit. These neighbors (Broken Arrow Trading Company, the Wall Discount Outlet, Dakota Mercantile, etc.) all mimic the faux-frontier faÃ§ade architecture of Wall Drug, which itself mimics real frontier faÃ§ade architecture, which itself was invented during the heydey of hastily constructed pioneer towns in hopes of mimicking the refined-looking streetscape of an organically evolved downtown.

But the thing is, Wall's downtown did evolve organically, only this evolution came as a result of a business model that hinged on selling tourists their own fantasy of what an inorganically evolved Western tourist trap should include. Did Wall constitute Wall Drug, or did Wall Drug constitute Wall? It's an unanswerable question. A three-hour visit to this wild, wild meme town was more than I could wrap my head around.
We reconvened in the store's backyard, in the shadow of a giant fiberglass jackalope, a mythical animal of regional folklore said to have the body of jackrabbit and the horns of an antelope. Having never seen a jackrabbit, nor an antelope, the idea did not seem so implausibly mythical to us, and for a few minutes we debated whether or not the animal actually exists. After a day at Wall Drug, it did not seem crazy that a thing cobbled together from so much randomness could somehow be real.

Inside The Brutal Life Of Working At Amazon

Amazon employees entering the companyâ€™s offices in Seattle. It recently became the most valuable retailer in the country. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

SEATTLE â€" On Monday mornings, fresh recruits line up for an orientation intended to catapult them into Amazonâ€™s singular way of working.

They are told to forget the â€œpoor habitsâ€ they learned at previous jobs, one employee recalled. When they â€œhit the wallâ€ from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: â€œClimb the wall,â€ others reported. To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, â€œIâ€™m Peculiarâ€ â€" the companyâ€™s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

At Amazon, workers are encouraged to tear apart one anotherâ€™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 â€œunreasonably high.â€ The internal phone directory instructs colleagues on how to send secret feedback to one anotherâ€™s bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others. (The tool offers sample texts, including this: â€œI felt concerned about his inflexibility and openly complaining about minor tasks.â€)

Amazon is building new offices in Seattle and, in about three years, will have enough space for about 50,000 employees. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Many of the newcomers filing in on Mondays may not be there in a few years. The companyâ€™s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff â€" â€œpurposeful Darwinism,â€ one former Amazon human resources director said. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

Even as the company tests delivery by drone and ways to restock toilet paper at the push of a bathroom button, it is conducting a little-known experiment in how far it can push white-collar workers, redrawing the boundaries of what is acceptable. The company, founded and still run by Jeff Bezos, rejects many of the popular management bromides that other corporations at least pay lip service to and has instead designed what many workers call an intricate machine propelling them to achieve Mr. Bezosâ€™ ever-expanding ambitions.

â€œThis is a company that strives to do really big, innovative, groundbreaking things, and those things arenâ€™t easy,â€ said Susan Harker, Amazonâ€™s top recruiter. â€œWhen youâ€™re shooting for the moon, the nature of the work is really challenging. For some people it doesnâ€™t work.â€

Bo Olson

Worked in books marketing

â€œNearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.â€

Bo Olson, worked in books marketing

Bo Olson was one of them. He lasted less than two years in a book marketing role and said that his enduring image was watching people weep in the office, a sight other workers described as well. â€œYou walk out of a conference room and youâ€™ll see a grown man covering his face,â€ he said. â€œNearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.â€

Thanks in part to its ability to extract the most from employees, Amazon is stronger than ever. Its swelling campus is transforming a swath of this city, a 10-million-square-foot bet that tens of thousands of new workers will be able to sell everything to everyone everywhere. Last month, it eclipsed Walmart as the most valuable retailer in the country, with a market valuation of $250 billion, and Forbes deemed Mr. Bezos the fifth-wealthiest person on earth.

Tens of millions of Americans know Amazon as customers, but life inside its corporate offices is largely a mystery. Secrecy is required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement. The company authorized only a handful of senior managers to talk to reporters for this article, declining requests for interviews with Mr. Bezos and his top leaders.

However, more than 100 current and former Amazonians â€" members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch â€" described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes-punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create.

In interviews, some said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits. Many employees are motivated by â€œthinking big and knowing that we havenâ€™t scratched the surface on whatâ€™s out there to invent,â€ said Elisabeth Rommel, a retail executive who was one of those permitted to speak.

