The Veteran Trap

Behind a performative facade, Amazon is deeply anti-veteran

For years, I’ve been listening to Amazon bang on about what a great place it is for military veterans and their spouses to work.

I’ve heard enough.

Let’s reconcile.

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Never get into a situation until you know how you’ll get out.

It’s sound logic. Once you’re in a tussle, commotion distorts reasoning. But also because if you look around the corner and all you see is blood and pain, you can make an informed decision about whether to get involved at all.

Being a tactician of decent experience and guile, I thought this way back in ‘16 when deciding whether to join Amazon operations. From the evidence available, it seemed like the kind of place I could have a good second career. So I jumped in.

In ‘23, I crawled out. Mentally exhausted and physically compromised, but having learned and gained a lot.

I don’t regret the decision. But I wouldn’t do it again.

Not just because my journey exposed an oceanic divide between Amazon’s public image and its lived reality. But also because the evidence has changed as the company has changed.

That evidence is clear. Amazon is a bad option. More than that, it’s a trap. The military equivalent of joining the nuclear engineering corps for college money only to find you’re swabbing the deck until you’re too tired to push a mop. Then getting pushed overboard.

Of course, I’m biased. We all are in one way or another. There are two ways to mitigate the impact of bias. One is to consciously acknowledge it, which I’ve just done. The other is to fight impression with data.

So here’s a data point: 95%.

That’s the percentage of veterans and spouses hired by Amazon no longer employed there within 30 months.

I couldn’t get this data from Amazon, so it had to be manually calculated. Or more precisely, manually triangulated. I’ll explain later about that.

For now, trust the number is accurate. And then think about how profoundly wretched a number it is.

30 months is a career shorter than an average military assignment. It’s not much longer than the deployments many veterans endured in the mid/late oughts. It’s a career that goes moldy slightly faster than a genetically modified banana, and a lot faster than a McDonald’s french fry.

If I told you I was hiring you for a permanent role in my Fortune 5 company, but there was only a 5% chance you’d have a job long enough to vest your 401(k), you’d probably treat me to a conversational military gesture and invite me to asphyxiate myself.

And yet, the company snags veterans and military spouses in droves. Because it does a superb job of propagandizing. Press releases, accolades, and gleaming lacquer generously slathered by recruiters paint a lustrous picture of shiny, happy people holding hands as they make retail history together. An idyllic dream played out on a peaceful tech-scape teeming with contently levitating teletubbies donning safety vests and vacant smiles.

It’s all bilge.

Before the pandemic, Amazon was a mixed bag but trying to be better. Tough, but not toxic.

Today, it is a bubbling profit foundry which will cook you, melt you, and forge you into a coin. Not because it hates you. Crocodiles don’t feel hate. But because it is driven purely by financial interest, having long since melted its value system.

It’s in Amazon’s interest that veterans feel warmth and hospitality during recruitment. So they do. They launch into their journeys full of the customary piss and vinegar. Later, they reach the grim conclusion that each day with Amazon is better than the next.

Via various descending paths, they decamp, or get squeezed out, or sling their hooks. At some point, 95 are gone and 5 remain.

That ain’t attrition, sally. It’s annihilation.

Amazon’s approach to veterans is like a woodworker who starts with a California redwood and whittles it down to a solitary spoon.

Of course, you can make a lot more than a spoon with a whole tree. And you definitely don’t need a whole tree if a single spoon is your objective.

But, to borrow a phrase from common parlance, it is what it is.

For 95 of every 100 veterans who join Amazon, what began with a smile ends with a whimper. Nearly always sooner than expected. Celebrated as prized recruits just a few generations of fruit flies before, they’re forgotten before they get out of the parking lot.

The rest of this piece advances the proposition that veterans would be better off bartending, refilling plastic cutlery dispensers, hammering railroad ties, or tagging toes at the local morgue than setting foot within 100 meters of Amazon.

Because the evidence shows Amazon is exactly what the veteran community does not need. Another conveyor belt for human wreckage. Another modern salt mine where bureaucrat overlords manufacture misery at the speed of indecency, beating working stiffs into rowing harder while insisting they’re lucky to have oars in the first place.

And those are just the positives.

I’ll start with a few notes from my own journey.

The world is not waiting for this story. But I shall tell it. Because until perceptions change, this company will continue to chew through the veteran and spouse populations at a rate of more than 3,000 every month.

It will continue to inflict harm on these communities while applauding itself loudly enough to cover the sound of shovels burying the data.

The data showing that Amazon is just another war machine by a different name.

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§1. Red Flags.

“If I come down here and find this again, someone’s getting fired.”

For the third time in a week, a frantic meat puppet threatened my job.

There was no conviction in his dramatic glares and gesticulations. But he didn’t know what else to do. Such was the puddle depth of his skillset.

We were launching a new warehouse. This dude had mismanaged his part, which was marshaling a few hundred employees to fill the shelves with inventory so the building would attract orders and achieve a productive tempo.

He was a poor manager — bottom 1% I’ve observed in 35 years. If he managed a funeral parlor, no one would die.

Immersed in a tough challenge, he was getting humiliated by his superiors on conference calls. Yanking his drawers down in front of the network had become a daily ritual.

In such an abusive environment, he became an abuser, lashing out at those trying hardest to help him. He would come to the shop floor, a raging cliche, and kick us every time he got kicked.

• Red flag #1: senior managers losing their shit under pressure.

• Red flag #2: threats to sack as a first tactic, reflecting a disposable labor mindset.

• Red flag #3: abusive tendencies amplified rather than tamed by long tenure.

On this particular occasion, the catastrophizing was triggered by a pallet of receivable goods blocking a walkway.

One pallet of thousands. One square meter in a warehouse the size of dozens of football pitches. A walkway no one was using, because instead of walking around, employees were busy trying to un-fuck a cocked hat created by people paid ridiculous salaries to support them.

The pallet wasn’t out of place because managers were slobs. But because we’d had less than an hour to clean up after the prior shift unloaded 750 pallets into an area with 200 spaces.

