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I'm 1000% in support of work-life balance, and of employers treating employees as humans. But given that the Amazon that I worked at for a year and a half (in

I'm 1000% in support of work-life balance, and of employers treating employees as humans. But given that the Amazon that I worked at for a year and a half (in the AWS tree) emphasized work-life balance, and among the dozens of workers I knew personally, none had complaints anything like the one in the article (or the many in the previous Amazon-is-evil article) I do wonder about the other examples given. Bezos sent out an email company-wide after the story about the stillborn child broke and said that is not something that should ever happen at Amazon, and to email him personally if anything like that ever happens again. I also have reports from an Apple employee who has worked there for years that he's not particularly overworked, and that he has plenty of time to spend with his family. All of the referenced companies are big. In any big company you'll have pockets of crappy management. It's no more fair to describe the company culture based on the experience of an individual than it is to describe a human culture based on the actions of an individual. That said, I'm sure there are companies where the culture is cutthroat all the way down. But I'm also sure that trait is not confined to tech start-ups -- and I would hope that the trait isn't highly correlated with company success.

gue5t 11y ago
Corporations aren't monoliths, but that's no excuse for the toxic situations known to fester in pockets of mismanagement. If these situations are inevitable in big companies, we'll have to dissolve big companies to get an ethical industry. Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line. The tech industry seems to think some kind of positivist exceptionalism frees them from worrying about sustainability, and I think venture capital is a significant negative influence there.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  > Corporations aren't monoliths, but that's no excuse for the toxic situations known to fester in pockets of mismanagement. If these situations are inevitable in big companies, we'll have to dissolve big companies to get an ethical industry. Why can't we take the mechanisms that work for groups of small companies and apply them to divisions of a corporation? It's a recursive structure either way, regardless how you name it, so maybe we could just copy parts of what works from the small world to the big world? > Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line. We'd have to figure out how to run the economy on ethics. So far the term everything is optimized for is measured in dollars. Being nice doesn't pay the rent, doesn't pay for food and doesn't let you send your kids to college. Morality doesn't buy widget parts, doesn't tool factories and doesn't help CEOs get their private jets. I used to have this sentiment that "money shouldn't be above people, wake up CEOs and managers, be human beings!" but I don't believe anymore that it reflects the true state of the world. The incentive structures are too strong, you can shout in the wind all they want, CEOs and managers and politicians will agree, and things won't change anyway, because we're all in too deep serving Moloch[0]. It's not that people don't care - they just don't have as much agency as they think they do. That's the reason I think concepts like automation of industry while switching to something UBI-like are important, because relieving the pressure in the system, letting everyone chill the fuck out, seems to be a good way to reduce the amount of suffering we inflict on each other in pursuit of money. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
mistermann 11y ago
> Bezos sent out an email company-wide after the story about the stillborn child broke and said that is not something that should ever happen at Amazon, and to email him personally if anything like that ever happens again. I've worked at places where <some other things that some people would consider inappropriate and are definitely contrary to the written ethical standards of the company> occurred, and if they received enough publicity then certainly an email like that would go out. But until then, the same people (whose responsibility it would be to have their name put at the bottom of such an email) are happy to continue to personally engage in the inappropriate behavior if it serves their career. I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't personally put a lot of faith in such correspondence.
mahyarm 11y ago
At big companies, your team & manager matters a lot more than the company itself. One engineering team can be a bunch of 9-5ers, and another team 2 floors down can be a bunch of 9-9ers. The engineers can work decent hours, but the recruiters are treated as disposable.
mahyarm 11y ago
At big companies, your team & manager matters a lot more than the company itself. One engineering team can be a bunch of 9-5ers, and another team 2 floors down can be a bunch of 9-9ers. The engineers can work decent hours, but the recruiters are treated as disposable.
InclinedPlane 11y ago
It's sad that the amazon work environment kerflufle started from an article that was so flawed and focused on the wrong things. The "work life balance" at amazon isn't as horrid as it could be but it's not good. There's more to a good work environment than simply avoiding horrendous overwork. Amazon has a lot of very serious problems including a toxic company culture that treats people like cogs. I've known a lot of people who have worked at Amazon in many different areas (including myself) and the overarching story is one of people who have not been happy and left quickly. There are some exceptions in specific groups and teams but the overall situation is very problematic and is a big competitive disadvantage for the company (though it's not obvious yet because they have so few capable competitors).
- kabdib 11y ago
  "Leaving quickly" seems to be common. The guy I'm sitting next to spent two years at Amazon (he left there a year ago) and said that at 18 months he was one of the longest employed in his group. I don't know how you get any semblance of a team with that kind of turnover.
  - SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
    The way my offer worked, at the end of the first year some stock grants vest come due, and I would end up working for less money per-month for the next year unless I stayed for my next stock grant a year later. I am not generally happy working in a corporate environment, but that's more about me than about Amazon in particular (I prefer being an entrepreneur; that's why I read HN). And I wasn't willing to work for another full year, even though the compensation was amazing. But it wasn't because of poor working conditions; instead it was pretty standard fare for big corporate salary jobs, like not being able to work on my own projects in my free time without restriction. After one year as a full employee I was deluged with job offers from just about every other major company. I'm sure many of them would have offered to increase my compensation. I said no to all of them because I wanted to go back to consulting. I assume that after your second year, you probably get a similar set of offers. A typical employee in AWS sticks around for about 2 years. But at the same time, tenure at tech companies is getting short just about everywhere these days -- and I knew people in my group who had been at Amazon for 4-5 years. My own personal tenure at companies rarely exceeds two years, with one exception where I stayed for nearly six. So again, I don't see how Amazon is terribly different on this axis. One of the most annoying things at Amazon is the "on call" policy where all developers need to put in time "on call", which includes answering a pager in the middle of the night, sometimes for poorly designed alarms that are poorly documented. I knew one developer who quit, with no notice, right after the first week he'd been on call. The frustrating thing about it was that my team did client work: Android, iOS, and Windows clients for an AWS service, so none of us knew the first thing about how to fix anything on the server side, so it was particularly painful to be put on call. So no, not everything is perfect, and I'm sure that some managers are downright awful. But not everything is "Work harder! Damn your family!" and "We'll be watching your performance after having a personal tragedy strike!" either, which is what the articles imply. I did really feel that if I'd seen something like that I could have taken it to HR and it would have been addressed.
Apocryphon 11y ago
How many other Apple anecdotes do you have? It's a huge company, secrecy is notorious, and experiences will vary.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  My point exactly. Experiences will vary, and one experience can't be used to extrapolate over the whole company. Which is what the articles are doing.