Others who cycled in and out of the company said that what they learned in their brief stints helped their careers take off. And more than a few who fled said they later realized they had become addicted to Amazonâ€™s way of working.

â€œA lot of people who work there feel this tension: Itâ€™s the greatest place I hate to work,â€ said John Rossman, a former executive there who published a book, â€œThe Amazon Way.â€

Tony Galbato

Amazon vice president of human resources

â€œIt would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.â€

Tony Galbato, Amazon vice president for human resources

Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

â€œOrganizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executionerâ€™s blade,â€ said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change.

On a recent morning, as Amazonâ€™s new hires waited to begin orientation, few of them seemed to appreciate the experiment in which they had enrolled. Only one, Keith Ketzle, a freckled Texan triathlete with an M.B.A., lit up with recognition, explaining how he left his old, lumbering company for a faster, grittier one.

â€œConflict brings about innovation,â€ he said.

New employees arrive at the campus of Amazon in Seattle. The company holds orientation sessions on Mondays. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

A Philosophy of Work

Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early.

He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton. He didnâ€™t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating that every puff cost her a few minutes. â€œYouâ€™ve taken nine years off your life!â€ he told her. She burst into tears.

He was 10 at the time. Decades later, he created a technological and retail giant by relying on some of the same impulses: eagerness to tell others how to behave; an instinct for bluntness bordering on confrontation; and an overarching confidence in the power of metrics, buoyed by his experience in the early 1990s at D. E. Shaw, a financial firm that overturned Wall Street convention by using algorithms to get the most out of every trade.

According to early executives and employees, Mr. Bezos was determined almost from the moment he founded Amazon in 1994 to resist the forces he thought sapped businesses over time â€" bureaucracy, profligate spending, lack of rigor. As the company grew, he wanted to codify his ideas about the workplace, some of them proudly counterintuitive, into instructions simple enough for a new worker to understand, general enough to apply to the nearly limitless number of businesses he wanted to enter and stringent enough to stave off the mediocrity he feared.

The result was the leadership principles, the articles of faith that describe the way Amazonians should act. In contrast to companies where declarations about their philosophy amount to vague platitudes, Amazon has rules that are part of its daily language and rituals, used in hiring, cited at meetings and quoted in food-truck lines at lunchtime. Some Amazonians say they teach them to their children.

The guidelines conjure an empire of elite workers (principle No. 5: â€œHire and develop the bestâ€) who hold one another to towering expectations and are liberated from the forces â€" red tape, office politics â€" that keep them from delivering their utmost. Employees are to exhibit â€œownershipâ€ (No. 2), or mastery of every element of their businesses, and â€œdive deep,â€ (No. 12) or find the underlying ideas that can fix problems or identify new services before shoppers even ask for them.

The workplace should be infused with transparency and precision about who is really achieving and who is not. Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as â€œathletesâ€ with endurance, speed (No. 8: â€œbias for actionâ€), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. 7: â€œthink bigâ€).

â€œYou can work long, hard or smart, but at Amazon.com you canâ€™t choose two out of three,â€ Mr. Bezos wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders, when the company sold only books, and which still serves as a manifesto. He added that when he interviewed potential hires, he warned them, â€œItâ€™s not easy to work here.â€

Amazon employees and family members attending a company picnic. Some fathers at Amazon said they considered quitting because of pressure from bosses to spend less time with their families. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Mr. Rossman, the former executive, said that Mr. Bezos was addressing a meeting in 2003 when he turned in the direction of Microsoft, across the water from Seattle, and said he didnâ€™t want Amazon to become â€œa country club.â€ If Amazon becomes like Microsoft, â€œwe would die,â€ Mr. Bezos added.

While the Amazon campus appears similar to those of some tech giants â€" with its dog-friendly offices, work force that skews young and male, on-site farmersâ€™ market and upbeat posters â€" the company is considered a place apart. Google and Facebook motivate employees with gyms, meals and benefits, like cash handouts for new parents, â€œdesigned to take care of the whole you,â€ as Google puts it.

