12 ms·

Jeff Bezos’ guide to life

161 points by yarapavan 9y ago

factsaresacred 9y ago
Well that was a waste of three minutes. Felt as if I was reading a child's "10 awesome things about my favoritest CEO" homework assignment. I expected at least a little insight. Building your own crane (how long does that take?!) as opposed to paying somebody a modest sum to help you move heavy objects is not a good lesson.
- mathgeek 9y ago
  Amazon built their own crane back when no one had cranes. You can't just build an online book store today and expect it to snowball into any business you choose to build a new crane for.
dokein 9y ago
I was excited to read this, but didn't find any useful insights. Just the typical 1-2 childhood stories extrapolated to "success" and some superficial comments on work-life balance.
- k__ 9y ago
  Yes, utter crap. Some guy got lucky, nothing else...
  - davidw 9y ago
    Luck plays a role, but it's not the difference between some guy being Jeff Bezos and working at McDonalds. It's probably more of the difference between being successful in a way that many are - maybe owning a local company or something like that - and having something that blows up like Amazon has.
    - Barrin92 9y ago
      I'd argue the reverse is the case. Between someone like Jeff Bezos and someone working at McDonalds, without disrespecting the latter as there's nothing wrong with it, is not luck but education, aptitude and so forth. But I have trouble seeing the substantial difference between Jeff Bezos and one of his dozens of colleagues at his former job. Many people tried to open online businesses like this, and often it came down to very specific moments in time where the circumstances, the money, the people applying to your company specifically and so on all checked out. And there's really no or very little control you have about this.
      - k__ 9y ago
        That's what I mean. Success is one thing, but Amazon level success is completly different.
      - davidw 9y ago
        As far as I can tell, you're arguing the same thing I am. There are a bunch of people like him who are pretty successful people; quite a few who are very successful, but what separates him from them is probably due to some good luck on his part.
  - khazhoux 9y ago
    It wasn't luck. But his stories mirrors thousands of failures, making any advice/insight useless.
- adamnemecek 9y ago
  Are you inspired yet? /s
- dogruck 9y ago
  He actually dispenses the idea with work-life balance. That’s different than “superficial comments on work-life balance.”
  - hinkley 9y ago
    I’ve met a couple people who quit Amazon in under a month. One saw a poster that said, “work harder, smarter, or faster. But you can’t pick just two” Like Microsoft, the cultural foundation is masochistic bullshit. They’ll never unwind that. And if that’s the only way to be rich then I’ll settle for successful and call it a day.
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Don't work there then... everyone has their own preferences. The moral judgements seem silly.
      - majewsky 9y ago
        It'd be fun to do a long-time study to see if working at highly competitive places like Amazon increases mortality rates among employees.
        dogruck 9y ago
        Bezos advocates an alternative perspective, which I think you missed. Don’t view work as a necessary evil that you must cope with and minimize. Instead, embrace it as a core aspect of life. Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work.
        krapp 9y ago
        > Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work. That's nonsense, though, and it's coming from a man whose company will push employees into 60 hour weeks for arbitrary lengths of time, often with little forewarning, because they expect work to be personal life, because "customer obsession."
- manigandham 9y ago
  These stories are all the same but people like to read them, the entire self-help industry is based on this. All the major advice is already common sense.
- hkmurakami 9y ago
  Imo his regret minimization framework and work/life harmony are legitimately worth thinking about. I've personally experienced the "unhappy/bored at work -> bad at home" connection in my life.
m52go 9y ago
I like the parenting part: he let his kids use sharp knives at 4yo because if they hurt themselves, they'd learn. "I'd much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid." I love the idea in theory...but really wonder if I'd have the guts to actually pull off something like that in real life.
- WA 9y ago
  It’s stupid, because your kid might lack the motor skills to handle a knife.
- dazc 9y ago
  When I was a child it was normal to play with knives, go off somewhere without telling your parents and even play in the road. Of all the people I knew back then I'm pretty sure they all survived into adulthood? The only thing that has changed really is that roads are a lot busier nowadays so you may be forgiven for exercising some caution with that one.
  - johnchristopher 9y ago
    Yeah, well. I grew up in the countryside. Recently spent some months back there. Connected with some people from kindergarten and primary school. I learned 6 people from back then died driving their car too fast when about 18~20. Edit: I also remember two kids burn down the house of one of their parents, playing with matches. I hope they are resourceful now because that one put the parents in a very difficult position.
  - AJ007 9y ago
    A usual Sunday afternoon for me as a young child was to cut pieces of wood with a pocket knife until I cut myself. Then I would go to my bedroom and read a book. I may or may not have learned anything.
  - cwilkes 9y ago
    I think that is literally survivorship bias.
coldtea 9y ago
