A now famous New York Times exposé painted a gloomy picture of Amazon’s workplace culture last month, but one company that took time to analyze tweets by Amazon employees says things might not be so bad after all.
Peakon, a startup that offers data-driven people management tools, pulled 1.2 million tweets from tech workers at some of the country’s largest technology companies and ran them through a tool that analyzes language in order to determine the sentiment of the messages.
They’re quick to point out that this is a non-scientific survey. But the results turned out to be a bit surprising.
Not only did Amazon employees not take to Twitter to vent never-ending frustrations, they ended up having the highest percentage of strongly positive tweets out of all the companies the study looked at.
Amazon also ranked near the top when it came to how frequently employees mentioned their workplace on Twitter. Microsoft just barely took that No. 1 spot.
To be fair, even Peakon has its doubts about the significance of the findings. The company says you probably can’t draw any definitive conclusions from the data, but it’s more of an exercise in this emerging form of analysis.
But Peakon does offer this conclusion: “So – are Amazon engineers unhappy? Not if the sentiment of their tweets is anything to go by.”
