Twenty-five years ago today Jeff Bezos posted Amazon's first-ever job ad, and it tells you everything you need to know about his obsession with speed.

He wrote that he was looking for someone who could perform tasks "in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible."

Amazon's need for speed manifests itself in everything from its ambition to launch rapid drone deliveries, to setting tough productivity targets for warehouse workers.

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Amazon's motto may be "customer obsession," but it has another infatuation — speed.

Amazon's brand identity has long rested on the promise of getting parcels to customers as quickly as possible. In June the company announced that its Prime service was offering one-day shipping on more than 10 million products.

Read more: eBay is trolling Amazon over last year's Prime Day outage with a 'crash sale'

Looking to the future, Amazon's starting to hype getting people their packages even quicker using drones. The Amazon Air drone programme has yet to launch, but Amazon's CEO of worldwide consumer Jeff Wilke said in June that the drones are going to start making deliveries in the next few months, and will apparently be able to do so within 30 minutes of receiving an order.

Amazon wants to make drone deliveries a reality in mere months. Amazon

Acceleration is a logical progression for a company whose guiding light has always been speed for the sake of customer convenience — and this philosophy was on show in one of Jeff Bezos' first pieces of public communication after setting up Amazon 25 years ago.

On Instagram on Friday, Bezos reflected on the very first job ad he posted for the company, on August 23 1994.

I posted our first job opening 25 years ago today, when I hadn’t even settled on the name Amazon yet. Feels like yesterday. #gratitude A post shared by Jeff Bezos (@jeffbezos) on Aug 22, 2019 at 4:09pm PDT Aug 22, 2019 at 4:09pm PDT

The ad is for a computer programmer who Bezos says should be able to build and maintain complex systems "in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible."

Doing things faster and better than other companies has turned Amazon into one of the most powerful firms in the world and made Bezos the richest man on the planet. It's an ethos that drives him on, because the alternative is death, as the CEO has made clear on numerous occasions.

Read more: Amazon warehouse employees speak out about the 'brutal' reality of working during the holidays, when 60-hour weeks are mandatory and ambulance calls are common

But there is a human element to this story, which gives Bezos' remark in that early job ad a darker sheen. Numerous reports on Amazon's working conditions have described the intense pressure employees face to stay on rate, the company term for the number of items they're expected to process per hour.

This has manifested itself in stories about warehouse workers and delivery drivers skipping meals and bathroom breaks just to stay on target. One driver reported finding bottles of urine inside delivery vans, echoing a report from inside a UK warehouse where an undercover reporter similarly found a bottle of urine.

Speed is paramount in Amazon warehouses. Getty/JOHANNES EISELE

Amazon has said it is proud of its "great working conditions, wages and benefits, and career opportunities," even going into battle with "Last Week Tonight" host John Oliver. Oliver said on his HBO show that Amazon "squeezes the people lowest on the ladder." Amazon's senior vice president of operations Dave Clark tweeted that the British comedian was wrong.

Whatever your view on the human impact of Amazon's need for speed, its relentless culture is set from the very top — and it was unambiguous right from the company's inception a quarter of a century ago.