Amazon, though, offers no pretense that catering to employees is a priority. Compensation is considered competitive â€" successful midlevel managers can collect the equivalent of an extra salary from grants of a stock that has increased more than tenfold since 2008. But workers are expected to embrace â€œfrugalityâ€ (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to the cellphones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. (No daily free food buffets or regular snack supplies, either.) The focus is on relentless striving to please customers, or â€œcustomer obsessionâ€ (No. 1), with words like â€œmissionâ€ used to describe lightning-quick delivery of Cocoa Krispies or selfie sticks.

As the company has grown, Mr. Bezos has become more committed to his original ideas, viewing them in almost moral terms, those who have worked closely with him say. â€œMy main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture,â€ Mr. Bezos said last year at a conference run by Business Insider, a web publication in which he is an investor.

Of all of his management notions, perhaps the most distinctive is his belief that harmony is often overvalued in the workplace â€" that it can stifle honest critique and encourage polite praise for flawed ideas. Instead, Amazonians are instructed to â€œdisagree and commitâ€ (No. 13) â€" to rip into colleaguesâ€™ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision.

â€œWe always want to arrive at the right answer,â€ said Tony Galbato, vice president for human resources, in an email statement. â€œIt would certainly be much easier and socially cohesive to just compromise and not debate, but that may lead to the wrong decision.â€

At its best, some employees said, Amazon can feel like the Bezos vision come to life, a place willing to embrace risk and strengthen ideas by stress test. Employees often say their co-workers are the sharpest, most committed colleagues they have ever met, taking to heart instructions in the leadership principles like â€œnever settleâ€ and â€œno task is beneath them.â€ Even relatively junior employees can make major contributions. The new delivery-by-drone project announced in 2013, for example, was coinvented by a low-level engineer named Daniel Buchmueller.

Dina Vaccari

Worked at Amazon from 2008 to 2014, on projects from corporate gift cards to sales of scientific supplies.

â€œI was so addicted to wanting to be successful there. For those of us who went to work there, it was like a drug that we could get self-worth from.â€

Dina Vaccari worked on projects from corporate gift cards to sales of scientific supplies, 2008 to 2014.

Last August, Stephenie Landry, an operations executive, joined in discussions about how to shorten delivery times and developed an idea for rushing goods to urban customers in an hour or less. One hundred eleven days later, she was in Brooklyn directing the start of the new service, Prime Now.

â€œA customer was able to get an Elsa doll that they could not find in all of New York City, and they had it delivered to their house in 23 minutes,â€ said Ms. Landry, who was authorized by the company to speak, still sounding exhilarated months later about providing â€œFrozenâ€ dolls in record time.

That becomes possible, she and others said, when everyone follows the dictates of the leadership principles. â€œWeâ€™re trying to create those moments for customers where weâ€™re solving a really practical need,â€ Ms. Landry said, â€œin this way that feels really futuristic and magical.â€

Motivating the â€˜Amabotsâ€™

Company veterans often say the genius of Amazon is the way it drives them to drive themselves. â€œIf youâ€™re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot,â€ said one employee, using a term that means you have become at one with the system.

In Amazon warehouses, employees are monitored by sophisticated electronic systems to ensure they are packing enough boxes every hour. (Amazon came under fire in 2011 when workers in an eastern Pennsylvania warehouse toiled in more than 100-degree heat with ambulances waiting outside, taking away laborers as they fell. After an investigation by the local newspaper, the company installed air-conditioning.)

But in its offices, Amazon uses a self-reinforcing set of management, data and psychological tools to spur its tens of thousands of white-collar employees to do more and more. â€œThe company is running a continual performance improvement algorithm on its staff,â€ said Amy Michaels, a former Kindle marketer.

The process begins when Amazonâ€™s legions of recruiters identify thousands of job prospects each year, who face extra screening by â€œbar raisers,â€ star employees and part-time interviewers charged with ensuring that only the best are hired. As the newcomers acclimate, they often feel dazzled, flattered and intimidated by how much responsibility the company puts on their shoulders and how directly Amazon links their performance to the success of their assigned projects, whether selling wine or testing the delivery of packages straight to shoppersâ€™ car trunks.

Amy Michaels

Worked in advertising and marketing at Amazon from 2012 to 2014.

â€œWhen you have so much turnover, the risk is that people are seen as fungible. You know that tomorrow youâ€™re going to look around and some people are going to have left the company or been managed out.â€

Amy Michaels worked in advertising and marketing, 2012-2014.