gue5t 11y ago

Corporations aren't monoliths, but that's no excuse for the toxic situations known to fester in pockets of mismanagement. If these situations are inevitable in big companies, we'll have to dissolve big companies to get an ethical industry. Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line. The tech industry seems to think some kind of positivist exceptionalism frees them from worrying about sustainability, and I think venture capital is a significant negative influence there.

TeMPOraL 11y ago
> Corporations aren't monoliths, but that's no excuse for the toxic situations known to fester in pockets of mismanagement. If these situations are inevitable in big companies, we'll have to dissolve big companies to get an ethical industry. Why can't we take the mechanisms that work for groups of small companies and apply them to divisions of a corporation? It's a recursive structure either way, regardless how you name it, so maybe we could just copy parts of what works from the small world to the big world? > Ethics should be a higher priority than profit. Companies should focus on having sustainable business models that support their employees while helping their customers, rather than taking advantage of both groups to drive the bottom line. We'd have to figure out how to run the economy on ethics. So far the term everything is optimized for is measured in dollars. Being nice doesn't pay the rent, doesn't pay for food and doesn't let you send your kids to college. Morality doesn't buy widget parts, doesn't tool factories and doesn't help CEOs get their private jets. I used to have this sentiment that "money shouldn't be above people, wake up CEOs and managers, be human beings!" but I don't believe anymore that it reflects the true state of the world. The incentive structures are too strong, you can shout in the wind all they want, CEOs and managers and politicians will agree, and things won't change anyway, because we're all in too deep serving Moloch[0]. It's not that people don't care - they just don't have as much agency as they think they do. That's the reason I think concepts like automation of industry while switching to something UBI-like are important, because relieving the pressure in the system, letting everyone chill the fuck out, seems to be a good way to reduce the amount of suffering we inflict on each other in pursuit of money. [0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/ http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/