I’ll never forget one of the managers from that prior shift walking out with tears in his eyes. He was broken. He’d just spent 12 hours doing the equivalent of cramming 8 pieces of bread into a 2-slice toaster, believing his job depended on keeping the bread edible and pristine.

Now he and we were getting kicked in the pills, adding insult to injury.

• Red flag #4: blaming people for things they can’t control.

The department was flooded with goods because the rate at which we were being directed to unload trucks exceeded our processing capability, which was constrained by poor area design, faulty software, insufficient expertise, and a glut of problem inventory. Much of it helpfully transferred to us by other Amazon warehouses.

We were pinned down. We couldn’t get a foot forward. We couldn’t reset the situation without a pause that would only put us further behind and exacerbate the downward pressure exerted by Big Amazon.

What we needed was controlled flow, better inventory, and more labor with better skills. In a later conversation, I summarized my thoughts.

“Telling people to try harder is not leadership. It insults their effort. What they need is the resources to get the job done.”

• Red flag #5: workers at the coal face lack support from managers who don’t try to understand or address their problems.

• Red flag #6: managers who don’t know what the fuck they are doing.

This particular senior manager was, like me, an armed forces veteran. In our pre-launch conversations, he seemed to understand things like cohesion, belonging, and hanging together when the going got tough.

But his brain was wiped clean by the first degree of exerted pressure. His persona didn’t shift a little. It was Dr. Jekyll vs. Mr. Jackass.

Which raised red flag #7, that individuals were quick to liquidate principles when squeezed. Or more precisely, to expose never having had them in the first place.

Because if core values only apply when things are hunky dory, then they aren’t core or values at all.

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§2. Combat Smile.

Had I misjudged Amazon? That was the question I needed to answer.

I wasn’t interested in working there if threats to sack over banalities were the norm. So I went to see the GM, an affable man of high character who I found sane and sensible.

“Either this is abnormal or I’ve joined the wrong company,” I said.

I then expounded on the joy of being kicked in the teeth for the sin of exhausting myself dancing in a daily carnival of pain for a blowtorch-wielding clown who, best I could tell, needed a pacifier and a good ass-kicking.

He patiently detailed our predicament, taught me a few things about launch coordination I hadn’t understood, and begged my fortitude and “combat smile” to help dig us out.

“This is abnormal. Hang in there and I promise it’ll improve.”

He was right.

I smiled and put my shoulder into the challenge afresh. Within a couple weeks, the toxic guy was gone. Executives visited and saw our issues first-hand. They started to understand and resource our situation better. Things improved. Soon enough, they were enjoyable.

And that was Amazon in ‘16. The sour and the sweet.

The Amazon I joined was conflicted. It was authoritarian and fear-driven. There was an impulse for headless chickenism. Coercion and threats were theatrically wielded nunchucks swung to and fro when the radar detected a blip of disquiet emanating from Seattle.

But there were also impulses for humanity and fairness. For giving employees a positive experience. There were leadership principles to guide us through ambiguity, and those principles were the Bezos-etched stone tablets beheld to reveal the path when other methods failed.

Within a few months, I reclined my seat a little and settled in.

But in time, the red flags would reappear.

Within a year, the GM who’d rallied my spirits was out of the business. He was eminently decent, a warm soul, an effective leader whose genuine engagement inspired his team.

These things ultimately made him unwelcome.

• Red flag #8: the good ones don’t hang around.

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§3. I Was Wrong.

I’m here to say I was wrong.

When I wrote, in July of last year, that Amazon wasn’t a good place for veterans, that was like saying a l’orange might be a bad move for a duck.

Insider's Take: Being a Veteran at Amazon

So let me correct myself.

If you’re a military veteran or spouse, avoid this company like poison, fleas, or white after Labor Day.

Do not work there if you have any other choice, including ditch-digging or emptying portable toilets.

I admit this should have been more obvious to me in the beginning. Surely confirmation bias played a role. But Amazon’s culture has also degraded dramatically since then.

I shall explain.

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§4. Row Well and Live.

To say a company despises its own employees is to say that company despises itself. Unless that company does not view its employees as part of itself.

Amazon’s actions expose a mentality regarding employees as hired help; serfs who should be grateful to have land to till and roofs to shelter them. It’s clear Amazon regards executives, shareholders, and select piss bucket holders as “the company” and all others as “not.”

Here’s some evidence.

• Layoffs amid record profits. Some Customer Service managers discovered they were jobless by being unable to log into their computers. This in a company whose legacy commitment to “customer obsession” was its raison d’etre.

• Reduced compensation amid record cash flows and market-leading performance. After we rowed as hard as we ever had in our lives to pull the company through the pandemic, we were made responsible to fix share price by cutting costs. Not by appeasing the Gods of profit with sacrificial goats or burnt effigies. We just had to stand still and get screwed with a pay cut, delivered against a backing track of sermons from the executive clown posse who’d trashed share price with garden variety mismanagement.

• Lack of empathy. Amazon’s return-to-office edict ignores assurances made to tens of thousands of employees hired during the pandemic (including scores of transitioning veterans and spouses), who were told they could work from anywhere and built their lives accordingly. They relocated families. Put kids in different schools. Bought houses. And then, Andrew Jassy altered the deal. It is breaking people and families.

• Cynical attrition moves. Amazon knows its RTO policy will cause people to quit because they can’t afford to relocate or can’t do so for practical reasons. It isn’t offering to help. It’s telling them if they don’t like the policy, “there are other companies around.” It’s obvious is conducting a back-door layoff.

• Refusing dialogue with employees. Even when hundreds write a letter together asking for a direct conversation, they are ignored by the same company claiming employees don’t need unions because they can simply have a “direct conversation” with senior management.

• Abusive labor practices. I’ve seen the company hire and fire employees in the same warehouse at the same time. I’ve seen it hire hundreds of people after firing hundreds just weeks before, often over the objections of managers actually responsible for performance.

