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I've heard comments from a dozen ex-Amazon employees on HN, in this thread and in the one back on the original NY Times article. The large majority of them said
by cwilkes 11y ago
I've heard comments from a dozen ex-Amazon employees on HN, in this thread and in the one back on the original NY Times article. The large majority of them said the anecdotes described by the article were unrepresentative of their time at Amazon.
Shouldn't that point to a problem of the HN crowd being homogeneous/type-A personalities and not representative of what most people see at Amazon?
- jessriedel 11y agoOf course the HN crowd is not a perfect sample. But why on Earth would you think the NYTimes reporters, who are trying to write a compelling article, are more likely to get an unbiased sampling of Amazon employees than a sampling of the commentators on HN, who have nothing to gain?
- cjbprime 11y agoAlternative theory: the people commenting on HN are software engineers, who are treated better than average at Amazon because it is very easy for them to go work somewhere else. I don't think any of the employees mentioned in the NYT article worked in software. It looks to me like the NYT found a statistically significant set of experiences that they wrote about while acknowledging that not everyone at Amazon would have these experiences.