Every aspect of the Amazon system amplifies the others to motivate and discipline the companyâ€™s marketers, engineers and finance specialists: the leadership principles; rigorous, continuing feedback on performance; and the competition among peers who fear missing a potential problem or improvement and race to answer an email before anyone else.

Some veterans interviewed said they were protected from pressures by nurturing bosses or worked in relatively slow divisions. But many others said the culture stoked their willingness to erode work-life boundaries, castigate themselves for shortcomings (being â€œvocally self-criticalâ€ is included in the description of the leadership principles) and try to impress a company that can often feel like an insatiable taskmaster. Even many Amazonians who have worked on Wall Street and at start-ups say the workloads at the new South Lake Union campus can be extreme: marathon conference calls on Easter Sunday and Thanksgiving, criticism from bosses for spotty Internet access on vacation, and hours spent working at home most nights or weekends.

â€œOne time I didnâ€™t sleep for four days straight,â€ said Dina Vaccari, who joined in 2008 to sell Amazon gift cards to other companies and once used her own money, without asking for approval, to pay a freelancer in India to enter data so she could get more done. â€œThese businesses were my babies, and I did whatever I could to make them successful.â€

She and other workers had no shortage of career options but said they had internalized Amazonâ€™s priorities. One ex-employeeâ€™s fiancÃ© became so concerned about her nonstop working night after night that he would drive to the Amazon campus at 10 p.m. and dial her cellphone until she agreed to come home. When they took a vacation to Florida, she spent every day at Starbucks using the wireless connection to get work done.

Liz Pearce

Helped start Amazonâ€™s wedding registry

â€œI would see people practically combust.â€

Liz Pearce, worked on Amazonâ€™s wedding registry

â€œThatâ€™s when the ulcer started,â€ she said. (Like several other former workers, the woman requested that her name not be used because her current company does business with Amazon. Some current employees were reluctant to be identified because they were barred from speaking with reporters.)

To prod employees, Amazon has a powerful lever: more data than any retail operation in history. Its perpetual flow of real-time, ultradetailed metrics allows the company to measure nearly everything its customers do: what they put in their shopping carts, but do not buy; when readers reach the â€œabandon pointâ€ in a Kindle book; and what they will stream based on previous purchases. It can also tell when engineers are not building pages that load quickly enough, or when a vendor manager does not have enough gardening gloves in stock.

â€œData creates a lot of clarity around decision-making,â€ said Sean Boyle, who runs the finance division of Amazon Web Services and was permitted by the company to speak. â€œData is incredibly liberating.â€

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.

Explanations like â€œweâ€™re not totally sureâ€ or â€œIâ€™ll get back to youâ€ are not acceptable, many employees said. Some managers sometimes dismissed such responses as â€œstupidâ€ or told workers to â€œjust stop it.â€ The toughest questions are often about getting to the bottom of â€œcold pricklies,â€ or email notifications that inform shoppers that their goods wonâ€™t arrive when promised â€" the opposite of the â€œwarm fuzzyâ€ sensation of consumer satisfaction.

The sessions crowd out other work, many workers complain. But they also say that is part of the point: The meetings force them to absorb the metrics of their business, their minds swimming with details.

Stephanie Landry

â€œThereâ€™s no reward for not speaking up. â€˜Good backboneâ€™ is a compliment. Itâ€™s a very seductive quality about the organization because people want to contribute.â€

Stephenie Landry has worked on projects from grocery delivery to sales of books and baby gear since 2004.

â€œOnce you know something isnâ€™t as good as it could be, why wouldnâ€™t you want to fix it?â€ said Julie Todaro, who led some of Amazonâ€™s largest retail categories.

Employees talk of feeling how their work is never done or good enough. One Amazon building complex is named Day 1, a reminder from Mr. Bezos that it is only the beginning of a new era of commerce, with much more to accomplish.

In 2012, Chris Brucia, who was working on a new fashion sale site, received a punishing performance review from his boss, a half-hour lecture on every goal he had not fulfilled and every skill he had not yet mastered. Mr. Brucia silently absorbed the criticism, fearing he was about to be managed out, wondering how he would tell his wife.

â€œCongratulations, youâ€™re being promoted,â€ his boss finished, leaning in for a hug that Mr. Brucia said he was too shocked to return.