mistermann 11y ago

> Bezos sent out an email company-wide after the story about the stillborn child broke and said that is not something that should ever happen at Amazon, and to email him personally if anything like that ever happens again. I've worked at places where <some other things that some people would consider inappropriate and are definitely contrary to the written ethical standards of the company> occurred, and if they received enough publicity then certainly an email like that would go out. But until then, the same people (whose responsibility it would be to have their name put at the bottom of such an email) are happy to continue to personally engage in the inappropriate behavior if it serves their career. I guess what I'm saying is, I wouldn't personally put a lot of faith in such correspondence.

mahyarm 11y ago

At big companies, your team & manager matters a lot more than the company itself. One engineering team can be a bunch of 9-5ers, and another team 2 floors down can be a bunch of 9-9ers. The engineers can work decent hours, but the recruiters are treated as disposable.

mahyarm 11y ago

InclinedPlane 11y ago

It's sad that the amazon work environment kerflufle started from an article that was so flawed and focused on the wrong things. The "work life balance" at amazon isn't as horrid as it could be but it's not good. There's more to a good work environment than simply avoiding horrendous overwork. Amazon has a lot of very serious problems including a toxic company culture that treats people like cogs. I've known a lot of people who have worked at Amazon in many different areas (including myself) and the overarching story is one of people who have not been happy and left quickly. There are some exceptions in specific groups and teams but the overall situation is very problematic and is a big competitive disadvantage for the company (though it's not obvious yet because they have so few capable competitors).

kabdib 11y ago
"Leaving quickly" seems to be common. The guy I'm sitting next to spent two years at Amazon (he left there a year ago) and said that at 18 months he was one of the longest employed in his group. I don't know how you get any semblance of a team with that kind of turnover.
- SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
  The way my offer worked, at the end of the first year some stock grants vest come due, and I would end up working for less money per-month for the next year unless I stayed for my next stock grant a year later. I am not generally happy working in a corporate environment, but that's more about me than about Amazon in particular (I prefer being an entrepreneur; that's why I read HN). And I wasn't willing to work for another full year, even though the compensation was amazing. But it wasn't because of poor working conditions; instead it was pretty standard fare for big corporate salary jobs, like not being able to work on my own projects in my free time without restriction. After one year as a full employee I was deluged with job offers from just about every other major company. I'm sure many of them would have offered to increase my compensation. I said no to all of them because I wanted to go back to consulting. I assume that after your second year, you probably get a similar set of offers. A typical employee in AWS sticks around for about 2 years. But at the same time, tenure at tech companies is getting short just about everywhere these days -- and I knew people in my group who had been at Amazon for 4-5 years. My own personal tenure at companies rarely exceeds two years, with one exception where I stayed for nearly six. So again, I don't see how Amazon is terribly different on this axis. One of the most annoying things at Amazon is the "on call" policy where all developers need to put in time "on call", which includes answering a pager in the middle of the night, sometimes for poorly designed alarms that are poorly documented. I knew one developer who quit, with no notice, right after the first week he'd been on call. The frustrating thing about it was that my team did client work: Android, iOS, and Windows clients for an AWS service, so none of us knew the first thing about how to fix anything on the server side, so it was particularly painful to be put on call. So no, not everything is perfect, and I'm sure that some managers are downright awful. But not everything is "Work harder! Damn your family!" and "We'll be watching your performance after having a personal tragedy strike!" either, which is what the articles imply. I did really feel that if I'd seen something like that I could have taken it to HR and it would have been addressed.

Apocryphon 11y ago

How many other Apple anecdotes do you have? It's a huge company, secrecy is notorious, and experiences will vary.

SomeCallMeTim 11y ago
My point exactly. Experiences will vary, and one experience can't be used to extrapolate over the whole company. Which is what the articles are doing.