21 Dog Years : Doing Time @ Amazon.com

This book is a sarcastic, funny and caustic account of the author's stint as a customer service representative at Amazon.com. He worked there in 1998 so I'm assuming a lot has changed in that time. However, it is a pretty biting view of what it was like inside Amazon during the beginning years. I read it quite a while ago but remember enjoying it and feeling like the author was probably violating some kind of workplace confidentiality agreement. Perhaps his former employee agrees because, although you can buy this book on Amazon, you'll find that the subtitle is changed to "A Cube Dweller's Tale." Kind of funny.

Very uneven, switching rather frustratingly between segments of actual description of life within the depths of Amazon and attempts at philosophical musing on the dot-com culture. Choosing one approach or the other might have worked better, but giving equal page space to the two has resulted in a bit of a muddle.

An easy, enjoyable read. This book gives an insider view from the trenches of customer service back in the day phone support for taking credit card info and looking up order details was common. From temp to overworked peon, it's a common life experience made unusual by the dotcom boom era stock growth and related madness as well as the unique Seattle underclass from which such peons was drawn.

This book is amusing, certainly, but I wouldn't exactly call it a great work of computer history. It's basically the story of a humorist working for a corporation, sitting in the cogs. It's inoffensive and worth checking out from the library, but I wouldn't call this a must-have book about the history of the computer industry.

Amusing account of life stuck in the customer service cube farm at Amazon.com. Not inspiring reading for Ann Arborites who are interested in working for Google AdWords. Customer service at any big company is something of a dungeon, the best option is to use your "customer-facing" cred and get ouf of the dungeon as fast as you can.

If Mike Daisey had worked in customer service at some other dotcom I'm not sure that his account would have been published.
Amazon.com and Jeff Bezos have a giant fascination for the public and the J.B. shadow falls over the whole book. Employees are presented as part of a cult and the author even addresses imaginary emails to J.B. to explore their imaginary relationship..
From a commercial point of view Amazon has been a big success and the author doesn't at all suggest why this is, so I would be much more interested in an autobiography by J.B. himself should one ever arrive.

Funny and disturbing, slackers view of early days of amazon. He sounds like the world's worst employee in the world's worst job.