Is "treat your lowest paid employees like dirt" and "if people are desperate and really need the job, as long as you employ them you don't need to treat them humanely" part of it? How about "If you are a rich owner you can safely distance yourself from lower management that does 'whatever it takes' to keep profits up and play the ignorance card"? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-accused-of-intolerable-conditions-at-scottish-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-ac... http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-single-bad-job-youve-ever-had-amazon-workers-warning-for-australia/news-story/238103f9c15052a1957c8d600b2af54a http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-s... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/amazons-jobs-creation-plan-comes-amid-labor-pains/96488166/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/ama... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon-brutal-work-culture https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon... http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-warehouses-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...
- QAPereo 9y ago
  “Be a high functioning sociopath” seems like it might save time... Edit: It might also offend, but it's hard to contextualize the behavior of humanity’s apex predators without resorting to models of/like sociopathy. If you have a better model to offer which preserves their humanity in some way, and just paints them as incredibly ideological, deluded, etc, I'd be open to that.
  - golemotron 9y ago
    Here's a better context. Primate groups label and shun members who fall out of line. When they do that you can get a better idea of what's happening by ignoring the labels and looking at situation of the ones doing the labeling.
    - QAPereo 9y ago
      That’s one hell of a diversion.
dogruck 9y ago
That was a nice summary — sounds like a great, insightful interview. The inevitable congestive dissonance in readers’ responses never cease to amuse me. Starts with, “wow, yeah, Bezos is a legend. I’d love some insight into what makes him tick, so I can be more like him!!” Then we quickly get to: 1. Oh, no way would I risk my child losing a finger! 2. Hey, work-life balance is important! It’s bad to work so much! 3. Maybe Bezos can focus on one task at a time — serial multi-tasker — but that’s not how I work!
5_minutes 9y ago
Millionaires advice about life, and for us normal people, hoping to get something out of it is like counting on the lottery to have a good life.
gallerdude 9y ago
I like the bit about how Pop would do everything himself. I think it's a huge skill just to realize how approachable things are. Especially with the increasing potentiality that the digital era gives us, it's important to have big ideas and go for them in smart & pragmatic ways.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  I once hired a plumber to make some repairs around the house. Curious, and not knowing anything about plumbing, I watched what he did. Then I got an enormous bill. Nothing he did seemed particularly hard, and since then I do plumbing repairs myself.
patkai 9y ago
It's interesting that we tend to ask for advice from rich people. Once I've heard a very annoyed George Soros saying in an interview - CNN or similar - that "you got me here not because I know stuff but because I'm rich".
- gist 9y ago
  As a very very general and rough rule the fact is someone like Soros or for that matter someone who is just famous or even niche famous will hang around with a different group of people and be exposed to things that normal people are not and do not have access to. Of course there are a ton of exceptions but the fact is if you are Soros (or Jobs or Bezos or Jack Welch (GE)) you simply have access to a group of people that aren't available to an ordinary person. Even take, say, Paul Graham or Sam Altman. They can reach out to anyone in the YC family and I would imagine get a very fast and motivated response and extra effort. Or for that matter anyone in the startup world who is familiar with who they are or what they do. There is no way anyone will convince me that isn't a very large advantage in either gaining information or access. And that information and access does mean something they are (in theory) better informed. Of course Soros is on CNN because he is rich and known. But the truth is what he says people will take seriously more so than if CNN interviewed the local head of a 100 or 200 person manufacturing company.
- WalterBright 9y ago
  It stands to reason that a rich person would know more about how to make money than a poor person, unless you believe it is totally random. Similarly, if I was interested in an athletic career, I'd be interested to hear from a gold medal champion more than from someone who is out of breath going to the mailbox.
  - dlp211 9y ago
    I don't think it's totally random, but I don't think that rich people have some unknown knowledge or quality that allowed them to become rich. Plenty of rich people are rich because of circumstance, others, because they were in the right place at the right time with the right knowledge.
martin1975 9y ago
Work life balance and Amazon ... sounds a bit ironic, but having worked there for a year, if you're at Amazon or thinking about working at Amazon, I want to leave you with one big, massive piece of advice - if you don't know how to say "no", Amazon isn't the place for you. What do I mean by this? Amazon has an infinite amount of work they will gladly load you up with - on-call duty, maintaining legacy stuff and doing new projects. If you don't know how to carve out your boundaries, you're going to be in a world of hurt at Amazon, get demoralized very quickly and either get axed after a bad review (like me) or you're going to quit or worse, stay miserable and go gray before your time. Another tidbit of advice my boss - who also no longer is there - gave me, is you have to be a dick to succeed at Amazon. I'll just leave you with that before you choose to surrender to the cult of Bezos.
- 3pt14159 9y ago
