11 ms·

Let's assume the rants are true for the most part. How is it possible that so many people work for Amazon despite the antics, especially in Seattle where it sho

by cm3 10y ago

Let's assume the rants are true for the most part. How is it possible that so many people work for Amazon despite the antics, especially in Seattle where it should be possible to get a similar job elsewhere. Are there benefits people work towards while coping with the toxic workplace?

exit 10y ago
people have far less freedom in deciding where to work than we fool ourselves into believing
- johnmarius 10y ago
  you mean, amazon is better than whatever other places people could work instead?
  - quantumhobbit 10y ago
    Or they thought it would be better than their previous place and were stuck once there. Or it was the only place to give them an offer. Or the money was too good to pass up despite the abuse. Or they accepted the abuse for the name brand on their resume.
    - exit 10y ago
      this, + a lot of job searching happens in a desperate daze.
    - pascalxus 10y ago
      Or, they have a huge mortgage to pay off and are in danger of losing their house. That'll keep people in an abusive relationship for a long time.
  - ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
    Ex amzn here: most of my ex colleagues agree that claims regarding opportunities for growth and so on are massively exaggerated by managers and HR.
  - VLM 10y ago
    Maybe they're trying to show off how tough they are. Nobody ever made the mistake of thinking military basic training was an all inclusive vacation. Its plausible. In an absolute sense it may be a hellish place to work and the average turnover might for the sake of argument be 6 months. But lets say you have a job hopping stain on the resume and you gut out 9 months of amazon, well, that's fifty percent longer than most survive, that employee must have a cast iron stomach and be a focused dedicated team player, etc etc. Paradoxically Amazon being hell on earth is a benefit in that scenario, obviously you don't want to waste your life on HR nonsense, and if you can prove you're tough in 9 months instead of 2 years, well, thats great. Actually, make working conditions worse at Amazon if at all possible so "tough guys" can prove themselves in only two months instead of the made up 9 months.
  - st3v3r 10y ago
    Well, up until the stories started coming out, Amazon was (and still kind of is) a "big name". So if one of their recruiters comes calling, most people were willing to follow. They'd get their salary and stock golden handcuffs, and by the time they realized the truth, it's too late. You can't leave for a while because of the handcuffs, and what it looks like to leave an employer, especially one like Amazon, within 6 months to a year.
- cm3 10y ago
  I know very well how little of the flexibility exists for most developers around the world, but I explicitly asked how Amazon can be a good opportunity in Seattle. I'm curious what the benefits are, since there are so many negative reports from insiders. There are many companies you'd expect to read similar reports about and don't, so either there's a negative Amazon press union somewhere, maybe those working in warehouses, or Amazon's office workplace is really as bad as people say.
argonaut 10y ago
An ex-Amazon engineer at a top tech company told me he felt that his current colleagues were higher-caliber than his colleagues at Amazon, and that many candidates that were rejected would have been accepted by Amazon. So that's a possible answer. That being said, Amazon is still considered a top tech firm, even if it is a cut below Google/Facebook in prestige. There aren't many tech firms as well-known as Amazon. I can see many fresh grads going to Amazon for 1-2 years just to get it on their resume.
InclinedPlane 10y ago
The median tenure is 1 year at Amazon. Lots of people cycle through there. Though plenty of people stay for a while. They pay alright and it's not too difficult to get hired. Also, when I was working there I had a difficult time reconciling myself to how bad it was to work there. On paper it doesn't seem so bad. You get to work on pretty interesting stuff sometimes, you make good money, typically you only have to work 40 hour work weeks, etc. I convinced myself to walk away from a good chunk of money just in bonuses to get out of there, some people might be able to stick it out longer or find the money harder to leave behind. The problem is that having such a huge portion of the economy being involved in knowledge work is a relatively new thing, and we don't understand the differences between knowledge work and physical work. And especially we don't have thoroughly established standards on what constitute good and bad conditions for knowledge work. We tend to think that sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day is "easy", but it very much is not. A stressful working environment for a knowledge worker is just as bad if not worse than a physical stressful job working extended hours. I only spent a year at Amazon, and most of the time I probably didn't even put in full 40 hour weeks, but I hated it there. In comparison I view the time I spent years ago doing data entry at sometimes up to 70 or 80 hours a week during peak times as comparatively inconsequential. Depending on the team you're on and so forth, working at Amazon can be a painful and stressful experience. Take being on call for example. In theory this isn't so bad, it's good to give devs exposure to how the ops side of things works, and it's in theory good to give them ownership of their own mistakes so that they have incentive to write good code. The problem is, you're not in charge. You're never going to get permission to dump the resources into making everything run well, ever. Most teams have other priorities and they don't have enough resources to spare to allow you to properly fix the code you're responsible for. Worse, it's not even your code, it's code that was written by someone else years ago who also left years ago. And the next person is just going to get whatever mess you leave behind when you leave. So in the average case you can't actually work to improve things, so being on call is going to always be an extra pain, and a significant intrusion into your theoretically off-work life. Worse, it'll push you behind on all the other stuff you need to deliver. Meanwhile, you have all the typical office BS of politics, ranking, bad corporate culture, reorgs, etc. that you have to deal with day to day. Some people manage to find good teams in that mess, and others manage to just turn off whatever makes people care about work and just suffer through it for the paycheck. But for a lot of people, more so the more you care, it'll be a stressful nightmare. And the easiest way to avoid dealing with all those problems is to just leave, which lots of people do.
cloverich 10y ago
I'm sure one factor is its probably relatively easy to get hired there with solid benefits and pay. While we always hear about great paying jobs (etc.) on HN, most people don't look that hard when searching for a new job. If Amazon pops in with everything they want (salary / benefits wise), they may be reluctant to go on that 4th, 8th... 10th interview.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
falseecho 10y ago
I work at Amazon, getting paid just shy of $200k/year. My team spends like 80% of the time doing whatever we think will make the product better. The rest is devoted to operations and handling requests. I don't take my laptop home when I'm not on-call, which isn't that awful. If witnessed half as much fuckery as I see espoused on this site or in the NYT article, I'd finally respond to the google recruiters that hit my inbox weekly. Or idk, maybe start a company, or retire early. I actually enjoy Amazon though. It's an elegant organization that can create product that speaks to the customer, then iterate it to maturity. I imagine in the process of getting where we are today some highly distressed pockets developed and asinine managers got promoted to incompetence, but I haven't witnessed it yet. Also probably helps that a ton of tech companies have popped up offices in Seattle and the demand for engineers is staggering.
- 1024core 10y ago
  Nice try, Jeff Bezos!
- cm3 10y ago
  We don't seem to know what teams the negative reports are from, so may I ask what your division or team is, given your positive experience?
  - falseecho 10y ago
    Supposedly it varies heavily from organization to organization. I work with people from multiple orgs. All of them seem pretty happy. Also, this is probably a violation of some policy which would be a tragic uncuffing of my badass golden handcuffs. Kind of sad that people probably get paid to monitor social media for company image. Probably a good start-up idea there if you squint hard enough and are willing to tolerate a large sales staff with long engagements and a lumpy revenue stream.
    - shostack 10y ago
      Any insight into why specific teams/managers aren't being anonymously named and shamed at this point if it is that bad? Seems almost inevitable at this point.
st3v3r 10y ago
Golden handcuffs.

