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Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

• east2west 11y ago
  Amazon does just have stack ranking, the company basks in it.
• coldcode 11y ago
  You could't pay me enough to work in such a sweatshop. It's like Bezos read Karl Marx and figured people are stupid enough to exploit. And yes no matter the pay working people voluntarily as if they were slaves on plantation is still exploitation. Of course the article might be hyperbole and people venting but I don't doubt there is truth in it. 100 years ago titans such a Carnegie and Rockefeller worked people to death and didn't care as long as they made money. The only difference today might be more money. Sometimes. Amazon would never hire me anyway no matter my long skill set as I would never put up with such crap.
  • ForHackernews 11y ago
    Is it reassuring that Amazon treats its white-collar office workers just as terribly as their blue-collar warehouse workers? http://gawker.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-treated-like-a-child-a-d-1651376061 http://gawker.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-treated-like-...
    • serge2k 11y ago
      No, they don't. They treat the FC workers horribly on another level. Refusing to install air conditioning in a hot warehouse and just having ambulances outside instead. Having people wait in line 30 minutes coming and going and refusing to pay them for it.
      • makoz 11y ago
        Do you know of any distribution warehouses that have air conditioning?
        • Crito 11y ago
          No, the no-AC thing is old news, from when they were still mostly selling books. Books don't really mind the heat, so Amazon didn't give a shit. Now that their warehouses have a bunch of other shit in them too, to my knowledge, they all have AC.
  • potatolicious 11y ago
    I worked at Amazon right out of college - I wouldn't do it again, but there's a reason why Amazon continues to hire a lot of people despite their growing (and already rather notorious) reputation as a workplace. Amazon is considered one of the big AAA-tier companies, at the same venerated level as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al. Having Amazon on my resume opened so many doors like you won't believe. I think a lot of people join Amazon knowing the toxic workplace culture out of necessity - our industry doesn't have a fucking clue how to hire people and leans heavily on "signals" like working for specific famous companies. As long as we continue to not be able to interview people effectively, and instead rely on things like "having worked at Amazon" as a positive hiring signal, the Amazon hiring machine will continue to function.
    • gozo 11y ago
      When a friend relocated to London for a well-paying job to "move data around" at Google, I couldn't help to think how similar it seemed to banking. When I read you post about "paying your dues to be in the club" I think the same thing.
      • leoedin 11y ago
        Hey! Just a heads up - you seem to have been shadow banned. I'm not sure why - possibly posting a link to an article about the HN rules?
    • enraged_camel 11y ago
      >>our industry doesn't have a fucking clue how to hire people The software industry isn't special in this regard. There are many industries where having a Harvard degree, for example, is a very strong "signal" that you're a top-tier individual.
      • acjohnson55 11y ago
        I'm curious what you think about a piece I published a couple days ago on the topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alanjohnson/were-hiring-engineers-all-wrong_b_7973484.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alanjohnson/were-hiring-engine... I'm not a great expert or anything, but it's basically my thoughts on engineering a better interviewing system than we had before.
  • kelukelugames 11y ago
    I don't think Amazon pays well. I turned down an offer from Amazon recently. It was to work in an area that was nearest and closest to my heart. Unfortunately their offer was 50 to 100k behind other offers.
    • nemtaro 11y ago
      Amazon does _not_ pay as well as Google/FB/Apple/Twitter/Netflix/LinkedIn/Salesforce/etc.
      • raverbashing 11y ago
        And at least for Google, their salaries, except for the top tier maybe cannot be considered as 'pays well'
        • chrisper 11y ago
          Really? Whenever I see people talking about Google they always say "pays really really well." Care to elaborate why you are saying that?
        • deleted 11y ago
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      • ams6110 11y ago
        Evidently they pay well enough to hire the talent they need.
        • rattray 11y ago
          They have 4,500 open positions in Seattle alone.
      • bethling 11y ago
        I don't know. When I made the decision to leave Amazon, my offers at Facebook and Apple were less than what I was making at Amazon. Google was only slightly more.
  • reitzensteinm 11y ago
    No matter the pay? That's nuts. If you're on 200k you can save up and quit with a hell of a comfortable cushion. If you refuse to right size your life to be able to do that, you have nobody else but yourself to blame. If you're on 20k living paycheck to paycheck, doing so is impossible. I'm not normally of the persuasion to get all social justice-y, but I feel that there's a massive blind spot around here for the struggles of the poor, because the average user of this site can trivially get a high paying job (even if they choose not to). Some things, like death, sickness and love, hit the poor and the rich alike. Career trouble is not one of those things.
    • deleted 11y ago
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  • savanaly 11y ago
    >And yes no matter the pay working people voluntarily as if they were slaves on plantation is still exploitation. I don't follow this. I would certainly put up with a lot for one billion dollars per hour pay. I assume you would too. Would you really not take a job there for one billion dollars per hour? I know it's boring, but I think the simple calculation workers make of tallying salary vs working conditions still applies here.
• paulhauggis 11y ago
  It sounds like they run their business like their seller marketplace...
• falcolas 11y ago
  I'm glad I got out (well, was pushed out, largely due to my own ignorance) when I did. This sounds like a real grindhouse now. Perhaps some folks enjoy this kind of working environment, but personally I'm thankful for a 40 hour work week where I can innovate for my company and still have a life outside work.
• amazonthrowaway 11y ago
  David Streitfeld has written a number of strident, highly-critical articles on Amazon. What he's writing here doesn't reflect my experience as an SDE in a couple of different divisions in the company. I can't speak to what people in marketing or vendor management experience. Take the first paragraph for instance: > They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs I don't recall anyone telling me this > When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported I don't recall hearing either of these phrases used. > To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy 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 conventions. The leadership principles are repeated pretty frequently, although I think most people take them with a grain of salt. The quiz is called 100% Peculiar, not "I'm Peculiar". I don't recall it being about leadership principles at all. I recall it being about things like how Amazon doesn't delete negative customer reviews because the company sees it as being in its long-term interest for reviews to be trustworthy. The other thing on the quiz I remember is that Amazon likes to use informal language with customers, like "Where's my stuff". [Edit: I should also point out that it's not a mandatory thing and nobody cares if you don't do it or don't do well enough on it to get the little badge on your page in the company directory.]
  • gary__ 11y ago
    Did you see people crying while in work?
    • amazonthrowaway 11y ago
      No
    • newobj 11y ago
      i did.
    • throwaway76554 11y ago
      Never.