• Coercion as a talent strategy. Amazon conducts a toxic rank-and-yank talent management process that is all about licensing itself to fire a percentage of its salaried workforce every six months to keep survivors motivated by fear. This is an inherently antagonistic attitude toward the people who generate its revenue.

Amazon's Rank and Yank Talent Process

The company is projected to pile up $400B in free cash flow on its balance sheet in the next two years. It is a market leader in online retail, cloud computing, and advertising.

Yet its employees get market mediocre compensation, ambush-styled layoffs, constant threats of joblessness, coercive talent reviews keeping them under unhealthy pressure, and arbitrary office timekeeping edicts contrary to what they’ve been promised.

They get no access to decision makers. If they save Amazon money, they’ll be thanked for doing their jobs. If they lose Amazon money, they’ll be fired.

Executives remain not just aloof, but notoriously hostile to the idea of everyone being on the same team. They’re enjoying private rock concerts while their people are worried about paying rent.

When confronted, they decline comment.

Maybe This is Too Cool

Amazon brags on quarterly earnings calls about its ability to make more people jobless. Meanwhile, it leads tech companies in R&D investment, including untold billions in AI.

The signal is clear: Amazon is looking to get out of the human labor business.

I once heard a VP justify the lack of a pay increase for frontline employees by claiming the company didn’t want to make inflation worse. You can’t have a raise because you might spend it and wreck the whole economy.

As bullshit goes, this was a particularly ripe batch. Pure gaslighting.

And of course, too outrageous to ever be uttered publicly, which is an important point. A good company is proud of its relationship with employees. It brags about them incessantly.

What we instead get from Amazon is soft-peddled chickenshit from PR pull-string dolls, followed by a refusal to answer questions. In the year or so I’ve been writing about my former employer, I’ve asked dozens of questions via various channels. No responses. And it’s not just that I’m an easily marginalized, feather-quilled crackpot. Reporters for major outlets get the same treatment.

You don’t need an advanced degree in human psychology to understand what’s being said by what’s not being said.

Amazon is hostile toward its own people. It sees them as a cost it must reluctantly bear, and pays as little as it can get away with instead of the most it can afford.

It cultivates resentment among employees. It is fine with alienating them because it sees them as interchangeable, and thus replaceable. It puts them to work in unsafe facilities while paying them so little that frontline employees struggle to survive.

And according to a recently filed lawsuit, when they quit before their 401(k) plans vest, the money left on the table is used to bolster Amazon’s bottom line instead of being plowed back into the retirement fund as legally required.

To say a company despises its own employees is to say that company despises itself. Unless that company does not view its employees as part of itself.

Amazon is in the stride of making its entire non-executive workforce into an underclass apart from the company. There to enrich it in exchange for survival.

Arrogant and superior attitudes fueled by wealth and status are normal.

Techno-feudalism isn’t. And it makes Amazon undeserving of any employee, especially military veterans who extend trust as a default, and are vulnerable as they work to learn the civilian ropes.

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§5. Nothing Drives Like a Rental.

I’ve spent many itinerant years. In the process of visiting more than 80 countries, I learned one of life’s most entertaining lessons: knowing you don’t have to care about the long-term health of a car frees you to abuse to shit out of it for a few days.

The red line on the tachometer becomes a suggestion. Slowing down for turns becomes optional. Speed bumps become Dukes of Hazard style launch ramps. Remember the dodgy valet from Ferris Bueller? Dead-on, center-of-mass accurate.

This is a perfect metaphor for Amazon’s exploitation of veteran labor.

1. Drive them like rented mules. Their long-term health is not your concern.

2. If they start neighing too much, put more weight on them until they quit.

3. When they break down, cut’ em loose.

4. Always be getting fresh mules ready.

Lots of veterans and spouses join Amazon, and can be forgiven. The company says it wants and values them. It recruits effectively.

It’s not clear how many of them make it beyond probation, how long they last, or what progression they tend to achieve. Let’s [bracket] that thought for a moment.

Meantime, let’s be skeptical.

Amazon brags about hiring 100,000 veterans but doesn’t brag about retaining, promoting, progressing, or supporting them. It polishes its social credentials, but doesn’t reveal anything beneath the shiny surface.

I’ve asked Amazon how many of those 100,000 are still with the company, as have others. No answer given.

Amazon’s recruiters leverage the familiarity veterans glimpse. The structure and organization. The high pace and challenge. The value placed on stretch and growth. The tactical milieu. The premium on calm under fire.

Indeed, there are several reasons why veterans should excel with the company.

• Experiential overlap between military and Amazon operational service makes veterans “plug-and-play.” They’re scrappy. They hold people together and figure things out. They don’t whine, or at least don’t stop working while whining. They have stamina and will pull the long hours.

• Amazon loves their positive attitude. Their can-do spirit. It loves their willingness to over-invest. To grind. To see their job as a “mission” and to therefore give everything to it.

• Amazon loves their self-sufficiency and independence. In the absence of proper resources, they will nonetheless get things done through grit and ingenuity.

• Amazon also approves of the veteran tendency for obedience as a default. The company likes perpetual velocity. Its executives would rather be boiled in hog fat than give an unrehearsed answer to an incisive question. So people who swallow their questions and keep delivering, a timeless military habit, are favored.

But there are some elements of the veteran ethos and mentality which make veterans cultural misfits at Amazon. Such as:

• The way military culture values individual human beings.

• The way that culture acknowledges and assumes a duty of care to teammates and families.

• How military veterans believe in servant leadership, with bosses working to support their workers vs the other way around.

• The way veterans prioritize leadership, team unity, and relationships over data and analysis. This puts them at odds with Amazon’s endless obsessions with financial efficiency and productivity.

Once the honeymoon is over and a veteran feels established in the company, these misfit qualities tend to emerge. And this is where the trouble begins, because the more they exhibit team-centric leadership qualities, the more Amazon’s deeply entrenched cultural bias toward veteran employees gets triggered.

Veterans are in an uphill battle before they start. Because Amazon’s attitude toward veterans presumes they will have “soft skills” but struggle to keep up analytically.

