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In an email thread obtained by Insider’s Eugene Kim with a subject line “worked_at_amazon,” more than two dozen former Amazon employees now working at Google complained about how frugal their former employer was.
In one email from the thread, a former Amazon employee who left the company in 2020 said project managers got “subpar Windows laptops” and had to prove they needed Apple MacBooks for work in order to get the devices.
Amazon employees having to ask for higher quality work devices became an example of the term “frupidity,” which is spreading throughout Amazon’s offices. The term combines the words “frugal” and “stupidity, former Amazon exec Ethan Evans explained in a blog post.
Frugality is part of Amazon’s culture as one of the company’s 16 leadership principles for making business decisions.
Another former employee who left in 2020 said in the email thread that his team only got one computer monitor. To get a second monitor, Amazon employees would hire summer interns who would get a monitor, then take them after the intern left. The former employee said the summer intern monitors were supposed to be returned, but weren’t.
Some employees said they would develop friendships with other employees who were responsible for office supplies so they could get an extra laptop charger on a loan, but keep them until they left the company, according to the emails.
The frugalness went beyond work devices too.
Cereal was removed from the office kitchens of two former employees on the thread who were told the cereal “didn’t represent a frugal mindset.” Amazon even sold instant-noodles for more than a store close to the office, according to one email.
In another email, two employees at a meeting were forced to split a bagel because the budget wasn’t high enough to order more.
One former employee said in the email thread that they were told, “Spending a couple hundred bucks on cereal isn’t frugal. You are free to solicit donations to try and keep it running.”
The email thread is followed by over 2,000 people, and is meant to connect former Amazonians who are now Googlers. One person on the thread previously told Insider that the culture at Google is a flip from Amazon, with a better culture and leaders.
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