The Zappos Family reviews

About 3-4 years ago Amazon acquired Zappos and executives have basically lost interest in the company starting at that point. While things were okay initially things got progressively worse over the years. The Las Vegas Downtown project has only made this worse the last few years, where executives are actively funding startups and encouraging a culture of working on downtown causes on Zappos/Amazon's dime. There are literally people/projects on Zappos payroll that work 100% on downtown businesses that have zero benefit to the business, which brings down the morale of employees focused on the core business. All-Hands meetings have become downtown time-share presentations where most wonder what relevance it had with Zappos. The new COO, Chris Nielsen, was the only executive that was still very committed to Zappos, however he recently resigned, leaving the company without a clear leader. In the last year, Zappos has seen a pretty massive hemorrhage of senior talent in Tech, Project Management, Finance, Marketing...Almost 1 major senior person a week. People are leaving for better opportunities outside of Zappos, leaving to start their own companies, even leaving without having a job or anything lined up because the work environment has gotten so bad. What's left is an increasingly junior team that is ill-equipped to run an enterprise business. Given that hiring is extremely difficult, the company is not able to replace the talent putting pressure on the remaining employees. The seniors that are staying are visa holders, employees with families or folks that have things that keep them in Las Vegas (however a lot of those folks are finding other work in gaming related companies).

Everything else. Since Amazon bought the company, the CEO has checked out. He basically uses all his time on pet projects that have nothing to do with core Zappos business. Moved the entire company downtown to the dirtiest and oldest part of Las Vegas for yet another of his social experiments. Uses the employees as test subjects for his ridiculous ideas (Holocracy being the latest) and when they don't work out he reads another book to find the next stupid thing to force on us. Total lack of original ideas and complete lack of leadership. The couple hundred workers that were recently offered packages to leave are lucky! I doubt anyone will be left in the tech area by the end of the year.