Noelle Barnes, who worked in marketing for Amazon for nine years, repeated a saying around campus: â€œAmazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.â€

A Running Competition

In 2013, Elizabeth Willet, a former Army captain who served in Iraq, joined Amazon to manage housewares vendors and was thrilled to find that a large company could feel so energetic and entrepreneurial. After she had a child, she arranged with her boss to be in the office from 7 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. each day, pick up her baby and often return to her laptop later. Her boss assured her things were going well, but her colleagues, who did not see how early she arrived, sent him negative feedback accusing her of leaving too soon.

â€œI canâ€™t stand here and defend you if your peers are saying youâ€™re not doing your work,â€ she says he told her. She left the company after a little more than a year.

Ms. Willetâ€™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 everyoneâ€™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 managerâ€™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 â€" a move that Amy Michaels, the former Kindle manager, said that colleagues called â€œthe full paste.â€

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 â€œeven when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting,â€ as the leadership principles note, has turned into a world of frequent combat.

David Loftesness

â€œYou can feel comfortable that if thereâ€™s a flaw in your plan someone will tell you to your face.â€

David Loftesness worked as a developer and manager on Amazonâ€™s internal search capabilities, 2003-2006.

Resources are sometimes hoarded. That includes promising job candidates, who are especially precious at a company with a high number of open positions. To get new team members, one veteran said, sometimes â€œyou drown someone in the deep end of the pool,â€ then take his or her subordinates. Ideas are critiqued so harshly in meetings at times that some workers fear speaking up.

David Loftesness, a senior developer, said he admired the customer focus but could not tolerate the hostile language used in many meetings, a comment echoed by many others.

For years, he and his team devoted themselves to improving the search capabilities of Amazonâ€™s website â€" only to discover that Mr. Bezos had greenlighted a secret competing effort to build an alternate technology. â€œIâ€™m not going to be the kind of person who can work in this environment,â€ he said he concluded. He went on to become a director of engineering at Twitter.

Each year, the internal competition culminates at an extended semi-open tournament called an Organization Level Review, where managers debate subordinatesâ€™ rankings, assigning and reassigning names to boxes in a matrix projected on the wall. In recent years, other large companies, including Microsoft, General Electric and Accenture Consulting, have dropped the practice â€" often called stack ranking, or â€œrank and yankâ€ â€" in part because it can force managers to get rid of valuable talent just to meet quotas.

The review meeting starts with a discussion of the lower-level employees, whose performance is debated in front of higher-level managers. As the hours pass, successive rounds of managers leave the room, knowing that those who remain will determine their fates.

Preparing is like getting ready for a court case, many supervisors say: To avoid losing good members of their teams â€" which could spell doom â€" they must come armed with paper trails to defend the wrongfully accused and incriminate members of competing groups. Or they adopt a strategy of choosing sacrificial lambs to protect more essential players. â€œYou learn how to diplomatically throw people under the bus,â€ said a marketer who spent six years in the retail division. â€œItâ€™s a horrible feeling.â€

Amazon employees on a lunch break. Many employees say they spend hours working at home most nights or on weekends. Ruth Fremson/The New York Times

Mr. Galbato, the human resources executive, explained the companyâ€™s reasoning for the annual staff paring. â€œWe hire a lot of great people,â€ he said in an email, â€œbut we donâ€™t always get it right.â€

Dick Finnegan, a consultant who advises companies on how to retain employees, warns of the costs of mandatory cuts. â€œIf you can build an organization with zero deadwood, why wouldnâ€™t you do it?â€ he asked. â€œBut I donâ€™t know how sustainable it is. Youâ€™d have to have a never-ending two-mile line around the block of very qualified people who want to work for you.â€

Many women at Amazon attribute its gender gap â€" unlike Facebook, Google or Walmart, it does not currently have a single woman on its top leadership team â€" to its competition-and-elimination system. Several former high-level female executives, and other women participating in a recent internal Amazon online discussion that was shared with The New York Times, said they believed that some of the leadership principles worked to their disadvantage. They said they could lose out in promotions because of intangible criteria like â€œearn trustâ€ (principle No. 10) or the emphasis on disagreeing with colleagues. Being too forceful, they said, can be particularly hazardous for women in the workplace.