Every veteran new hire works against an unstated requirement to prove they can do more than “just lead people.”

The first time I heard this, I invited someone to asphyxiate himself and demonstrated a conversational military gesture. I then lectured him and the innocent bystanders on the analytical depth required in contemporary combat service.

But my sermon was no needle-mover. Fact is, Amazon loves newly-hired veterans who are happy to slog like rented mules and deliver outsize value. It loves them pulling the apple cart.

It is culturally unenthusiastic about them rising to senior roles, where their penchant for leadership might upset that apple cart. All the jostling caused by integrity and accountability might result in a few nickels of profit slipping off.

In my years at the company, I got so tired of this attitude that my eye-rolling became not just habitual, but reflexive.

Every talent review, anti-veteran dogs played with the same chew toys, always convinced they were gnawing on fresh insight. That despite their experience, these people were somehow inept at playing with excel.

But even if they become wizards of data, they’ll buck perceptual headwinds.

Because they care about and spend time with their teammates, something long seen in Amazon culture as wasted time.

The company doesn’t think about its employees as long-term counterparts in a relationship, so it doesn’t recognize the value of knowing their stories, caring about their lives beyond work, or nurturing their growth.

For military veterans, these are natural behaviors. And the more they do them, the further they creep away from the favored archetype.

I sat through talent reviews where managers were unfairly judged or even maliciously slagged off for “over-investing” time in supporting their people.

In one case, I refused to downgrade a manager who joined less than six months before and was still in learning curve. There was a proposal to put this veteran army officer, who had commanded in combat, on an “improvement plan” because he didn’t seem to be coming along quick enough with data. When I asked for the evidence, there wasn’t any. Just impressions. Just bias.

“If we’re gonna manage by impression, there’s a few people in this room I think should go on improvement plans.” That comment dissolved the argument.

Six months later, the manager was thriving.

As I got more senior, I would use my pulpit to evangelize on the importance of leadership skills. You passed operational tests with inspired people, not excel macros or three-point plans for new bread slicing methods.

But it was never far from my mind that the company treated veteran hires as rentals. Driving them as hard as it could before trading them in for a new model.

Then came ‘23, and it was my turn to feel disposable.

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§6. Thank You. You’re Fired.

Amazon has a leadership principle called “Disagree and Commit.” When applied properly, it’s powerful. Everyone is invited to debate and argue before a decision is made. Once the decision is finalized, everyone commits whether it was what they wanted or not.

The opportunity to have a voice and influence the decision gives everyone a sense of ownership. Even those opposed to the outcome execute energetically, and leaders move forward under a unified banner.

But the principle backfires when the “disagree” step is foregone, or speed-bumped, or obviously performative. What you then have is a residual expectation of debate going unfulfilled, followed by autocracy with a false pretense of debate.

Everyone is pissed off. Less buy-in. Less unity and energy in execution. This is a dangerous dynamic in a company exercising centralized decision making, because no one who will execute the decision is heard during deliberations.

I spent much of ‘22 building a management team and hiring a workforce to launch a new warehouse. In September, we opened the doors, delivering a fantastic peak season.

Barely a month after peak concluded, I was directed to cut management headcount in half.

No debate. No chance to disagree. No data to support the decision. It was literally an excel spreadsheet with a tab for each building showing “approved” headcounts.

When concerns were raised, the leadership principle was weaponized by executives who insisted we all commit.

Reductions were initially sold as a “glide down” with staff levels gradually waning via natural attrition, promotions, and relocations.

Within a month, gliding down was over.

There began a regular meeting sequence with a “project leader” whose job was to browbeat sites, upend any excuses, and pin us to faster timelines. It was obvious the incentives had shifted. Showing reduced labor cost was now eclipsing everything.

Our warehouse had already cut more managers as a proportion of our headcount than any other site. We’d made aggressive moves to consolidate shifts and reduce operating hours. We showed agility despite being a new launch.

None of that bought us anything. As an Amazon General Manager, I could not even get a conversation about it.

The rationale given for the reductions was a projected decline in customer demand. But demand didn’t decline.

And yet, we kept cutting. So, I asked whether we should pause or halt the headcount reductions. If we still needed x employees, we still needed y managers.

At which point I was told it wasn’t just about volume, but “running more lean and efficient.” Which was a barge-load of steaming horseshit. Reducing headcount on the same volume would reduce management coverage. It would stretch the remaining managers. It would reduce employee access to managers and degrade both the employee and manager experience.

The conversation rapidly dead-ended. I knew there would be no reversal. Because if I couldn’t get the preening simp running the project to understand the risk, there was no way strong-willed executives with zero operational knowledge would bother to get their heads around it.

Being directed to break up a team I’d just built exceeded my bullshit tolerance. Having to explain why I wouldn’t go faster to a guy who thought of my team as numbers on a spreadsheet inspired nothing but molten fury.

I’d been rated a “Role Model” on Amazon’s leadership principles. Now I was commanded to mock them.

The camel’s back had already been creaking. This was it.

I resigned soon after. When a close friend asked me why, my response was terse. “Not willing to join the clowns.”

I’d been thanked and congratulated by a dozen VPs and Directors for building and training an elite team who delivered a killer launch, saving a few million against projected costs. But their words were cheap.

The thanks I wanted was to be heard on decisions impacting my team and their families.

It reminded me of the powerless years of ForeverWar, with centralized control and bureaucratic barricades creating a miserable and disempowering experience.

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§7. Planting Plastic Trees.

If you have empathy for someone only when it’s in your interest to have it, then it’s not really empathy at all. It’s an intermittent hologram of empathy. You’re being transactional. Giving someone support only when you need them to give you something.

Fake empathy makes things worse. In an organization where everyone knows the power structure only cares when it stands to gain something, they know where they stand. Expectations are stable.