by cm3 10y ago

exit 10y ago

people have far less freedom in deciding where to work than we fool ourselves into believing

johnmarius 10y ago
you mean, amazon is better than whatever other places people could work instead?
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  Or they thought it would be better than their previous place and were stuck once there. Or it was the only place to give them an offer. Or the money was too good to pass up despite the abuse. Or they accepted the abuse for the name brand on their resume.
  - exit 10y ago
    this, + a lot of job searching happens in a desperate daze.
  - pascalxus 10y ago
    Or, they have a huge mortgage to pay off and are in danger of losing their house. That'll keep people in an abusive relationship for a long time.
- ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
  Ex amzn here: most of my ex colleagues agree that claims regarding opportunities for growth and so on are massively exaggerated by managers and HR.
- VLM 10y ago
  Maybe they're trying to show off how tough they are. Nobody ever made the mistake of thinking military basic training was an all inclusive vacation. Its plausible. In an absolute sense it may be a hellish place to work and the average turnover might for the sake of argument be 6 months. But lets say you have a job hopping stain on the resume and you gut out 9 months of amazon, well, that's fifty percent longer than most survive, that employee must have a cast iron stomach and be a focused dedicated team player, etc etc. Paradoxically Amazon being hell on earth is a benefit in that scenario, obviously you don't want to waste your life on HR nonsense, and if you can prove you're tough in 9 months instead of 2 years, well, thats great. Actually, make working conditions worse at Amazon if at all possible so "tough guys" can prove themselves in only two months instead of the made up 9 months.
- st3v3r 10y ago
  Well, up until the stories started coming out, Amazon was (and still kind of is) a "big name". So if one of their recruiters comes calling, most people were willing to follow. They'd get their salary and stock golden handcuffs, and by the time they realized the truth, it's too late. You can't leave for a while because of the handcuffs, and what it looks like to leave an employer, especially one like Amazon, within 6 months to a year.
cm3 10y ago
I know very well how little of the flexibility exists for most developers around the world, but I explicitly asked how Amazon can be a good opportunity in Seattle. I'm curious what the benefits are, since there are so many negative reports from insiders. There are many companies you'd expect to read similar reports about and don't, so either there's a negative Amazon press union somewhere, maybe those working in warehouses, or Amazon's office workplace is really as bad as people say.

argonaut 10y ago

An ex-Amazon engineer at a top tech company told me he felt that his current colleagues were higher-caliber than his colleagues at Amazon, and that many candidates that were rejected would have been accepted by Amazon. So that's a possible answer. That being said, Amazon is still considered a top tech firm, even if it is a cut below Google/Facebook in prestige. There aren't many tech firms as well-known as Amazon. I can see many fresh grads going to Amazon for 1-2 years just to get it on their resume.