Motherhood can also be a liability. Michelle Williamson, a 41-year-old parent of three who helped build Amazonâ€™s restaurant supply business, said her boss, Shahrul Ladue, had told her that raising children would most likely prevent her from success at a higher level because of the long hours required. Mr. Ladue, who confirmed her account, said that Ms. Williamson had been directly competing with younger colleagues with fewer commitments, so he suggested she find a less demanding job at Amazon. (Both he and Ms. Williamson left the company.)

He added that he usually worked 85 or more hours a week and rarely took a vacation.

When â€˜Allâ€™ Isnâ€™t Good Enough

Molly Jay, an early member of the Kindle team, said she received high ratings for years. But when she began traveling to care for her father, who was suffering from cancer, and cut back working on nights and weekends, her status changed. She was blocked from transferring to a less pressure-filled job, she said, and her boss told her she was â€œa problem.â€ As her father was dying, she took unpaid leave to care for him and never returned to Amazon.

â€œWhen youâ€™re not able to give your absolute all, 80 hours a week, they see it as a major weakness,â€ she said.

A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal. Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. â€œIâ€™m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,â€ she said her boss told her. â€œFrom where you are in life, trying to start a family, I donâ€™t know if this is the right place for you.â€

A woman who had breast cancer was told that she was put on a â€œperformance improvement planâ€ â€" Amazon code for â€œyouâ€™re in danger of being firedâ€ â€" because â€œdifficultiesâ€ in her â€œpersonal lifeâ€ had interfered with fulfilling her work goals. Their accounts echoed others from workers who had suffered health crises and felt they had also been judged harshly instead of being given time to recover.

A former human resources executive said she was required to put a woman who had recently returned after undergoing serious surgery, and another who had just had a stillborn child, on performance improvement plans, accounts that were corroborated by a co-worker still at Amazon. â€œWhat kind of company do we want to be?â€ the executive recalled asking her bosses.

The mother of the stillborn child soon left Amazon. â€œI had just experienced the most devastating event in my life,â€ the woman recalled via email, only to be told her performance would be monitored â€œto make sure my focus stayed on my job.â€

Jason Merkoski

Worked at Amazon from 2007-2012, on projects from software sales to launching a new flash-sale site.

â€œThe joke in the office was that when it came to work/life balance, work came first, life came second, and trying to find the balance came last.â€

Jason Merkoski worked on projects including Kindle and the Fire TV device. Employed at Amazon 2006 to 2010, then again in 2014.

Mr. Berman, the spokesman, said such responses to employeesâ€™ crises were â€œnot our policy or practice.â€ He added, â€œIf we were to become aware of anything like that, we would take swift action to correct it.â€ Amazon also made Ms. Harker, the top recruiter, available to describe the leadership teamâ€™s strong support over the last two years as her husband battled a rare cancer. â€œIt took my breath away,â€ she said.

Several employment lawyers in the Seattle area said they got regular calls from Amazon workers complaining of unfair treatment, including those who said they had been pushed out for â€œnot being sufficiently devoted to the company,â€ said Michael Subit. But that is not a basis for a suit by itself, he said. â€œUnfairness is not illegal,â€ echoed Sara Amies, another lawyer. Without clear evidence of discrimination, it is difficult to win a suit based on a negative evaluation, she said.

For all of the employees who are edged out, many others flee, exhausted or unwilling to further endure the hardships for the cause of delivering swim goggles and rolls of Scotch tape to customers just a little quicker.

Jason Merkoski, 42, an engineer, worked on the team developing the first Kindle e-reader and served as a technology evangelist for Amazon, traveling the world to learn how people used the technology so it could be improved. He left Amazon in 2010 and then returned briefly in 2014.

â€œThe sheer number of innovations means things go wrong, you need to rectify, and then explain, and heaven help if you got an email from Jeff,â€ he said. â€œItâ€™s as if youâ€™ve got the C.E.O. of the company in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.â€

A Stream of Departures

Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years. Several fathers said they left or were considering quitting because of pressure from bosses or peers to spend less time with their families. (Many tech companies are racing to top one anotherâ€™s family leave policies â€" Netflix just began offering up to a year of paid parental leave. Amazon, though, offers no paid paternity leave.)