• npalli 11y ago
  So from the article we read >> Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early. He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton. He didn’t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating that every puff cost her a few minutes. “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” he told her. She burst into tears. The weird thing is that I actually watched the Princeton video and Bezos learnt a very different lesson (by his grandfather). Makes you wonder if yet again the need for simple narratives makes this article kind of useless. http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml?section=&path=/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/index.xml&next=1 http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/inde... >> At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!" I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever." What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.
• yaman12 11y ago
  Back in 2005 I interviewed for a director of engineering role at Amazon. But after I learned about the culture and methods Amazon uses to "manage" it's people I lost interest. It's just not how I want to be remembered. I don't see the value of a harsh dehumanizing environment ironically used to create a feeling in customers that people come first. And I just don't think these tactics work over the long term. Google will be around long after Amazon fails because it retains and inspires it's best engineers.
• djhworld 11y ago
  I remember a few months ago a senior manager from their security team came to our workplace to give a presentation (we use AWS a lot) He was talking about how he and his team are constantly evaluated on metrics, down to the minutest detail that are recorded and reviewed regularly.
• caiob 11y ago
  Is Seattle the modern-day Detroit?
• johneth 11y ago
  Personally, I think Amazon's successful despite their workplace culture, not because of it.
  • raverbashing 11y ago
    It seems to me it's pretty much like the Army. Push people hard, a lot will give up, but whoever remains is pretty strong and performant (for how long who knows, of course)
  • serge2k 11y ago
    Hard to say. For me it really comes down to they do not give a shit about their employees. Not at all. You can say that about other companies, but Amazon sets the bar very very low.
• noir_lord 11y ago
  Jeff Bezos has always been a bit of a dick. This just codifies his dickishness, this kind of crap a century from now will be written about like Dickens wrote about 19th century London. Appalling in every way, I think I'm going to shop elsewhere in future.
  • tootie 11y ago
    So were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie before them. It's part and parcel of being aggressive, creative and demanding. You can't build an industry that goes against the grain of established practice and drag 10,000 followers with you unless you're a big of an egomaniac. There's probably 1000 people out there smart enough to envision an Amazon-like business, but they are content to enjoy what they have and not stress themselves out by building a giant corporation.
    • wpietri 11y ago
      I think there's a big difference between "a bit of an egomaniac" and "a controlling, abusive asshole". Also, it's worth considering whether "look at all the successful assholes" argument is basically circular. It sounds a lot to me like saying, "well of course ISIS should be like that. Look at how well Stalin, Mao, and Hitler did." I can't deny that there are many prominent assholes. But does that mean that they were the only ones who could have created successful companies? Or just that, by being horrible people, they managed to exclude the other competent and effective people who could have done as well or better, and without the same sort of collateral damage?
      • calibraxis 11y ago
        Some systems reward sociopaths (and punish altruists), some don’t. War obviously does; so does capitalism. Some perceptive people I know keep telling me their boss is foolish for being cruel; yet the boss is clearly winning, making millions hand over fist. (Obviously, there’s latitude; one can certainly lavish comforts on lieutenants and elite troops for example.)
• dpflan 11y ago
  Here are Amazon's Leadership Principles, complete with phrases and stock photos: http://www.amazon.jobs/principles http://www.amazon.jobs/principles
  • seiji 11y ago
    Wow, it actually says this: "Leaders are right a lot. They have strong business judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs." Don't question. Obey. Leaders are leaders because they are better than you.
    • retailengineer 11y ago
      The entire point of the leadership principles at Amazon is that they apply to everybody at the company. The handouts with leadership principles they give out to everyone all start with "Please be a leader". No one's obeying anyone.
    • chwahoo 11y ago
      You're misreading. Everyone they hire is intended to be a leader, and being right is one of the qualities they care about in employees. Not "management is usually right, so trust them".
    • serge2k 11y ago
      No, it's actually saying you aren't a leader if you aren't capable of being right a lot of the time.
• tootie 11y ago
  It's like a tl;dr or Steve Yegge's blog.
• outside1234 11y ago
  This sounds like a boom/bust company. This all works while the stock is going up consistently. Eventually it won't, and this place will implode.
  • mtbcoder 11y ago
    This sounds like a big enterprise company taking the next evolutionary step. Soon the tactics will be labelled as "best practices", talks and conferences will be given, the mentality accepted and the rest of the herd will continue to froth at the mouth to be more enterprise-y than the next. As the article states: > "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. “Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change."
    • x5n1 11y ago
      The world is a big enough place to say f-you to companies like this and live your life well. At the end of the day work is work. Doesn't matter what you actually do in the long run.
    • plonh 11y ago
      That's nonsense and unsupported. Steve Jobs had asshole management patented before the New Economy, and Google and Facebook are doing fine without Amazon culture. Come-and-go employment is Uber/AirBnB 1099s, and MSFT's old practice of hiring contractors , not Amazon full-time SDEs
  • brown9-2 11y ago
    Note how in the conclusion of the article it mentions that Amazon is already running out of candidates in the Seattle area.
• mkozlows 11y ago
  On the one hand, I zero percent want to work in that environment. On the other hand, I can see why it would appeal to some people. If you've ever worked at a place with stifling bureaucracy, where building consensus laboriously over months is necessary to move forward with even relatively minor decisions, then you know how liberating and empowering it feels to work in a place where people are focused on getting things done, where you can make decisions and drive forward quickly, and where ideas get debated openly and decisively. But yeah, I suspect most people would prefer that taken down a few notches.
  • wilsynet 11y ago
    Only thing I would add is: and leave people with their dignity intact whenever possible because 1) it's the decent thing to do and 2) it's cheaper to keep someone than it is to hire someone new after the person has quit. Clearly that's not something that Amazon prizes. They seem to know that their culture drives people to quit. Which is why stock doesn't meaningfully vest until years 2, 3 and 4.
    • rjayatilleka 11y ago
      * Years 3 and 4. It starts vesting at the end of year 2.
      • delecti 11y ago
        Yes and no. It's 5% at the end of 1 year, another 15% at the end of 2, and then 20% every 6 months. I would argue that the 15% is the first meaningful vest, making the parent comment correct.