InclinedPlane 10y ago

The median tenure is 1 year at Amazon. Lots of people cycle through there. Though plenty of people stay for a while. They pay alright and it's not too difficult to get hired. Also, when I was working there I had a difficult time reconciling myself to how bad it was to work there. On paper it doesn't seem so bad. You get to work on pretty interesting stuff sometimes, you make good money, typically you only have to work 40 hour work weeks, etc. I convinced myself to walk away from a good chunk of money just in bonuses to get out of there, some people might be able to stick it out longer or find the money harder to leave behind. The problem is that having such a huge portion of the economy being involved in knowledge work is a relatively new thing, and we don't understand the differences between knowledge work and physical work. And especially we don't have thoroughly established standards on what constitute good and bad conditions for knowledge work. We tend to think that sitting in a chair for 8 hours a day is "easy", but it very much is not. A stressful working environment for a knowledge worker is just as bad if not worse than a physical stressful job working extended hours. I only spent a year at Amazon, and most of the time I probably didn't even put in full 40 hour weeks, but I hated it there. In comparison I view the time I spent years ago doing data entry at sometimes up to 70 or 80 hours a week during peak times as comparatively inconsequential. Depending on the team you're on and so forth, working at Amazon can be a painful and stressful experience. Take being on call for example. In theory this isn't so bad, it's good to give devs exposure to how the ops side of things works, and it's in theory good to give them ownership of their own mistakes so that they have incentive to write good code. The problem is, you're not in charge. You're never going to get permission to dump the resources into making everything run well, ever. Most teams have other priorities and they don't have enough resources to spare to allow you to properly fix the code you're responsible for. Worse, it's not even your code, it's code that was written by someone else years ago who also left years ago. And the next person is just going to get whatever mess you leave behind when you leave. So in the average case you can't actually work to improve things, so being on call is going to always be an extra pain, and a significant intrusion into your theoretically off-work life. Worse, it'll push you behind on all the other stuff you need to deliver. Meanwhile, you have all the typical office BS of politics, ranking, bad corporate culture, reorgs, etc. that you have to deal with day to day. Some people manage to find good teams in that mess, and others manage to just turn off whatever makes people care about work and just suffer through it for the paycheck. But for a lot of people, more so the more you care, it'll be a stressful nightmare. And the easiest way to avoid dealing with all those problems is to just leave, which lots of people do.

cloverich 10y ago

I'm sure one factor is its probably relatively easy to get hired there with solid benefits and pay. While we always hear about great paying jobs (etc.) on HN, most people don't look that hard when searching for a new job. If Amazon pops in with everything they want (salary / benefits wise), they may be reluctant to go on that 4th, 8th... 10th interview.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

falseecho 10y ago

I work at Amazon, getting paid just shy of $200k/year. My team spends like 80% of the time doing whatever we think will make the product better. The rest is devoted to operations and handling requests. I don't take my laptop home when I'm not on-call, which isn't that awful. If witnessed half as much fuckery as I see espoused on this site or in the NYT article, I'd finally respond to the google recruiters that hit my inbox weekly. Or idk, maybe start a company, or retire early. I actually enjoy Amazon though. It's an elegant organization that can create product that speaks to the customer, then iterate it to maturity. I imagine in the process of getting where we are today some highly distressed pockets developed and asinine managers got promoted to incompetence, but I haven't witnessed it yet. Also probably helps that a ton of tech companies have popped up offices in Seattle and the demand for engineers is staggering.

1024core 10y ago
Nice try, Jeff Bezos!
cm3 10y ago
We don't seem to know what teams the negative reports are from, so may I ask what your division or team is, given your positive experience?
- falseecho 10y ago
  Supposedly it varies heavily from organization to organization. I work with people from multiple orgs. All of them seem pretty happy. Also, this is probably a violation of some policy which would be a tragic uncuffing of my badass golden handcuffs. Kind of sad that people probably get paid to monitor social media for company image. Probably a good start-up idea there if you squint hard enough and are willing to tolerate a large sales staff with long engagements and a lumpy revenue stream.
  - shostack 10y ago
    Any insight into why specific teams/managers aren't being anonymously named and shamed at this point if it is that bad? Seems almost inevitable at this point.

st3v3r 10y ago

Golden handcuffs.