  Disclosure: Financially impacted by both Amazon and Apple. I know it's ironic to be in a position where I'm criticizing Amazon whilst owning shares, but I'm not the only one making decisions in my family's investment company. Honestly other than Alexa, Amazon is such an underwhelming company. Even AWS is completely overhyped and there are other products out there with betters interfaces (GUIs, APIs, and CLIs) and cheaper prices. Even S3 is a complete chore to work with and it's their simplest product. I buy books and a couple knicknacks off of Amazon and I've semi-enjoyed one show they produced (Alpha House). But the list of things they've done to piss me off is getting pretty long: 1. Sex toys in "recent purchases". Thanks guys, because what I wanted was to have my conservative family members have a view into my sex life. I'm bi and semi-closeted, so this is even worse than you're probably imagining. 2. I've never had a more frustrating CLI than the one I had to interact with from Amazon for AWS. It was right during the transition to a new, better CLI, but that also just meant that the one I was using had wrong documentation. It literally took me 100 times longer than a couple DigitalOcean API calls would have run me. 3. Chinese crap. I went travelling with a motion activated camera that would SMS me if there was motion in my Airbnb room. Of course the motion camera didn't work for more than 3 minutes. Crashed constantly, etc. Then when I appealed for a refund the company listed on Amazon gave me $2. Right, thanks guys, I paid way more than that but it got around whatever refund system Amazon had in place because I couldn't escalate it any further. Don't even get me started on the fake knockoffs for sale all across the store. It's turning into Ebay with all these fly by night stores. I could honestly go on much, much longer. This isn't just a product of me having had such a long relationship with the company, I've had just as long of a relationship with Apple and the only thing they do to piss me off is their constant slowness at their stores. The products themselves are great. And I pin all the blame for this on the stupid Amazon philosophy where people have to be dicks to succeed at Amazon.
dreamdu5t 9y ago
What a bunch of self selected myths. Jeff Bezos isn’t a sociopath and he isn’t Superman, he’s a clueless fucking human being like the rest of us. He’s not special, he hasn’t “figured it all out” and he doesn’t have some secret others lack. His shit stinks and I bet he can’t even make an omelette. Stop this cargo cult of CEO celebrity worship.
- HappyDeveloper 9y ago
  Yes, but somehow he has started an empire that ships thousands of packages every day and allows people to easily shop online. He might not be bright, but he did something right. Something that others didn't want to take the leap to do.
  - candiodari 9y ago
    He did do something right. Mail order was always more expensive than shops, but Amazon wasn't ... Why not ? Sales Tax Evasion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/03/27/tax-free-no-more-amazon-to-begin-collecting-sales-tax-nationwide-on-april-1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/03/27/tax... That is the only reason Amazon was ever price competitive. Without that, it wouldn't have grown. That's his great accomplishment. Not just abusing workers, not just treating low paid employees like dirt, constantly firing the most vulnerable just to keep them down, and not just hiding from criticism on those actions [1], but also abusing the country as a whole, through massive scale tax evasion. Jeff Bezos truly has something to be proud of ! [1] http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_amazon_wo.php http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_am...
- richardthered 9y ago
  Human? I thought he was a "hyper-intelligent alien with a tangential interest in human affairs." :) https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV... Of course, he is also one of the richest people on the planet...
Applejinx 9y ago
"Jeff’s Pop once tore the top of his thumb off. He had tried to jump out of his moving truck and unlatch the farm’s gate before the car slid through" Jeff's Pop was a loony, but extremely characteristic of what Amazon became. Guy couldn't stop his TRUCK long enough to open a gate for that same truck to go through? That's an… unusual attitude to driving a truck.
jscholes 9y ago
> If he feels like he’s adding value and is a productive member of a team at work, “it makes me better at home. The constant switching in and out of first person quotations in this article is weird and off-putting.
HappyDeveloper 9y ago
The raising kids part was interesting and took me a bit off guard, but I do like his view on regrets. Look for to 80 years old and think what you can do to minimize your regrets!
gtcode 9y ago
Amazon is, based on my direct experience, on the list of companies partaking in some level of social shenanigans against US citizens, not completely dissimilar from folks who have overtaken content here on HN, and have done so on reddit in the past. Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one. This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.
dmitrygr 9y ago
Possessives in English only get a single apostrophe at the end if they are plural. "Besos" is not plural.
- grzm 9y ago
  It's definitely not a settled issue. > "Proper Nouns Ending in S" > "AP: Add an apostrophe." > "Charlaine Harris’ books" > "the Joneses’ competition" > "Chicago: Add apostrophe-s if singular, and add an apostrophe if plural." > "Socrates’s tea" > "the Obamas’ garden" > "Les’s moor" http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-forming.html http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-fo... > "Nouns, noun phrases, and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix 's (or in some cases just by adding an apostrophe to an existing s)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive
scrpn 9y ago
Is funny that Bezos speaks about work-life balance.