• nemtaro 11y ago
  I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at some point promoted to SDE II ;) It's a shark eat shark environment. I never cried, but I saw others (specially female colleagues) do. After 2 years of waking up in the middle of the night for bullshit on-call pages (wack-a-mole with production issues) and increasingly heavier deadlines, I developed stress related medical issues. That was a wake up call for me, and as soon as I realized the shit place that I was in, I started showing up at the office detached, practicing interview questions and doing phone screen interviews from work. I eventually got offers from Facebook/Google, and moved on. It was only then that I realize I was actually paid at the 50th percentile for my position's level and experience all along. Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises. I get Amazon recruiters contacting me all the time, and I'm always nice to them because I know the shit environment they're stuck in. Though in the back of my mind I'm thinking "there's no way in hell I'd ever go back" Fuck Jeff, fuck Amazon, fuck AWS, and fuck their leadership principles.
  • solutionyogi 11y ago
    I am curious. If work environment was so toxic, why did you stick around 5 long years? What was your thought process? I have had similar happened to my friends who somehow get stuck at one place for one reason or other and don't realize what they are missing out. Right now, I am trying to help another friend who is stuck in similar situation (not at Amazon).
    • enraged_camel 11y ago
      People stick around in toxic environments mostly because of social reasons. Adversity breeds camaraderie. When you commiserate with people on a regular basis about the shitty work environment and terrible company policies, you build mutual trust tend to become really good friends with them. Leaving those people behind can be tough for a lot of people, especially if it is their first job out of college (and they don't know what they are missing out on).
• minimaxir 11y ago
  Remember the "Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long." post that was made a month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon_interns_some_advice_from_an_old_man/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon...
• Disruptive_Dave 11y ago
  At least they seem to be upfront about it (inside their own walls, perhaps). There are plenty of companies who preach work/life balance and give lip service to employees being rewarded based on their output, and everyone knows it's complete BS.
• unauthorizedsde 11y ago
  I have worked all over Amazon as an SDE and Manager, and still do (11 years and counting.) I have certainly seen parts of the company that resemble parts of this article, especially OLR backstabbing, which I especially despise. As someone in a technical job family, it has always been easy for me to transfer internally to better-run corners of the company. I stick around because I find that I like the low-fat culture, and working with extremely high achievers. Most of those top-tier people that I know in the tech families that have left end up coming back within a few years because they get bored on the outside. The exceptions overwhelmingly are those who left for Google, they never look back. I cannot imagine literally crying about criticism in a meeting, and have never seen it myself. Working in a place with high standards and honest criticism is preferable to the alternatives. The real danger is inadequate mechanisms to deal with toxic org politics, and especially jackasses who think 80 hour weeks are not a sign of a problem. This definitely needs to change.
  • nemtaro 11y ago
    If you've been at Amazon for 11 years, your stock has grown from $40 to $500. I can see why you stick around in addition to the other positives that you mentioned... I've been at Google for a few years now in Seattle, and know of exactly 1 person who left Google to go back to Amazon for a title boost. In contrast, I know dozens of SDEs who have been coming from Amazon to Google.
    • crucifiction 11y ago
      Google is the new Microsoft, its where talented engineers go to retire.
      • adgjl92 11y ago
        I think that would still be Microsoft.
    • plonh 11y ago
      Amazon is so stingy with RSUs ( and base salary and 401k and benefits ) that 10x growth doesn't make it worthwhile.
• rdtsc 11y ago
  Ok since we are talking Amazon, let me share my interviewing experience with them. I was talking to an AWS team. Had a phone interview scheduled. They forgot about me. Ok, it happens in a big company. Had another one, went pretty well. They invited me over. I show up and my contact person (my future manager) wasn't there that day. They had me wait for 30min, I guess until they scrambled to find a replacement. Except 2 people I talked to that day, everyone else seemed like they didn't expect to be interviewing anyone and were pulled in last minute. Needless to say that made for a pretty bad experience. Oh and they promised lunch, ok, I wasn't hungry but they actually forgot about me during lunch. I was just sitting there in the conference room by myself. I thought, ok, this is pretty bad. But no, that's not all, they promised "we'll get back to you with an answer in 2 days". Took almost 3 weeks. At that point I was just curious how long they would take and just waited. So anyway, I hear people like working there. But judging by me experience, there are some red flags. I think it points to how things are run internally.
  • skynetv2 11y ago
    My experience was polar opposite. I interviewed with AWS. The entire process was very well organized and very professional. The recruiters were very professional, everyone showed up as promised, manager took me to lunch - overall a very pleasant experience. The HR rep took me thru the benefits, comp. package etc before the interview. The only thing I hated was the "bar raiser". He was a guy who came in made up his mind for sure. I could see it in his face. He was not pleasant, did not smile. And he started with "I have a lot of questions to ask, and I want to get through all of them in our time. So give me short straight answers and dont take too much time". At that moment I knew I was a goner. Just to compare, I have 12 years of experience in areas of open source, big company, big university research on large systems. A few patents and a ton of publications. Either he walked in feeling insecure and wanted to crush me with his power or feeling that I am full of shit and he is going to let me know about it. The bar raiser has veto on the candidate and I think it was abused severely. He did not like any answer I gave, and keep in mind that the questions he asked are not the kind that have black and white answers but the answers vary on your background and experience. Since I signed an NDA saying I wont reveal any questions, let me give a simple example: What have you ever done for a customer that was not planned? Now if you come from a hardware product development background, there is nothing you can do without it being POR. Engineers cannot randomly decide to change specs or features without the entire supporting organizations knowing about it. If an engineer decides to add some feature to help some customer, who is going to test it, document it, train the support organization, tell the factory about the changes in the process etc? You can't do stuff without anyone approving it. yes, you can affect change and try to get buy in from the rest of the organization but thats all you can do. If you come from a web dev company, maybe there is more leeway in what an anyone can do individually. So there is no black and white answer here and he just said "thats not satisfactory". Shortly after that the hiring manager came in and said the process wasnt going well and basically told me to go home. One would think someone who is given that much veto power is more professional and objective and unbiased.
• deleted 11y ago
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• dkural 11y ago
  People seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a company is. It exists for the benefit of its shareholders, and secondarily, customers. It will take whatever actions necessary towards achieving this. It'll accrue benefits to the employee to the extent it helps towards these goals. Now what happens in a lot of publicly-traded large companies is, the inmates start running the asylum. The workplace primarily starts to exist for the benefit of the employee. Since internally most companies are structured as an oligarchy or dictatorship, most of these benefits accrue to "management" - another type of employee. Harmonious behavior and not creating too much trouble become the premium value. Everything seems to be going great, until you implode and fire thousands of people, or get acquired and the same things happen. The lucky ones retire before that. All of this, of course, happens to the detriment of shareholders. Look at Microsoft. Great employee satisfaction. They missed out on the internet, on search, on social, on mobile, all the while bringing in HUNDREDS of BILLIONS in revenue over the last 20 years. Ballmer gets a lot of the blame, but everybody else also kind of just went with it. Asleep at the switch. A company doesn't exist for the employee to have good work-balance, to get self-worth, nurture your creativity or whatever. It exploits your very human needs and desires to create wealth for its shareholders. Google would like you to think it's just like college, and to give you great social opportunities and make as many friends as possible, so it replaces your original parent-in-standing, The College Campus. The more of your psyche and social world is tied to the corporation, the more meaning you'll ascribe to your work, the more likely you'll stay.