In an organization that successfully deceives people into believing the power structure cares when it actually doesn’t, the moral injury imparted by them learning the grim truth compounds the absence of support. Instead of merely working for a bloodless company and knowing it, they made themselves vulnerable by actually believing they were in a caring and empathetic environment. They feel stupid and foolish for extending trust. They feel complicit for appealing to others to do the same.

This can traumatize and break people.

I belabor the point because it matters a lot in the veteran ethos. For sensible reasons, veterans reserve esteem for mutual support when the chips are down.

Amazon’s culture was empathetic sometimes. Which is to say it wasn’t at all. Even if many usefully oblivious and good people were genuine, every string was pulled for financial reasons.

I got support from Amazon when I needed it. And then I didn’t. And for a while, I told myself it was just a matter of good and bad bosses.

But having now compared my story to hundreds of others, it’s clear that a hinge existed, and when it swung, I went from being an important asset to being surplus to requirements.

I then converted myself to a liability by daring to be human. The process of that conversion was frosted thick with cold rationality. After seven peak seasons, it turned out a tuppence of perceived value was the width of my professional relevance.

Three times prior to the pandemic, I needed a bit of tempo relief and some brief time away from the business to deal with family issues, personal illness, and the loss of my Dad. In each case, the company supported.

I saw the same with others.

That support was important to me. A big reason I stayed with Amazon.

After the pandemic, you could feel a shift immediately.

There was a “project” to study and drive down manager absence. There was doubt and scrutiny for those with “recurring health issues.” There was new pressure for managers to not only deliver more value, but be seen doing so, be monitored, and to a greater extent than is ever advisable, be controlled.

In early ‘23 came my turn in the barrel.

I had a new manager. She was transactional in her approach. She also kept her distance. She was new in role and stretched for time, so talking to a self-sufficient GM was not her priority. Which was OK with me, except we never managed to forge any kind of relationship.

Then, I fell seriously ill. Bad enough that I needed to take a few weeks away on doctor’s orders.

Leading up to this point was a grueling six months of launching a building and delivering a peak season. I’d picked up enough projects and additional duties to cement 80-hour weeks as the norm. Which made me pretty much like everyone I knew at my level.

When I got back to work after those few weeks away, I was confronted with disturbing facts.

Seemed my name had been dragged through the mud on a large-audience business review. My manager was openly frustrated with my absence. She was unhappy with a few of my decisions before going off sick. Her contempt was obvious enough that my peers and direct reports noticed, along with other trusted contacts.

That was the first time in my professional life I’d been publicly disparaged when I wasn’t present. I was embarrassed. I was also embarrassed for my boss, who had done herself a disservice and damaged her own reputation more than mine.

But before I could even react, there was something else.

Our regional HR manager was also attacking my reputation in her travels. She was unhappy to learn I’d been working from home one day each week while nursing a medical condition that kept me from walking unless I gargled painkillers and wielded a cane. I had taken advice from my own HR partner and mentors I trusted, then applied some common sense. Where I had been trusted in such a way before, the latitude was no more.

Nothing had changed.

Except that Amazon was in downsizing mode. Which was the whole difference. The incentive to retain people had become an incentive to get rid of people. Without any interest in retaining me, the company no longer demonstrated empathy.

Which revealed to me that it had never really been empathy at all. The joke was on me, and on those I fooled into believing the same lie.

With my boss and her HR toadie having nothing to gain by supporting me at a vulnerable moment, I was transformed instantly. I had been a valued and respected senior leader worthy of deference. Suddenly, I was reduced to a nonlinear inconvenience in an environment obsessed with downsizing. I was a nail sticking out. In their eyes, I needed to be hammered flat or pried loose.

The illness I was battling, it turned out, traced to military service years before. Years of stressful work slowed me down a little. It caught up.

I was successfully balancing the demands of my role with that illness. My team and business were performing in the top 5% globally. I was delivering a lot. But by needing a bit of leeway and support, I was being different. And for that, a pair of Peter Principle poster children had put my hard-earned reputation at hazard and seemed intent on building a perceptual case to manage me away.

I didn’t recognize Amazon anymore.

But I did see clearly that I was in an anti-veteran environment. Service-connected illnesses are often delay-fused. Part of being “veteran friendly” is expecting people to struggle periodically when these hidden maladies detonate.

Unless the point is merely to hire veterans and say you did. Then discard them when they neigh too much. Then replace them with younger, cheaper mules whose backs can still absorb plenty of abuse.

I didn’t need to be there. So I walked, leaving behind a few hundred thousand in share value. Owning shares in Amazon wasn’t something I desired anymore.

In our last conversation, I gave my manager unsolicited leadership advice. Ask more questions, make fewer assumptions, and remember people are going through all sorts of things we don’t know about. So be kind and empathize.

Weird that I was saying this in a company that had made empathy the centerpiece of leader development just a few years before, and only excelled during the pandemic because leaders had internalized that idea.

The irony was lost on her. As I reeled off my advice, she seemed as interested as someone watching a VHS-era documentary on the relative permeability of different grades of cheesecloth. If her life had depended on reciting any three words I spoke, the Almighty would have claimed her there and then.

So we ended the call. And just like that, I ended my second career.

---

That last boss was a bad manager, but that wasn’t the cause of her toxicity. She was merely responding to the incentives. The ability to throttle the expression of empathy to maximize profit was just what Amazon wanted.

And therein lies the rub.

Veterans expect a value system that exists independent of business interest. They understand values are critical, because they’ve lived the difference. They’ve believed in transcendent things that don’t drift with the shifting tides of every business cycle. If you tell veterans a value system exists, they will believe you. Because they want to believe you, and because they trust you until you prove them wrong.

Amazon tells them it has a value system. They find out later it was just a military-style recruitment pitch.

Amazon’s veteran trap is a grand grin-fuck. The toothy glint of the recruiter’s smile illuminates the leadership principles scrawled onto their wearable sandwich board.

Around a year later, when that veteran goes on leave and is tranquil enough to think for the first time in a while, they realize what they’re into. They look in the mirror and see a mule staring back.

Or, like me, they continue buying into the fake value system through the power of denial and delusion. But eventually, they conclude what I eventually did.