161 points by yarapavan 9y ago

Well that was a waste of three minutes. Felt as if I was reading a child's "10 awesome things about my favoritest CEO" homework assignment. I expected at least a little insight. Building your own crane (how long does that take?!) as opposed to paying somebody a modest sum to help you move heavy objects is not a good lesson.

mathgeek 9y ago
Amazon built their own crane back when no one had cranes. You can't just build an online book store today and expect it to snowball into any business you choose to build a new crane for.

dokein 9y ago

I was excited to read this, but didn't find any useful insights. Just the typical 1-2 childhood stories extrapolated to "success" and some superficial comments on work-life balance.

k__ 9y ago
Yes, utter crap. Some guy got lucky, nothing else...
- davidw 9y ago
  Luck plays a role, but it's not the difference between some guy being Jeff Bezos and working at McDonalds. It's probably more of the difference between being successful in a way that many are - maybe owning a local company or something like that - and having something that blows up like Amazon has.
  - Barrin92 9y ago
    I'd argue the reverse is the case. Between someone like Jeff Bezos and someone working at McDonalds, without disrespecting the latter as there's nothing wrong with it, is not luck but education, aptitude and so forth. But I have trouble seeing the substantial difference between Jeff Bezos and one of his dozens of colleagues at his former job. Many people tried to open online businesses like this, and often it came down to very specific moments in time where the circumstances, the money, the people applying to your company specifically and so on all checked out. And there's really no or very little control you have about this.
    - k__ 9y ago
      That's what I mean. Success is one thing, but Amazon level success is completly different.
    - davidw 9y ago
      As far as I can tell, you're arguing the same thing I am. There are a bunch of people like him who are pretty successful people; quite a few who are very successful, but what separates him from them is probably due to some good luck on his part.
- khazhoux 9y ago
  It wasn't luck. But his stories mirrors thousands of failures, making any advice/insight useless.
adamnemecek 9y ago
Are you inspired yet? /s
dogruck 9y ago
He actually dispenses the idea with work-life balance. That’s different than “superficial comments on work-life balance.”
- hinkley 9y ago
  I’ve met a couple people who quit Amazon in under a month. One saw a poster that said, “work harder, smarter, or faster. But you can’t pick just two” Like Microsoft, the cultural foundation is masochistic bullshit. They’ll never unwind that. And if that’s the only way to be rich then I’ll settle for successful and call it a day.
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Don't work there then... everyone has their own preferences. The moral judgements seem silly.
    - majewsky 9y ago
      It'd be fun to do a long-time study to see if working at highly competitive places like Amazon increases mortality rates among employees.
      - dogruck 9y ago
        Bezos advocates an alternative perspective, which I think you missed. Don’t view work as a necessary evil that you must cope with and minimize. Instead, embrace it as a core aspect of life. Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work.
        krapp 9y ago
        > Let work elevate your personal life, and let your personal life elevate work. That's nonsense, though, and it's coming from a man whose company will push employees into 60 hour weeks for arbitrary lengths of time, often with little forewarning, because they expect work to be personal life, because "customer obsession."
manigandham 9y ago
These stories are all the same but people like to read them, the entire self-help industry is based on this. All the major advice is already common sense.
hkmurakami 9y ago
Imo his regret minimization framework and work/life harmony are legitimately worth thinking about. I've personally experienced the "unhappy/bored at work -> bad at home" connection in my life.