  • pkinsky 11y ago
    Fortunately my skills are in demand enough that hopefully I will never be forced to sell my labor to such a company.
  • wilsynet 11y ago
    The idea that a company exists for the benefit of shareholders is not universally agreed. For example: http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/how-shareholders-are-hurting-america http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/how-shareholders-are... Anyway, you're free to be cynical about Google, but it is clear that Larry is not trying to maximize shareholder value.
• amznawsthrow 11y ago
  I've worked at Amazon for the last 3 years as a Software Developer both on AWS and on the Retail side and I can answer any questions people have. Most of the things I see in this article are bullshit, at least as a software developer is concerned. Maybe the business side is way worse, but I doubt it. I've never seen anyone refer to "Climbing over the wall" when hitting it. People talk about "working hard and making history", but what major leading software company (Google, Facebook, anything in Silicon Valley) doesn't talk about changing the world? The internal "anytime feedback" tool is geared towards giving people unprompted POSITIVE feedback when they do something you think is worthy of recognition. It is not meant to undermine each other's bosses, that's laughable. Yes, once you reach a high enough level (Senior Manager (ie manager of managers), Director, VP), you hear stories all the time of your bosses emailing you things on Sundays and expecting a response the same day, but again, at the level of responsibility that we are talking about, where you are paid six figures multiple times over with additional six figures worth of stock, that's common expectations from most leading software companies that are in a cuthroat business. I've never seen developers or senior developers be expected to respond to emails on Sunday or after midnight. In fact, right now, because of StageFright, most developers don't even have access to work email on their Android devices. > "workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings"? Don't make me laugh. If anything, the emphasis on "Leadership principles" emphasizes that as leaders we are more than our ideas, we are meant to build relationships, and not act as assholes where the idea is king. > "Secrecy is required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement". NOPE. Just a standard boilerplate NDA and non-compete clause the same as at every software company I've worked at before - small and local, or large and multinational. OF COURSE there are teams that are under stricter security (e.g. the Kindle Fire team before it was announced), but again, that's not unorthodox. I've never seen anyone cry at the office, not even close. > "Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as “athletes” with endurance, speed (No. 8: “bias for action”), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. 7: “think big”)." NOT EVEN CLOSE. "Bias for action" simply means that when faced with a choice to either try something and fail, and ultimately risk wasting that time, versus sitting around and trying to analyze the tradeoffs, we want to err on the side of trying. It's kind of like Facebook's "Move fast and break things", only without the breaking. It just says that we want our people to experiment, attempt moonshots, and figure out quickly if something will work or not. "Think big" means that every decision we make needs to be considered at Amazon scale. If you build a caching library, think about what happens if every team at amazon started using it. If you build a feature to solve some problem for Amazon.fr, consider if every single marketplace needed it, and then 10 more regional marketplaces showed upworldwide. Would the same solution work? >"Workers are expected to embrace “frugality” (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to the cellphones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. " Typical standard per-diem when travelling like I have at other companies. Frugality isn't supposed to be "be cheap". It's "consider before spending". There is a whole Amazon legends about how you get a door for a desk, and it's not supposed to be literal. The point isn't that Amazon makes you use a door for a desk. It's that at some point in the company history, they realized they could get doors from Home Depot for cheaper than a simple office desk and thought "hey that's a good idea". These days desks are not doors. If you request you can get an adjustable ergonomic sit/stand desk. And no, if you're a developer, you don't have to buy your own second monitor. The company provides 2 monitors just like anywhere else, and reasonable developer-friendly specs for the machines. >"Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (No. 13) — to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision." The bullshit just won't end. Disagree and commit isn't "Disagree and be aggressive". It's "If you disagree but are overruled, make your point AND MOVE ON." Don't sabotage the chosen approach if you were overruled. Don't make passive aggressive comments. Don't celebrate if it turned out you were right after all. Make the best argument you can, but if it's overruled, you go with the decision, and be a team player.
• outside1234 11y ago
  The most depressing thing about this is that this abusive mode of working started by apple and Amazon seems to be winning. I don't see how this is sustainable - while it leads to probably good business results - how many relationships is it destroying and how many children are going unparented? Amazon in general seems like a net loss for society.
  • gress 11y ago
    Apple doesn't operate like this at all. You are confusing Steve Jobs personal behavior with the company culture.
    • WorldWideWayne 11y ago
      No, Apple is known to be a bad employer too - http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-the-worst-things-about-working-at-apple-2014-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-t...
      • gress 11y ago
        You do realize that Business Insider is part owned by Jeff Bezos?
        • WorldWideWayne 11y ago
          So, do you think Jeff Bezos himself coerced all of those quotes out of ex-Apple employees? You do realize that Business Insider also wrote an article entitled "Why Working At Apple Is A Dream Job"? Nevermind those articles though - one need only to look at Apple's involvement in the recent high-tech employee anti-trust to see that they're a bad employer.
          • gress 11y ago
            If you knew about that second business insider article, why did you reference the only the first unless to deliberately justify a biased point of view?
• analog31 11y ago
  Sometimes I wonder what saves the rest of us from working under such conditions. Given the continual adoration of "leaders" from Jack Welch onward, managers everywhere should aspire to replicate those conditions within their own empires. Why not utopia everywhere? I think there are a couple of reasons. First, within the exponential (or whatever) distribution of company sizes, most companies aren't big enough to operate such programs efficiently. Just as some processes can't be scaled up, others are hard to scale down. At my own employer, despite 30k+ employees, we are quite diverse and scattered. The kind of orientation and monitoring that the AAA companies can give their employees, we just can't afford. Second, there may be a very small number of top managers with the self discipline and emotional stamina to actually carry it out.
