Tampa Bay tech entrepreneurs say Amazon workplace is more the norm

By Justine Griffin for the Tampa Bay Times

amazon

A recent New York Times report about the workplace culture of online retail giant Amazon sparked intense debate about the Seattle-based company’s cultlike enterprise.

Brutal tales of fierce employee competition, 24/7 work cycles and unforgiving denials of requests for time off may not be the norm for every growing company. But millennials working in the tech industry in Tampa Bay were unfazed by the report. It felt more like a lecture from Dad: old fashioned, out of touch and very yesterday.

Answering text messages from bosses after midnight and logging 80-hour workweeks isn’t a big deal to many young people working in fast-growing, innovative industries, some entrepreneurs say, because technology has made it easy to be “wired in” all the time.

“I haven’t figured out a way to disconnect. If you find a way to not be on your phone at all times, please let me know,” said Daniel James Scott, executive director of the Tampa Bay Technology Forum. “The challenge is looking at how the technology we have is changing how we work all the time, and adapting to that culture and the new level of data that’s available at our fingertips. It’s a bit of a mystery to me how to balance that.”

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