The value system is inert.

The company has devolved into a human filing cabinet. An uninteresting vertical bureaucracy, addicted to authority, happy to serially annoy its own people, and dependent on legion-wide burnout to validate its business model.

Some will say that sounds a lot like career military service. And they’re not wrong.

But Amazon’s version excludes the culture of mutual support, the sense of belonging, and the sense of purpose which balance out toxicity.

Empathy sometimes is not empathy at all. It’s a forest of plastic trees.

Squint into the hologram and you’ll see why hiring veterans is favored but sustaining and supporting them is not.

---

§8. Data + Anecdote.

Bezos was known for using anecdotes to acid test what data suggested. But sometimes, it works the other way around. You observe enough anecdote to push you into the data.

By the latter part of ‘22, I was in a senior role. My passion was hiring and developing leaders for the network, and this is where my projects were concentrated.

I’d attained Amazon’s “Bar Raiser” qualification to lead hiring panels. And I was getting interested in the company’s veteran hiring and retention programs.

A series of anecdotes were impacting my perception. They were pushing me into the data. Here’s a sample.

• A retired officer with top 5% leadership ability was turned down repeatedly for promotion to a senior role. The feedback: “too candid.”

• A retired officer was pushed out with less than a year’s tenure after reporting unlawful conduct by leaders in his region. He was offered a settlement and presented with an expansive NDA.

• A former NCO told me he’d been downgraded in talent review for missing half a shift every other week to attend counseling. He was still bitten with PTSD and needed psychotherapy, which recruiters assured him would be fine. When he opened up to his manager, the immediate concern was impact to his work performance. They basically asked him to hurry up and be done with it. Never developing confidence in his manager, he quit with less than a year tenure. His message to me closed with the phrase “I’d rather do another tour in Iraq than work for these people.”

• A military spouse accepted a role requiring relocation. Her active duty husband applied for retirement, walking through a one-way door to trade his income and career for hers. Months after the family relocated, absorbing debt and disruption, she lost her job in a round of ambush layoffs. The family lost their house, filed for bankruptcy, and had their lives totally disrupted.

• A military spouse hired on a permanent contract was informed that she was being let go in three days because her temporary contract was ending and there was no permanent role for her to occupy. She challenged, producing a permanent contract as evidence and pointing out her performance had been exemplary. Amazon admitted the mistake but claimed it was an administrative error. They gave her two weeks pay and let her go. Less than a month later, the role was advertised again. She applied and heard nothing.

Amid all this, I noticed a couple of other curious changes in the climate.

Terms like “All In” and “More with Less” were spouted pridefully by directors and executives. These terms are hate speech in veteran circles. They signify everything that went wrong in two decades of under-resourced over-stretch that broke families and is still claiming lives via suicide.

I kept seeing negative anecdotes from Amazon participants in the DoD SkillBridge program, which partners with (and pays) employers to give transitioning veterans training opportunities on the promise that they will get an employment offer 75% of the time. The anecdotes suggested very few people were getting hired after training with Amazon.

Military affinity groups were also a joke. There was nothing to them beyond t-shirts.

This all ran contrary to the public campaign, which suggested a thriving post-military community where at least a shadow of the mutual support and bond familiar to veterans could be found.

So I got curious. I then did what Amazon trained me to do. Inspect the data and ask smart questions.

---

§9. Pending.

I wanted to understand veteran employment at Amazon. If my intuitions were correct, we had a problem.

So I asked:

• How long are veteran and spouse hires staying with us? What’s the average tenure and is it going up or down? How does this vary by business — is it different in ops vs AWS vs corporate, etc?

• What’s our veteran and spouse hiring record for each level in each business? How many are we seeking to hire and how many are we actually getting?

• What are our retention targets and are we meeting them?

• How many SkillBridge participants have we had and how many were offered roles? How many accepted? Of those, how many were still employed at 1, 2, and 3 years tenure?

• What are the average dwell times in each level for salaried veteran and spouse hires? How do these compare with the Amazon average?

• How many veterans and spouses have we hired into fast-track programs? How many graduated on time? How does this compare to the broader average?

• How are veterans and spouses faring in talent review compared to the averages? Are there more or fewer being performance managed?

• Are there more or fewer veterans and spouses being investigated for conduct issues?

• How do veteran and spouse sickness and absence rates compare to the mean?

• How many veteran hires have asked for support with mental health or suicidal thoughts? Have we had any veterans attempt or commit suicide while serving with Amazon?

I was interested to see how this data compared with people on active service and others in post-service civilian life.

The chart below is not something we can accept, and no stone should remain unturned until we figure out why it’s happening and address it. Which is why employers like Amazon need to have open conversations to understand whether they are contributing to or subtracting from these grim numbers.

The chart terminates in ‘21, the year Amazon pledged to hire 100,000 veterans and spouses. By definition, a company declaring that objective against such a backdrop has a duty to care.

There were other questions I can can’t recall, but you get the idea. I wanted to get between the wall and the wallpaper and see just how serious we were about giving veterans a great place to work.

I fired off my questions via the standard method. Nothing heard.

I chased. Nothing heard.

I triangulated to individual level and haggled. The individuals involved were evasive, vague, and used obvious delay tactics. They then pleaded insufficient authority to release the data, so we went down that path.

I worked my way up until reaching someone who was senior enough. We booked a call.

She cancelled last minute. We rescheduled. And after months of delay, she told me I couldn’t get the data I requested without a policy exception from Amazon’s Senior VP for HR.

So I asked how to make that request. She said it would be made for me.

For three months, I checked periodically on the request.

“Pending.”

Before I could get a response, my time with Amazon came to a close.

No response was coming. I’ve worked at the Pentagon. I know what a wait-out feels like.

The fact a senior manager and senior veteran in the company with the proper standing and access to see the data wasn’t entrusted to see it tells me two things.

1. The public will never see it.

2. The data is not favorable.

Which brings us to the fundamental reason I will not recommend Amazon as a veteran employer, and will indeed proactively dissuade at every opportunity.