  • brown9-2 11y ago
    Amazon is a retail business. They can only earn money from razor-thin margins by pushing to keep costs down so hard. This is why it is fundamentally unfair to compare Amazon to Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or Google. They are in different businesses. Other companies are fortunate to not have to treat humans so poorly to be able to exist.
    • serge2k 11y ago
      I disagree completely with the idea that they have to treat people this way. They choose to because it's easier and more profitable. It's scummy as hell.
      • brown9-2 11y ago
        I'm not making excuses for them (see my other comments in this thread). But I think that one thing saving other companies from being like this is that they don't feel monetary pressure to do so.
• tonetheman 11y ago
  That is a shitty place to work period.
• thecombjelly 11y ago
  Seeing as this isn't close to the first report on Amazon treating its workers horribly, why do people continue to use AWS? There are alternative companies that provide AWS like services and don't put workers in a sweatshop. So if you continue to use AWS aren't you just encouraging Amazon to do more of the same?
  • jacalata 11y ago
    Same reason they continue to buy clothes made in actual sweatshops, because most people don't care as much about the workers making their products as they do about the cost (and sometimes quality) of those products.
    • thecombjelly 11y ago
      This isn't the same. In this case we know Amazon does it whereas with many products we don't know exactly how the item is produced. As well, AWS is not the best value whereas with commodity products the item may be the best value, from a monetary to quality standpoint. Not to mention, in most cases, technology companies can afford to pay more for a more ethical product even if AWS was the best value whereas for many people the price of a commodity is very important. Using AWS is either laziness, the "we use Java because everyone uses Java" syndrome, or internal inertia. The only partially excusable reason is internal inertia.
  • gdulli 11y ago
    I use AWS because it's a choice my company has made that I can't overturn. But I've phased buying from Amazon out of my personal life. It wasn't even difficult. If you just look a bit and stop assuming Amazon is always the best deal, you'll find it's not. Recently I wanted to buy some cheap $7 earphones. At Amazon they would have been 30 cents cheaper but I had to buy $35 worth of stuff to get free shipping. (Or pay $100/year, which would amortize to very expensive shipping for me.) Elsewhere I paid 30 cents extra for the product but got free shipping for just the one item. That's a great tradeoff.
• ilurkedhere 11y ago
  Sounds like hell is filled with suckers.
• ck2 11y ago
  I don't get how they keep anyone more than 6 months? What the hell are they dangling over people that makes them stay?
  • dontmentionit 11y ago
    Most of their engineers are fresh out of college who don't know anything better. Some stay for stocks, while others are just biding their time. At Amazon, you definitely learn a lot - that keeps some people too.
  • brown9-2 11y ago
    Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.
  • potatolicious 11y ago
    Amazon's stock packages vest non-linearly (exponentially) over 4 years, so if you leave after only one year you get only ~5% of the total package. As opposed to the industry standard which is linear vesting. They also have onerous clawback clauses on signing bonuses and relocation, and I know of one instance where the clawback stipulated that the signing bonuses would be paid back pre-tax (e.g., $10k signing bonus, of which you got $6k after tax, but if you quit you have to cough up $10k) - meaning you are actually in the hole if you leave. They also have a habit of putting 2-year clawbacks on their bonuses rather than the more common 1-year, so leaving even in your second year at Amazon would result in substantial financial loss. Even in this environment I know multiple people who left before their 1-year anniversary, that's how bad it is in many parts of the company. I personally know multiple people who suffered substantial financial loss in order to leave.
    • ljk 11y ago
      > They also have onerous clawback clauses on signing bonuses and relocation, and I know of one instance where the clawback stipulated that the signing bonuses would be paid back pre-tax (e.g., $10k signing bonus, of which you got $6k after tax, but if you quit you have to cough up $10k) - meaning you are actually in the hole if you leave. so if you get fired then you don't have to pay it back?
• blueside 11y ago
  This makes me recall Bezos posting to usenet in 1994 looking for potential new hires... "You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. " https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mi.jobs/poXLCW8udK4/_GHzqB9sG9gJ https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mi.jobs/poXLCW8udK4/_G...
  • technofiend 11y ago
    That attitude still prevails. Last time I talked to someone at Amazon he said something "we get more done in one quarter than you finance guys get done in a year."
• thewarrior 11y ago
  Employees ratting on each other is straight out of 1984.
• lamontcg 11y ago
  I left in 2006. It seems to have actually gotten substantially worse there. Wow...
• noahm 11y ago
  I worked at Amazon for 3+ years, leaving just under a year ago. "It’s the greatest place I hate to work" pretty much sums up how I felt about the place. The crazy thing is, I kinda want to go back! The scope and scale of the engineering problems is simply unmatched, especially if you're like me and you don't want to work for a primarily advertising funded company. I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site. It sounds like most of the people interviewed for the article were on the retail side. In AWS, I never felt any sort of competition with my peers, nor did I feel like people were trying to sabotage me with the anytime feedback tool. In fact, it really felt like there was a refreshing lack of office politics there. Everybody worked very hard and there was mutual respect among all my peers. The workloads are heavy, for sure, but never really unmanageable, and the work is almost always interesting. Ultimately what finally ended it for me was the complete lack of paternity leave. Amazon offers, to the letter, the bare minimum family leave that they can legally get away with. If the company isn't interested in my health or that of my family, should I really be putting effort into helping them succeed? I think policies like that really run counter to their "hire and develop the best" principle. How exactly do they plan on doing that if they don't treat them with respect?
  • deleted 11y ago
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    • noahm 11y ago
      > Re: Paternity leave, I was able to take as much as I needed - it depends on the team/org I guess. Yeah, I'm sure the teams have some ability to be flexible, and if I'd pushed I could have gotten more time. Managers understand very well how difficult it can be to hire a new engineer, and they recognize the importance of keeping the ones they've got, but the company-wide policy literally is zero paid family leave for fathers. Regardless of available workarounds, I wanted to express my dissatisfaction with the policy.
  • retailengineer 11y ago
    > I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site. I'm an SDE on the retail side, and the funny thing is, there seems to be a consensus among the engineers on the retail side that it's much harder to work at AWS, because of poor management. Glad to know that's not the case. My engineering team at least is pretty chill. The business teams have the harder job, but not nearly as hard as the article suggests ("cancer? screw that!" -- sure, that's how it is). Totally agree about the lack of paternity leave, though. One of the guys on the team who has a two-month-old hardly gets any sleep at all. Perhaps all this bad PR (and all the customers saying "I won't buy Amazon anymore!") will make Amazon address this issue.