m52go 9y ago

I like the parenting part: he let his kids use sharp knives at 4yo because if they hurt themselves, they'd learn. "I'd much rather have a kid with nine fingers than a resourceless kid." I love the idea in theory...but really wonder if I'd have the guts to actually pull off something like that in real life.

WA 9y ago
It’s stupid, because your kid might lack the motor skills to handle a knife.
dazc 9y ago
When I was a child it was normal to play with knives, go off somewhere without telling your parents and even play in the road. Of all the people I knew back then I'm pretty sure they all survived into adulthood? The only thing that has changed really is that roads are a lot busier nowadays so you may be forgiven for exercising some caution with that one.
- johnchristopher 9y ago
  Yeah, well. I grew up in the countryside. Recently spent some months back there. Connected with some people from kindergarten and primary school. I learned 6 people from back then died driving their car too fast when about 18~20. Edit: I also remember two kids burn down the house of one of their parents, playing with matches. I hope they are resourceful now because that one put the parents in a very difficult position.
- AJ007 9y ago
  A usual Sunday afternoon for me as a young child was to cut pieces of wood with a pocket knife until I cut myself. Then I would go to my bedroom and read a book. I may or may not have learned anything.
- cwilkes 9y ago
  I think that is literally survivorship bias.

coldtea 9y ago

Is "treat your lowest paid employees like dirt" and "if people are desperate and really need the job, as long as you employ them you don't need to treat them humanely" part of it? How about "If you are a rich owner you can safely distance yourself from lower management that does 'whatever it takes' to keep profits up and play the ignorance card"? https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-accused-of-intolerable-conditions-at-scottish-warehouse https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/11/amazon-ac... http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-single-bad-job-youve-ever-had-amazon-workers-warning-for-australia/news-story/238103f9c15052a1957c8d600b2af54a http://www.news.com.au/finance/work/at-work/its-like-every-s... https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/amazons-jobs-creation-plan-comes-amid-labor-pains/96488166/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/columnist/2017/01/13/ama... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon-brutal-work-culture https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/22/amazon... http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-warehouses-2013-8 http://www.businessinsider.com/brutal-conditions-in-amazons-...

QAPereo 9y ago
“Be a high functioning sociopath” seems like it might save time... Edit: It might also offend, but it's hard to contextualize the behavior of humanity’s apex predators without resorting to models of/like sociopathy. If you have a better model to offer which preserves their humanity in some way, and just paints them as incredibly ideological, deluded, etc, I'd be open to that.
- golemotron 9y ago
  Here's a better context. Primate groups label and shun members who fall out of line. When they do that you can get a better idea of what's happening by ignoring the labels and looking at situation of the ones doing the labeling.
  - QAPereo 9y ago
    That’s one hell of a diversion.

dogruck 9y ago

That was a nice summary — sounds like a great, insightful interview. The inevitable congestive dissonance in readers’ responses never cease to amuse me. Starts with, “wow, yeah, Bezos is a legend. I’d love some insight into what makes him tick, so I can be more like him!!” Then we quickly get to: 1. Oh, no way would I risk my child losing a finger! 2. Hey, work-life balance is important! It’s bad to work so much! 3. Maybe Bezos can focus on one task at a time — serial multi-tasker — but that’s not how I work!