In interviews, 40-year-old men were convinced Amazon would replace them with 30-year-olds who could put in more hours, and 30-year-olds were sure that the company preferred to hire 20-somethings who would outwork them. After Max Shipley, a father of two young children, left this spring, he wondered if Amazon would â€œbring in college kids who have fewer commitments, who are single, who have more time to focus on work.â€ Mr. Shipley is 25.

Amazon insists its reputation for high attrition is misleading. A 2013 survey by PayScale, a salary analysis firm, put the median employee tenure at one year, among the briefest in the Fortune 500. Amazon officials insisted tenure was low because hiring was so robust, adding that only 15 percent of employees had been at the company more than five years. Turnover is consistent with others in the technology industry, they said, but declined to disclose any data.

Chris Brucia

Worked at Amazon from 2007-2012, on projects from software sales to launching a new flash-sale site.

â€œWorking at Amazon can be a bit of an acquired taste, because everyone has a different need for positive reinforcement. It was hard to feel like the work we were doing was satisfactory. There are not a lot of people that last even as long as I stayed.â€

Chris Brucia worked at Amazon from 2005-2012, on projects from software sales to launching a new flash-sale site.

Employees, human resources executives and recruiters describe a steady exodus. â€œThe pattern of burn and churn at Amazon, resulting in a disproportionate number of candidates from Amazon showing at our doorstep, is clear and consistent,â€ Nimrod Hoofien, a director of engineering at Facebook and an Amazon veteran, said in a recent Facebook post.

Those departures are not a failure of the system, many current and former employees say, but rather the logical conclusion: mass intake of new workers, who help the Amazon machine spin and then wear out, leaving the most committed Amazonians to survive.

â€œPurposeful Darwinism,â€ Robin Andrulevich, a former top Amazon human resources executive who helped draft the Leadership Principles, posted in reply to Mr. Hoofienâ€™s comment. â€œThey never could have done what theyâ€™ve accomplished without that,â€ she said in an interview, referring to Amazonâ€™s cycle of constantly hiring employees, driving them and cutting them.

â€œAmazon is O.K. with moving through a lot of people to identify and retain superstars,â€ said Vijay Ravindran, who worked at the retailer for seven years, the last two as the manager overseeing the checkout technology. â€œThey keep the stars by offering a combination of incredible opportunities and incredible compensation. Itâ€™s like panning for gold.â€

The employees who stream from the Amazon exits are highly desirable because of their work ethic, local recruiters say. In recent years, companies like Facebook and LinkedIn have opened large Seattle offices, and they benefit from the Amazon outflow.

Recruiters, though, also say that other businesses are sometimes cautious about bringing in Amazon workers, because they have been trained to be so combative. The derisive local nickname for Amazon employees is â€œAmholesâ€ â€" pugnacious and work-obsessed.

Call them what you will, their ranks are rapidly increasing. Amazon is finishing a 37-floor office tower near its South Lake Union campus and building another tower next to it. It plans a third next to that and has space for two more high-rises. By the time the dust settles in three years, Amazon will have enough space for 50,000 employees or so, more than triple what it had as recently as 2013.

Amazon continues to grow and is finishing a 37-floor office tower near its South Lake Un

Thursday, August 20, 2015

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Saturday, August 15, 2015

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Inside The Brutal Life Of Working At Amazon

Bo Olson

Bo Olson, worked in books marketing

Tony Galbato

Tony Galbato, Amazon vice president for human resources

A Philosophy of Work

Dina Vaccari

Dina Vaccari worked on projects from corporate gift cards to sales of scientific supplies, 2008 to 2014.

Motivating the â€˜Amabotsâ€™

Amy Michaels

Amy Michaels worked in advertising and marketing, 2012-2014.

Liz Pearce

Liz Pearce, worked on Amazonâ€™s wedding registry

Stephanie Landry

Stephenie Landry has worked on projects from grocery delivery to sales of books and baby gear since 2004.

A Running Competition

David Loftesness

David Loftesness worked as a developer and manager on Amazonâ€™s internal search capabilities, 2003-2006.

When â€˜Allâ€™ Isnâ€™t Good Enough

Jason Merkoski

Jason Merkoski worked on projects including Kindle and the Fire TV device. Employed at Amazon 2006 to 2010, then again in 2014.

A Stream of Departures

Chris Brucia

Chris Brucia worked at Amazon from 2005-2012, on projects from software sales to launching a new flash-sale site.