• scurvy 11y ago
  From the comments posted so far, it sounds like the author put a very bright spotlight on a few bad cases and blew certain things out of proportion. That said, it does sound like Amazon is very different, bottom-to-top, from other tech companies -- especially those that got their start in the Valley. Right or wrong, Amazon is trying something different. Every company in the Valley just mimics each other and clones their "corporate values" from each other as well as practices, benefits, etc. That said, there are some refreshing things I read in the article. It's nice to hear there are tech companies where you're not required to be everyone's friend and sing kumbaya. I currently work at one where one of the company's ideals is "extreme respect" -- meaning you must respect every employee even if they have never earned such respect and have done several things to make them lose respect in your eyes. Criticizing bad ideas is extremely difficult to do because someone's feelings might get hurt and then they'll tattle on you to a manager than you're not respecting them. Never mind the fact that their idea was a bad one that would have cost the company money, caused setbacks, or lost customers. In the founder's mind, everyone is going to get a gold star and the company will succeed with this idea of respect, not the best decisions. I think I'm stuck at the other end of the spectrum from Amazon, and I'll leave shortly after working out financing to sell my options via warrants to a third party. Extreme respect and gold stars for everyone, but how dare you try and sell your precious shares to the unwashed?
  • eclipxe 11y ago
    Mind sharing what company it is?
    • scurvy 11y ago
      I will after I sell my shares. They might preach respect, but they don't take criticism too well.
• chad_strategic 11y ago
  I'm sure this is going to piss a lot of people off... This is #firstworldproblems. If you don't want to work there, then don't. I just quit a crappy/work intensive/crazy/insane/no structure cannabis startup and I feel a heck of lot better. I would have been thrilled to be making the Amazon money out of college, instead I went to Boot Camp (USMC), that was low pay and stress environment. Let's put this all in perspective... (Let's not forget Bezos owns the Washington Post, and well this was written by the NYT?)
• Zigurd 11y ago
  I wonder if Amazon runs 126 Labs this way. If they do, I think they are reducing the chances that they will turn Fire OS into a serious competitor in phones and tablets, even for media consumption.
  • serge2k 11y ago
    I don't think it matters.
• tzs 11y ago
  Many more anecdotes from former or current Amazon employees in the biggest Reddit discussion of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3h391m/amazon_employee_on_relentless_working_conditions/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3h391m/amazon_e...
  • esturk 11y ago
    Interesting to see Amazon's lack of damage control on reddit vs the damage control on here.
• S_A_P 11y ago
  I can see the perspective of wanting Amazon on your resume. But otherwise it sounds like an awful place to work. I've known three people who have worked there. 1 made it 6 months, another 2 years, and the last is going on 3 years if his LinkedIn profile is correct. I suspect he will stay due to H1B reasons.
• cesarbs 11y ago
  My feeling is that these things vary greatly from group to group within Amazon. My wife works there as an SDET and nothing in that article applies to her. Most days she is home by 6:30-7pm, and would be even sooner if it weren't for the long commute (we live on Eastside). A co-worker's wife also works there as an SDET and it's the same - very 9-5, very rarely she has to work a bit later. Our wives are in completely different groups by the way. Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs, but my wife says that the devs in her group don't seem to be under a lot of pressure/stress either.
• mud_dauber 11y ago
  I got through 3/4 of the article and had to quit. Simply FUCKING APPALLING organizational behavior. I can say with reasonable confidence that if I had discovered those tricks being done to my reputation behind my back, there would be fisticuffs. Fuck Bezos.
  • tr4 11y ago
    Fisticuffs...or worse. I've heard developer colleagues joking at times of excessive pressure and management nastiness at my (non-Amazon) workplace about "going postal". At a large enough scale, you will get people who lack the coping skills deal with that kind of nasty environment. I suppose an employee going beserk and harming others would be the ultimate expression of "organizational Darwinism".
• tobbyb 11y ago
  What a depressing read. Jeff Bezos needs to tell us why he is treating our fellow human beings so badly. I am willing to wait another day for my gadgets from amazon, or not even have gadgets. I didn't ask for this, no customer asked for this. I don't want people to be treated like this, Some of the reports about the sick and unlucky being penalized is grotesque and Bezos needs to stand up and defend himself or be dismissed as a psychopath. Efficiency, performance and wealth should not be a ruse for businesses to drag us a sterile world stripped of humanity in pursuit of profits. No one signed that social contract. Ultimately the only reasons sociopaths thrive and succeed is there are too many people willing to do their bidding, every single time, to dehumanize themselves and others.
  • blueside 11y ago
    Agreed, unfortunately the two terms you mentioned "psychopath" and "sociopath" are character traits that get rewarded in our current system. Very sad.
• ledriveby 11y ago
  I wonder if ex-Amazon employees will seed Seattle's startup scenes with "the Amazon way". Maybe they'll do the exact opposite, since they've seen how unhappy life can be when they're treated as grist for the mill. I try to take my dollars elsewhere because I think Amazon is detrimental to local economies or their employees in warehouses and HQ. Kind of like how I feel about Wal*Mart.
  • plonh 11y ago
    A few ex-Amazon startups have exported Amazon culture and failed in industry . Pelago, for example.
  • seattle_spring 11y ago
    I recently left a mid-sized tech company in Seattle largely because of a few bad apples toxifying the culture. Interestingly enough, all 3 of them were ex-Amazon employees.
• curiousjorge 11y ago
  A business engine always breaks with the very people that make up the engine. If people aren't happy, the product sucks, managers go into panic and begins pushing people more and the downward spiral continues. My speculation here but I think Amazon has reached peak. It got what it wanted, the largest retailer in America. Jeff Bezo got his feature on magazine and tv shows. Stock leaps one more fold. Amazon has consistently led on investors that future profits is everything while undercutting everyone else in a razor thin margin operations. Now that it's reached the title it wanted it finds the very people that got them there miserable and jumping ship. That's very hard to fix especially when you piss off the work force and give the impression that it's a hell hole. Reminds me of a startup that grew super quick while maintaing crazy turnovers until they couldn't hire anymore directly because their reputation has gotten so bad. They never recovered. I think we are seeing something like that to a certain degree but in much larger magnitude. I think Walmart would be very much poised to begin eating at Amazon's margins. These days I find myself comparing prices with walmart.com before ordering on Amazon.
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• sidcool 11y ago
  So basically it's true. Bezos is a tyrant hellbent on fame. But we won't stop buying from them. There was another story where an honest employee was trampled by the bosses..
