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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 lea

by 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.
- JavaOffScript 9y ago
  You shouldn't buy sex toys on amazon precisely because of reason number 3. Shit is straight up dangerous and someone is going to get hurt before long, it'll be a huge lawsuit and a PR disaster for Amazon and they'll finally crackdown on all the counterfeit chinese bullshit.

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.

JavaOffScript 9y ago
You shouldn't buy sex toys on amazon precisely because of reason number 3. Shit is straight up dangerous and someone is going to get hurt before long, it'll be a huge lawsuit and a PR disaster for Amazon and they'll finally crackdown on all the counterfeit chinese bullshit.