If Amazon were a good company for military veterans and spouses, data would be shown to support saying so.

Lack of transparency is Amazon’s way of saying “trust us” while simultaneously proving why we can’t.

---

§10. Don’t Believe the Hype.

Amazon’s strong veteran and spouse recruitment depends on creating an idea different from reality.

This in turn depends on three things.

First, Amazon’s hype machine. Given only its propaganda, you’d be convinced of its “veteran-friendly” image.

Second, it depends on the general impression veterans and their families have developed about Amazon over the course of time. An impression that suggests overlap with military service. But that impression traces to a dated version of the Amazon experience. The only overlap remaining is the bad kind. Wheel-spinning in a frustrating environment where responsibility exceeds agency for all but those at the very top, and mere plebes are deprived of stable expectations.

Third, veterans tend to over-subscribe to the power of positivity. Having endured challenging trials and survived tough moments, in part by drawing on will power and esprit de corps, veterans commonly underestimate the level of misery civilian employment is capable of imparting.

Maybe you believe Amazon just needs more good people to turn things around. You’re solution oriented and want to be part of reversing the trend I’ve illustrated.

Or maybe you believe you can find a nice pocket of existence and thrive locally even if the macro trend is not great. Some dogs, after all, find a warm piece of the sidewalk.

But there’s another dog metaphor that reinforces why you’d be mistaken.

I was sitting at a boardroom table about 15 years ago when I heard an army brigade commander use a phrase hilariously nonsensical, yet brimming with wisdom.

“Never pet a burning dog.”

Several senior generals were at that table. Not one could keep a straight face. The whole room erupted laughing.

But the zaniness of this colonel’s masterful gallows humor was a vessel for a somber point. He was actually modeling a high form of stoicism.

Our cultural tendency for can-do makes it a natural impulse to jump in whenever we see an opportunity for our strengths to matter. But sometimes, getting involved is the wrong move, because nothing you do can make things better and you’ll just get burned.

The brigade commander was explaining why he and his unit sat with crossed arms while two rival factions tore each other to shreds in an Iraqi urban area. He had the wisdom to know what he couldn’t control or even marginally influence. And he knew that any well-meaning attempt would end poorly for his unit without so much as denting the inevitable outcome.

This is how I encourage veterans and their families to think about Amazon.

The company is currently in a fight against its own value system. Executives are actively waging an assault on the idea that people matter. The first casualties are its leadership principles.

Like most tenured Amazonians, I joined the company for one set of reasons and stayed for another. The leadership principles are what kept me renewing my lease, despite other factors which weren’t so favorable.

Those principles made Amazon a self-limiting and self-healing organization. When executives started attacking those principles, I knew it was time to go.

I’m not merely suggesting you consider avoiding.

I’m telling you to bank 90 degrees and pull the stick into your lap, select full throttle, and roll level when you’re facing the opposite direction. Establish as much distance as possible between you and this employer.

Because for individual veterans, this isn’t about relative job satisfaction.

It’s about a company which is dangerous to your mental health and overall well-being.

If it was merely about your best traits being liabilities, or the bias you’d face in talent reviews, or that you and your family would not be genuinely valued, or that its failure to promote and value good leaders meant you’d be subject to occasional abuse, Amazon would be no worse than a slew of other employers who claim to love veterans but really just want the social credit of hiring them.

The unique problem is that you cannot trust Amazon anymore. The chasm between rhetoric and reality isn’t just a problem in its veteran employment practices. It’s an ingrained habit in everything Amazon now does.

Here’s a post from Charlotte La Belle, Amazon’s Head of Military Affairs.

La Belle is herself an Army veteran. I share this not to take a pot shot at Charlotte, but because she’s the source telling us 45k veterans work for Amazon.

To share that headcount in isolation is disingenuous.

A few weeks before, she shared a brag from Amazon’s head of talent acquisition that the company surpassed its goal of hiring more than 100k veterans and spouses in the prior 30 months.

The implication Amazon wants us to have is that the company is teeming with newly onboarded veterans and military spouses.

But if the hiring total and current headcount were shared in the same message, it would raise difficult questions.

Such as “wait … you hired 100k but you have 45k? How did you lose 55k already?”

Decoupling the numbers permits a half story, omitting the damning fact that it is hemorrhaging veteran hires faster than it can replace them.

But it’s actually even worse than I’ve initially painted it.

Here are the numbers all in one place, as I promised earlier.

• In ‘21, Amazon employed 40,000 military veterans and spouses

• In a 30-month span between ‘21 and ‘24, Amazon hired 100,000 military veterans and spouses

• Today, Amazon employs 45,000 military veterans and spouses

• Which means the net gain from ‘21 to ‘24 was 5,000

• Which means 95,000 veterans and spouses left Amazon during the period

• Which means the huge hiring success sits alongside a huge retention failure, because if 100k is worth bragging about, then -95k is worth lamenting

Bottom Line: the 3-year veteran/spouse retention rate is 5%.

That reflects not mere ambivalence, but a forceful rejection.

And of course, it stands at odds with the self-applause of the company’s recruitment leaders. They deserve recognition for the work they do to get veterans through the door. But that task is a lot easier when you don’t openly admit 95 of every 100 you hire will quit or be fired before they even make it to 401(k) vesting.

About a quarter of the military spouse hires Amazon made in its big push were subsequently laid off in its spasmodic waves of elective downsizing. They didn’t quit. They were hired to be fired.

It is incredibly dishonest to hold yourself out to the public as a veteran friendly employer with a retention rate this poor.

The dishonesty alone makes Amazon a bad choice. But if that wasn’t enough, there’s also whatever is driving 95% of veterans and spouses out of the company within 3 years. We should be hearing what the company is doing to improve upon that. Instead we hear nothing but propaganda.

But what I’ve noticed since I started looking more closely is that lying has become a central feature of Amazon’s corporate persona.