• oneshot908 11y ago
  Something to keep in mind here is that while history is written by the victors, hit pieces like this are primarily sourced from the sad tales of the losers. While there is truth in this article, it exhibits the same sort of inaccuracies as _The Everything Store_. It's nowhere near as bad it sounds from this article, but there are real problems - just like anywhere else. One's ability to prosper at Amazon is a function of one's personality - just like anywhere else. People who need strong guidance will do poorly. People who can survive criticism and thrive in chaos will prosper. As for me, I worked at Amazon for several years as an engineer. The frugality is what eventually made me leave because too often it gets implemented as dirt cheapness. But in their defense, I had opportunities to do things there none of the other big 4 would have granted. And I got the chance to do them by being confrontational and confident. The downside is that if one interviews at other companies with one's Amazon personality, one will frequently come off as a total a$$hole. Amazon will change you. Some of those changes are great, but you really have to keep your Amazon ego in check outside of the place.
  • serge2k 11y ago
    I keep hearing people talk about how inaccurate the everything store is. In what ways is it wrong? Keeping your ego in check? They
  • throwaway654123 11y ago
    Yes. The frugality here is ridiculous. I work on device hardware/software. We need a lot of devices for testing. We have to buy them from the retail website. And yesterday they sent out an email asking for help testing FireTV device on TV with certain specs, with a snarky comment about how you cannot expense a TV. It's completely ridiculous. If they need to test with particular hardware they need to buy the hardware and not rely on using their employees personal TV. That reminds me, they are always asking to use employees cars for bluetooth testing with device as well.
    • lordleft 11y ago
      Is that...legal? I mean I feel like requiring employees to source hardware you need to do your job would violate some statute, somewhere.
• satyajeet23 11y ago
  Some of us (like me) really look up to it, the Industry, the Culture and People. Things like this really depress me.
• chrisra 11y ago
  In contrast, Walmart (where I worked as an intern this summer) is full of genuine kindness, bottom to top, as far as I could tell. I don't remember anyone saying a thing that was rude or harsh to me. Even higher ups seemed like cool people that you could talk to whenever you needed to. If you're at Amazon and are looking for a kinder environment, Walmart was great to my family.
  • amazonthrowaway 11y ago
    Doesn't Walmart drug test everyone?
    • chrisra 11y ago
      They required me to for my internship at least.
      • amazonthrowaway 11y ago
        I think there's a bit of a disconnect between genuinely caring about people and treating them like criminals. I can understand drug testing a truck driver, but drug testing developers makes no sense to me.
        • protomyth 11y ago
          It happens in a lot of companies. From what I understand its an insurance thing. The place where I currently work does random tests every so often, but that's a government grant issue.
• chwahoo 11y ago
  Can people suggest companies that better balance the factors that I've seen mentioned in this thread: - Provide good pay/benefits - Provide a positive culture for employees - Employees are encouraged to have a life outside work - Are run in such a way that good decisions are made and the company seems headed for continued success - Look good on your resume
• z2a 11y ago
  No one refer the thread? http://redd.it/3ce0s8 http://redd.it/3ce0s8
• anti-shill 11y ago
  as the news about amazon and other similar IT/tech workplaces spreads among the populace, fewer americans will want to work there. So we need more H1b imports to help these wonderful companies continue the growth of their stock prices. This is the true american dream in action. And more immigration will help america grow.
• iradik 11y ago
  I started at Amazon in 2005 and I can definitely say it's an intense place-- I spent most of my 20s at Amazon. Amazon makes you battle-hardened, jaded engineer the longer you are there. There's just no avoiding it. That being said I worked there as long as I did because there were aspects that I did like. For example I think the opportunities there in terms of work / scale are a lot bigger than many other big companies. They are more willing to take risks on people. For example I had no college degree when they hired me. Also there are quite a lot of very smart people working there. So it's not all bad. But intense? Yes.
• Aleman360 11y ago
  Work will set you free.
• amznthrowaway21 11y ago
  Amazonian here. My experience has been nothing like what was described in the article. A few quick hits: -In three years, I have never once seen anyone cry at Amazon. I've never even heard of anyone crying at work. -In re: secret feedback tool -- Note that it isn't anonymous. I know the article doesn't say it is, but "secret feedback" seems to imply it is, at least IMO. It's little more than a form for submitting an email to someone's boss. I've only ever heard of a sabotage attempt happening once, and it backfired as predictably as one would expect. -I remember hearing the phrase "climb the wall" once during my first week at orientation. Reading it in this article was the first time I've heard it in the three years since then. The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff Correct. Good employees do well. Bad employees are eventually weeded out. This was not invented at Amazon. Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover. I legitimately laughed out loud when I read this. Cancer! Miscarriages! Literally the two worst things to ever happen to most people in their lives when they strike! And, of course, not a single shred of evidence to support the claim. Well, unless you count "some workers" as a reliable source.
  • rdtsc 11y ago
    > And, of course, not a single shred of evidence to support the claim. What is your evidence for working as an Amazonian? It is a bit hypocritical to critisize others for lack of "evidence" while posting from a throwaway account, donchathink?
    • amznthrowaway21 11y ago
      Nope. Burden of proof falls on the party making the assertion. The NYT says X, based on no cited sources. When X is challenged, the burden falls to the NYT to prove X, not the person challenging the assertion. The fact that I'm an Amazonian has no bearing on any of that, and is actually little more than a red herring. The fact that I'm posting from a throwaway matters even less.
• nickc181 11y ago
  For those that want to know what Amazon is really like, please read my rebuttal: http://bit.ly/1DWkhgV http://bit.ly/1DWkhgV. It's a long article, but it actually gives you facts and data
  • senderista 11y ago
    Yes, "facts" like denying that OLR actually targets a fixed proportion of employees to be managed out. Who do you think you're fooling? Not anyone who's worked at Amazon.
• andyl 11y ago
  It's so difficult to create a successful software product. Amazon has done it dozens of times. An exceptional record. Many great companies have been driven by intensity and competition. The old days of Microsoft and Intel come to mind. An intense workplace will not appeal to everyone. No surprise. In the civil war, Grant was the first union general to consistently win battles. Politicians complained that Grant drank too much whiskey. Lincoln replied: “Tell me what brand of whiskey Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”
• burlymonster 11y ago
  I worked at Amazon as an intern for 3 months. Super intense work environment that seriously skewed my view of the normal workplace, as it was my first time working at a large company. Heard shouting during meetings behind closed doors. F-Bombs used regularly. Saw lots of 50+ year old engineers with kids working there until 3 am for a week at a time. Even as an intern I was working nights and weekends. A lot of the middle managers went home early at 4pm though. Lots of Indian contractors working their ass of so they don't lose their visas and get kicked out of the US. My mentor was getting so many text messages (thousands) being sent to his phone in the middle of the night while he was on call that he was fighting with Amazon to get them reimbursed.
