How I "escaped" from Amazon.cult

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Today's knowledge worker is overworked, underpaid, and as badly beaten with carrots as with sticks.

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• Jeff Bezos
• Michael Moore
• Moscow
• Stock Options
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Still, Amazon's management team could care less about inspiring my confidence as long as it maintains Wall Street's. And reports like the one I read just yesterday about the company's '97 sales figures, showing a ninefold increase over the previous year to somewhere in the $150 million neighborhood, are likely to pull that off. So if Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos' initial time frame for profitability has been quietly revised backward, no one at the company is worried so long as investors remain bullish and the stock market continues its record-breaking ascent. As long as that remains the case, Seattle-area job seekers will continue to be seduced by the cleverly worded classified ad designed to induce fits of digital envy in its target audience: "Customer Service Tier 1: Lame Title—Cool Job . . . Internet concepts . . . incentive stock options . . . " Virtual poetry for a high-tech, low-wage, post-industrial marketplace.