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My experience aligns with everything here. I don’t doubt that there are some very unhappy people and dysfunctional teams at Amazon, but I haven’t discovered th

by yrmj 8y ago

My experience aligns with everything here. I don’t doubt that there are some very unhappy people and dysfunctional teams at Amazon, but I haven’t discovered them personally. One possible, yet perhaps overlooked, side-effect of the NYT article is that very driven engineers have self-selected to work at Amazon. Compared to my past workplaces, I feel there are far fewer people just punching in the hours for a paycheck, but I am not sure if this is specific to my team or division.

bryanrasmussen 8y ago
I would think a driven engineer would be driven because either 1. wants to work on complex problems 2. wants more compensation. I guess there's complex problems at Amazon but not more than any of the other big ones, and probably less than some startups so in conclusion I don't see a driven engineer self-selecting for Amazon.
- yrmj 8y ago
  While this is a fair point, I’m not sure I agree. Personally while I am driven by those two things, I am probably driven more by doing new things, and even more by delivering the most value to the company that I can with my time. I recognize how impersonal and unsexy that sounds, but as a nice side-effect, it tends to yield complex problems which I am generously compensated for solving.
  - bryanrasmussen 8y ago
    ok, it's probably a limit of my assumptions about people then. I remember I was on a very big complicated project doing some groundbreaking stuff on single sourcing multiple meda a decade ago and a couple years ago I asked someone else on the same project what was the best part about it for them and it was when they had made some svg conversion algorithm for generating all the various colored backgrounds and icons that any dynamically generated website needed when a customer decided they wanted to generate a website for their data. It was a ridiculously trivial part of the whole, but that was what had really made him happy.

by yrmj 8y ago

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

I would think a driven engineer would be driven because either 1. wants to work on complex problems 2. wants more compensation. I guess there's complex problems at Amazon but not more than any of the other big ones, and probably less than some startups so in conclusion I don't see a driven engineer self-selecting for Amazon.

yrmj 8y ago
While this is a fair point, I’m not sure I agree. Personally while I am driven by those two things, I am probably driven more by doing new things, and even more by delivering the most value to the company that I can with my time. I recognize how impersonal and unsexy that sounds, but as a nice side-effect, it tends to yield complex problems which I am generously compensated for solving.
- bryanrasmussen 8y ago
  ok, it's probably a limit of my assumptions about people then. I remember I was on a very big complicated project doing some groundbreaking stuff on single sourcing multiple meda a decade ago and a couple years ago I asked someone else on the same project what was the best part about it for them and it was when they had made some svg conversion algorithm for generating all the various colored backgrounds and icons that any dynamically generated website needed when a customer decided they wanted to generate a website for their data. It was a ridiculously trivial part of the whole, but that was what had really made him happy.