5_minutes 9y ago

Millionaires advice about life, and for us normal people, hoping to get something out of it is like counting on the lottery to have a good life.

gallerdude 9y ago

I like the bit about how Pop would do everything himself. I think it's a huge skill just to realize how approachable things are. Especially with the increasing potentiality that the digital era gives us, it's important to have big ideas and go for them in smart & pragmatic ways.

WalterBright 9y ago
I once hired a plumber to make some repairs around the house. Curious, and not knowing anything about plumbing, I watched what he did. Then I got an enormous bill. Nothing he did seemed particularly hard, and since then I do plumbing repairs myself.

patkai 9y ago

It's interesting that we tend to ask for advice from rich people. Once I've heard a very annoyed George Soros saying in an interview - CNN or similar - that "you got me here not because I know stuff but because I'm rich".

gist 9y ago
As a very very general and rough rule the fact is someone like Soros or for that matter someone who is just famous or even niche famous will hang around with a different group of people and be exposed to things that normal people are not and do not have access to. Of course there are a ton of exceptions but the fact is if you are Soros (or Jobs or Bezos or Jack Welch (GE)) you simply have access to a group of people that aren't available to an ordinary person. Even take, say, Paul Graham or Sam Altman. They can reach out to anyone in the YC family and I would imagine get a very fast and motivated response and extra effort. Or for that matter anyone in the startup world who is familiar with who they are or what they do. There is no way anyone will convince me that isn't a very large advantage in either gaining information or access. And that information and access does mean something they are (in theory) better informed. Of course Soros is on CNN because he is rich and known. But the truth is what he says people will take seriously more so than if CNN interviewed the local head of a 100 or 200 person manufacturing company.
WalterBright 9y ago
It stands to reason that a rich person would know more about how to make money than a poor person, unless you believe it is totally random. Similarly, if I was interested in an athletic career, I'd be interested to hear from a gold medal champion more than from someone who is out of breath going to the mailbox.
- dlp211 9y ago
  I don't think it's totally random, but I don't think that rich people have some unknown knowledge or quality that allowed them to become rich. Plenty of rich people are rich because of circumstance, others, because they were in the right place at the right time with the right knowledge.

martin1975 9y ago

Work life balance and Amazon ... sounds a bit ironic, but having worked there for a year, if you're at Amazon or thinking about working at Amazon, I want to leave you with one big, massive piece of advice - if you don't know how to say "no", Amazon isn't the place for you. What do I mean by this? Amazon has an infinite amount of work they will gladly load you up with - on-call duty, maintaining legacy stuff and doing new projects. If you don't know how to carve out your boundaries, you're going to be in a world of hurt at Amazon, get demoralized very quickly and either get axed after a bad review (like me) or you're going to quit or worse, stay miserable and go gray before your time. Another tidbit of advice my boss - who also no longer is there - gave me, is you have to be a dick to succeed at Amazon. I'll just leave you with that before you choose to surrender to the cult of Bezos.

3pt14159 9y ago
Disclosure: Financially impacted by both Amazon and Apple. I know it's ironic to be in a position where I'm criticizing Amazon whilst owning shares, but I'm not the only one making decisions in my family's investment company. Honestly other than Alexa, Amazon is such an underwhelming company. Even AWS is completely overhyped and there are other products out there with betters interfaces (GUIs, APIs, and CLIs) and cheaper prices. Even S3 is a complete chore to work with and it's their simplest product. I buy books and a couple knicknacks off of Amazon and I've semi-enjoyed one show they produced (Alpha House). But the list of things they've done to piss me off is getting pretty long: 1. Sex toys in "recent purchases". Thanks guys, because what I wanted was to have my conservative family members have a view into my sex life. I'm bi and semi-closeted, so this is even worse than you're probably imagining. 2. I've never had a more frustrating CLI than the one I had to interact with from Amazon for AWS. It was right during the transition to a new, better CLI, but that also just meant that the one I was using had wrong documentation. It literally took me 100 times longer than a couple DigitalOcean API calls would have run me. 3. Chinese crap. I went travelling with a motion activated camera that would SMS me if there was motion in my Airbnb room. Of course the motion camera didn't work for more than 3 minutes. Crashed constantly, etc. Then when I appealed for a refund the company listed on Amazon gave me $2. Right, thanks guys, I paid way more than that but it got around whatever refund system Amazon had in place because I couldn't escalate it any further. Don't even get me started on the fake knockoffs for sale all across the store. It's turning into Ebay with all these fly by night stores. I could honestly go on much, much longer. This isn't just a product of me having had such a long relationship with the company, I've had just as long of a relationship with Apple and the only thing they do to piss me off is their constant slowness at their stores. The products themselves are great. And I pin all the blame for this on the stupid Amazon philosophy where people have to be dicks to succeed at Amazon.