  • amzn_thrwy_158 11y ago
    I am skeptical about this post. I work at Amazon and we don't have any 50+ year old engineers. (I don't know what happened to them. I assume they either quit for greener pastures, or Jeff Bezos invited them to Day 1 North where he tore out their beating hearts while the S-Team danced wildly to the beat of hellish drums)
    • kome 11y ago
      > I work at Amazon and we don't have any 50+ year old engineers. > I don't know what happened to them. That's creepy.
• kindleguy 11y ago
  Since this is getting a lot of visibility, I would like to ask - How many of you like the e-book reading experience in the Kindle or with the Kindle reader apps on other devices? To me, I hated the high quantity of low quality of work I was doing at Amazon. I worked for Kindle e-books division. Most of the times the product managers were giving random suggestions, and the managers mostly spent time impressing higher level management rather than delivering the best experience for the customer. I felt like being in the midst of a bunch of folks who weren't excited about the e-books space and that they were mostly there because they had a good pay and were able to dance the dance. Internal politics was a big thing and the more I licked my managers boots by answering his midnight calls/mails the more he liked me. Adding even a small feature to enhance the reading experience needed sign-offs from a gazillion teams who would sometimes not agree to just Quality Validate because there wasn't enough time for them. The environment was toxic and no team wanted the other teams to perform well.
  • parasubvert 11y ago
    I find the Kindle ebook layouts are "meh" and miss, so will tend to lean towards iBooks or Kobo when I can lately. PDF is best but tends to be slower to render. Though the vast majority of my e-library is on Kindle. Device wise, I have an old 2nd generation Kindle for beach use but mostly use my iPad and Laptop. The Voyage and latest Paperwhite look interesting but I'd rather have a device that supported EPUB without me jumping through hoops. So I guess I'd say "it's adequate". Early Kindle days I was a brand loyalist, but not these days... probably a mix of quality issues and Amazon's overall monopoly position.
    • kindleguy 11y ago
      Actually nobody cared to ask a majority of users their opinions in what was wrong with Kindle.. Any survey would only be towards a subset of users who like the Kindle because they most likely got it for free from Amazon. This feeds into an ecosystem which gives them the impression that everything is right while in reality, they can do much much better. I hope your comments on layout get enough visibility.
• swehner 11y ago
  Funny - the NYT talking about "big ideas" in the title of the article. It's just an online shopping site ....
• ranman 11y ago
  One datapoint: I worked at AWS and truly enjoyed my job and my manager. I would definitely go back. I think there are some teams that are building very cool stuff with thoughtful managers. Other teams that are mis-managed and poorly co-ordinated (with a lot of redundant people).
• nicegeek 11y ago
  startup is new big fuss ... People making shit load of money from investors . without even making a viable product example: http://siftery.com http://siftery.com
• ex-Amazonian 11y ago
  Worked in AWS DevOps in Dublin, Ireland for 8 months. Totally agree with the article. - 12 - 16 hour days. Conf calls with the States in the middle of the night. Was expected to respond to emails/txt/calls even when not on-call. - Low pay, cr*p health insurance, minimal pension contribution. Cheap PC, dirty, overcrowded office, expected to pay for parking outside of office. - Colleagues never saw their young children. My friend's wife filed for divorce as he was always working. - When my 2nd son was diagnosed with a lethal condition before birth, my boss showed zero tolerance to what i was going through and expected the same level of commitment as before. This was when i decided to leave. Three years on if i have to summarize what AWS felt like i'd say "It's a mad scientist's experiment to find the limits of human beings until a more efficient replacement (drones, robots,etc.) is found."
  • xcs 11y ago
    Shit, I have just being offered to start there on SDE position and I'm considering to reject the proposal after reading the article and many other related opinions on the net.
• race2thebottom 11y ago
  Stock goes up they can play this game, stock goes down everyone bails and the aftermath is hard to recover from since the culture is shit.
• bricss 11y ago
  Hell yes! React is silly
• mwg66 11y ago
  I'm interested what the data shows for workplace productivity and quality (not just quantity) in such an environment. Specifically in engineering, is there not evidence to suggest that longer hours and more pressure does not get more done? (e.g. Peopleware et al)
• mycodebreaks 11y ago
  How do Google, Facebook or Apple compare to Amazon work-culture and balance wise?
  • Apocryphon 11y ago
    This article, and its comments, are worth checking out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994
• twoquestions 11y ago
  Given such brutal firing practices, it seems like there's a lot of ways this could go very, very badly. If you know you're competing against someone for a raise or to keep from getting fired, what's to stop you from paying some thugs to beat the hell out of your competition, slash their tires, or poison their food? I'm morbidly curious when Amazon is going to start threatening promising candidates to work for them rather than paying well (or at all). Imagine the money Jeff could save if he could motivate people with their family's continued safety instead of money!
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• manish_gill 11y ago
  I love how all the Amazon apologists came out to defend their company and criticise any argument against it. They want hard evidence yet completely ignore everything the article says. To counter it, they cite their own anecdotal experience as proof that Amazon's not a bad place to work at all!
• z2a 11y ago
  check the update https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-am.... Quoted from Gizmodo: Gizmodo received the following email from an Amazon representative today: Hi Maddie, I saw that you covered the recent NYT story about Amazon. While we generally do not comment on individual news stories, we quickly saw current Amazon employees react. Here’s an example: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu Could you please include that employee’s rebuttal in your coverage, either in full or in excerpts with a link to the full piece? Thanks, Ty
• staticelf 11y ago
  This is one of the several reasons I would probably never be able to work in the US or for an american company. It is simply too much top-down management, too much stress and bad culture. This description is of course extreme but by my standards (I'm a swede) even what is considered normal i the US is unacceptable for me. I don't know if I simply enjoy the prospects of a nation with a greater view on the work life but I seriously question all americans how you can tolare such an environment as many of you seem to have?
• tribetally 11y ago
  What is Amazon's culture? Find out and add your insight as well: http://www.tribetally.com/tribes/amazon/ http://www.tribetally.com/tribes/amazon/