Amazon's plan to add 250 technologists in Johannesburg to its 400 Cape Town staff is, on the face of it, good news. The recruits will help to drive the growth of Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services to organisations such as the CIA and large corporations.On their first Monday morning they will be told about the company's leadership principles, 14 rules that are inscribed on laminated cards.When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, "I'm Peculiar" - the company's proud phrase for overturning workplace convention.At Amazon workers are encouraged to tear apart one another's ideas in meetings, toil long and late into the night (e-mails arrive past midnight, followed by text messages asking why they were not answered), and held to standards that the company boasts are "unreasonably high".The internal phone directory instructs colleagues how to send secret feedback to one another's bosses. Employees say it is frequently used to sabotage others.Many of the Johannesburg newcomers will not be there in a few years thanks to annual staff culling - "purposeful Darwinism" - one former Amazon human resources director said.The company authorised only a handful of senior managers to talk to reporters for this article, but more than 100 current and former Amazonians described how they tried to reconcile the sometimes punishing aspects of their workplace with what many called its thrilling power to create.In interviews, some said they thrived at Amazon precisely because it pushed them past what they thought were their limits.Many employees are motivated by "thinking big and knowing that we haven't scratched the surface on what's out there to invent", said retail executive Elisabeth Rommel.Amazon may be singular, but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims.It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight.Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving. ..