dreamdu5t 9y ago

What a bunch of self selected myths. Jeff Bezos isn’t a sociopath and he isn’t Superman, he’s a clueless fucking human being like the rest of us. He’s not special, he hasn’t “figured it all out” and he doesn’t have some secret others lack. His shit stinks and I bet he can’t even make an omelette. Stop this cargo cult of CEO celebrity worship.

HappyDeveloper 9y ago
Yes, but somehow he has started an empire that ships thousands of packages every day and allows people to easily shop online. He might not be bright, but he did something right. Something that others didn't want to take the leap to do.
- candiodari 9y ago
  He did do something right. Mail order was always more expensive than shops, but Amazon wasn't ... Why not ? Sales Tax Evasion: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/03/27/tax-free-no-more-amazon-to-begin-collecting-sales-tax-nationwide-on-april-1 https://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyphillipserb/2017/03/27/tax... That is the only reason Amazon was ever price competitive. Without that, it wouldn't have grown. That's his great accomplishment. Not just abusing workers, not just treating low paid employees like dirt, constantly firing the most vulnerable just to keep them down, and not just hiding from criticism on those actions [1], but also abusing the country as a whole, through massive scale tax evasion. Jeff Bezos truly has something to be proud of ! [1] http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_amazon_wo.php http://gothamist.com/2015/08/15/life_inside_the_nightmare_am...
richardthered 9y ago
Human? I thought he was a "hyper-intelligent alien with a tangential interest in human affairs." :) https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzVeRq https://plus.google.com/110981030061712822816/posts/AaygmbzV... Of course, he is also one of the richest people on the planet...

Applejinx 9y ago

"Jeff’s Pop once tore the top of his thumb off. He had tried to jump out of his moving truck and unlatch the farm’s gate before the car slid through" Jeff's Pop was a loony, but extremely characteristic of what Amazon became. Guy couldn't stop his TRUCK long enough to open a gate for that same truck to go through? That's an… unusual attitude to driving a truck.

jscholes 9y ago

> If he feels like he’s adding value and is a productive member of a team at work, “it makes me better at home. The constant switching in and out of first person quotations in this article is weird and off-putting.

HappyDeveloper 9y ago

The raising kids part was interesting and took me a bit off guard, but I do like his view on regrets. Look for to 80 years old and think what you can do to minimize your regrets!

gtcode 9y ago

Amazon is, based on my direct experience, on the list of companies partaking in some level of social shenanigans against US citizens, not completely dissimilar from folks who have overtaken content here on HN, and have done so on reddit in the past. Seattle is a place full of extraordinarily smart individuals, and the probability that some non-empty subset of those extraordinarily smart individuals partake in sociopathic projects expressed through (and/or enabled by) technology approaches one. This isn't necessarily related to Jeff Bezos, however.

dmitrygr 9y ago

Possessives in English only get a single apostrophe at the end if they are plural. "Besos" is not plural.

grzm 9y ago
It's definitely not a settled issue. > "Proper Nouns Ending in S" > "AP: Add an apostrophe." > "Charlaine Harris’ books" > "the Joneses’ competition" > "Chicago: Add apostrophe-s if singular, and add an apostrophe if plural." > "Socrates’s tea" > "the Obamas’ garden" > "Les’s moor" http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-forming.html http://apvschicago.com/2011/06/apostrophe-s-vs-apostrophe-fo... > "Nouns, noun phrases, and some pronouns generally form a possessive with the suffix 's (or in some cases just by adding an apostrophe to an existing s)." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_possessive

scrpn 9y ago

Is funny that Bezos speaks about work-life balance.