The company is reliant on deceit to avoid difficult conversations about its relationship with employees, its stance on unions, its treatment of customers, its adherence to the rules and principles it imposes on its workforce, and even its public image as a good place to work.

Amazon is being sued by the US Federal Trade Commission for using deceptive tactics to prevent customers dis-enrolling from its Prime service. The suit alleges the company named the process “Iliad Flow” after a Homer poem describing a lengthy and friction-filled trial providing an epic test of suffering and will power. The "Four-Page, Six-Click, Fifteen-Option Iliad Cancellation Process" was preserved in deceptive form to prevent harm to the bottom line, reportedly reducing cancellations by 14%.

@vergeAmazon is calling its cancellation process "the Iliad flow" which is actually more fitting than you think. #amazon #amazonprime #tech #techtok

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35,000 sellers in Amazon’s UK marketplace are suing the company for what they claim is unlawful freezing and holding of their sales proceeds. They also allege Amazon manipulated the marketplace to demote their product and promote its own. Both are violations of the agreement Amazon makes with merchants when they list on its website.

The company is accused of hiring more workers than it needed at a warehouse in the UK in order to dilute a unionization vote, and now faces a legal claim that it illegally induced workers to change their votes. CEO Andy Jassy was earlier this year cited for unlawful union-busting statements.

Washington, D.C. is suing Amazon for collecting Prime subscription fees from 48,000 residents in two of the city’s wards despite secretly restricting those wards from Prime subscription benefits. If true, this would mean Amazon pocketed $6.7M in annualized revenue for a service it didn’t intend to provide.

This is a mere sample of the lies stacked so high you can no longer see what’s at the foundation beneath.

And yet, the company continues to collect high-profile laurels heralding its greatness as a veteran and spouse employer. There was substantial gloating at its receipt of the Ex Forces in Business Award for Employer of the Year.

What I’ve heard from more than a dozen people inside the company is that these “awards” are simply purchased via “consideration fees” paid by the company to the “judging” organizations.

I can’t say for certain this is true. Only Amazon can do that, and it won’t.

What’s verifiable is that none of the judging panels talk to veterans who have worked at the company, nor do they include members who have direct experience at the company.

The one prominent evaluator of veteran employers which publishes its methodology is Forbes, which surveys 24,000 veterans in current employment to inform its assessment.

Where did Amazon finish on that list?

121st of 150.

Lies are a feature and not a bug in bureaucracies. Employees are seen as potential threats rather than teammates. They are outside the loop and external to the power structure.

Trust dies. Mutuality breaks down. Instead of a relationship, there is simply authority and coercion. Carrots and sticks. People start needing permission to do their jobs. Psychological safety dies. Employees adopt the risk-aversion modeled by executives, and everything slows to a crawl.

It’s a common way for performance to erode enough to kill a company’s value. Too many companies refuse to break lock on quarterly earnings long enough to hear and heed this warning. They become case studies instead of legends.

Amazon is on its way to being studied in business schools for all the wrong reasons.

Part of that story will be how it pissed away the energy and commitment of a veteran population capable of giving it the cultural refresh and renewal of values necessary to help it evade the gravitational pull of bureaucracy.

---

§11. Amazon, You are Dismissed.

Veterans have certain tendencies.

They tend to trust, because they’ve been taught that trust is the key to teamwork, survival, and victory.

The trust they extend means they’re unlikely to question what they find in a new work environment. They’ll try to assimilate.

They’ll tend to “gut out” bad situations, showing perseverance and determination. But this tendency spills into over-commitment, imbalance, and self-exhaustion.

And of course, military service teaches obedience. Veterans tend to stay in their lane because they take for granted their superiors are competent and earnest.

But these tendencies are all rooted the assumption that beneficiaries of that trust are worthy of it. That they will not abuse it. That they’ll never take advantage. That they’re honest, and mutually committed to the core values everyone has agreed will both drive and limit activity.

Amazon hasn’t earned this trust.

Which places veterans at Amazon in a vulnerable position. They’re likely to burn themselves out in the journey of discovering they’re in a company that actually has no core values and only pretends to care about anything other than profit.

Which means it pretends to care about them, their families, and their teammates.

Eventually, this conclusion becomes unavoidable. The veteran who realizes they’re in an abusive and dishonest environment is likely to do one of three things.

1. Leave the company as soon as possible.

2. Engage in denial, which leads to burnout, which gets them performance managed and eventually fired.

3. Become strident and vocal in an effort to influence change, which gets them marked as inconvenient, performance managed, and eventually fired.

The story ends with them leaving the company sooner than expected, in worse shape mentally and physically than when they joined, and morally wounded by the experience. For those who get fired, family trauma is not uncommon. The impact is sometimes too much for families who have already given more than their fair share and envisioned civilian life as a reprieve from abusive employment.

Veterans of the post-9/11 era have learned the hard way that who we give power over us matters. Trusting in the fidelity and honor of others as a default is what good people do. But it's risky.

When you go to work, you give an employer power over you. They control your livelihood, heavily influence your sense of self-worth, shape your reputation, and fundamentally determine your day-to-day well-being. If they prove unworthy, you will have put everything at hazard.

So my message to veterans is simple.

If the work you do violates your values, quitting is an act of integrity. So with what you now know about Amazon, learned the hard way by 95% of your peers, you can predict your values will be violated. Preserve your integrity by quitting before you start.

My message for Amazon is also simple.

Stop selling yourself as a good employer for anyone, especially veterans. The fact you do it with a straight face doesn’t make you more convincing, it just means you’re better at lying.

Get back to your leadership principles. Respect your people. Earn trust. Or have the decency to dismiss yourself from veteran recruitment.

---

I know many veterans who served in combat. Reflecting on those times, most find it difficult to conceal their sense of pride and fulfillment, even when touching on dark moments.

I know many veterans who worked for Amazon. I don’t know any who enjoy thinking about it. I don’t know any who smile about it.

That’s FUBAR. So why is Amazon still grinning?

That grin needs to go until .

TC is an American military veteran who served and commanded in combat. He is also a former senior leader in Amazon operations.