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Amazon is really a frugal company, in a sense they want every penny they spend on you to evetually make it back to their pockets.

raxxorrax 8y ago
Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. And since people at Amazon having difficulties trying to find time to take a piss, it doesn't really qualify as an employer for me personally. I like their services in AWS-land and they have really good solutions. They probably treat their developers better as long as they can be exploited. But if there is another service with comparable features, I generally don't have to think very long.
- goldenkey 8y ago
  I worked there too in 2015. The culture is toxic. The most surprising thing was the way all the AWS services are built with a grab bag of different teams with entirely different languages, copying CSS and code all over the place. There were no real standards. I still like AWS but knowing how bad the sausage is made makes me cringe a bit...
  - akhilcacharya 8y ago
    I mean...if it performs well all of that is irrelevant to the customer.
    - h1d 8y ago
      While it works.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. Seems like a policy that gives a big advantage to industries that aren't labour-intensive. Is Costco a worse company than Oracle, because the former has employees making $30,000 and the latter doesn't?
  - Sahhaese 8y ago
    How you treat employees isn't the same thing as salaries. There are environments where people earning $20,000 are still treated with respect and there are environments where people earning $200,000 are treated badly.
    - michaelt 8y ago
      Depends what you mean by 'treated with respect'. Every job I've had, people have been polite and friendly to me. No bullying or harassment or anything like that. But the low-paid jobs would carefully police our working hours and sick leave, while taking a toll on our bodies and demanding measurable daily performance. Whereas the highly-paid jobs would trust me to work my contract hours, take my word if I said I was sick, didn't expect me to lift anything heavier than a laptop, and barely audited how hard I was working at all. If you think it's prima facie disrespectful to require a doctor's note for sick leave, my poorly paid jobs have been less respectful than my highly paid jobs.
  - tialaramex 8y ago
    How much do you think Oracle's cleaners are paid? The guy on the door at the HQ building? I'm sure that you can argue oh, those people are actually working for a contractor, but let's agree for a moment that this is purely a matter of paperwork, those are Oracle cleaners, that guy is on the door of Oracle's HQ building.

raxxorrax 8y ago

Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. And since people at Amazon having difficulties trying to find time to take a piss, it doesn't really qualify as an employer for me personally. I like their services in AWS-land and they have really good solutions. They probably treat their developers better as long as they can be exploited. But if there is another service with comparable features, I generally don't have to think very long.

goldenkey 8y ago
I worked there too in 2015. The culture is toxic. The most surprising thing was the way all the AWS services are built with a grab bag of different teams with entirely different languages, copying CSS and code all over the place. There were no real standards. I still like AWS but knowing how bad the sausage is made makes me cringe a bit...
- akhilcacharya 8y ago
  I mean...if it performs well all of that is irrelevant to the customer.
  - h1d 8y ago
    While it works.
michaelt 8y ago
Always judge a company by how they treat their lowest employees. Seems like a policy that gives a big advantage to industries that aren't labour-intensive. Is Costco a worse company than Oracle, because the former has employees making $30,000 and the latter doesn't?
- Sahhaese 8y ago
  How you treat employees isn't the same thing as salaries. There are environments where people earning $20,000 are still treated with respect and there are environments where people earning $200,000 are treated badly.
  - michaelt 8y ago
    Depends what you mean by 'treated with respect'. Every job I've had, people have been polite and friendly to me. No bullying or harassment or anything like that. But the low-paid jobs would carefully police our working hours and sick leave, while taking a toll on our bodies and demanding measurable daily performance. Whereas the highly-paid jobs would trust me to work my contract hours, take my word if I said I was sick, didn't expect me to lift anything heavier than a laptop, and barely audited how hard I was working at all. If you think it's prima facie disrespectful to require a doctor's note for sick leave, my poorly paid jobs have been less respectful than my highly paid jobs.
- tialaramex 8y ago
  How much do you think Oracle's cleaners are paid? The guy on the door at the HQ building? I'm sure that you can argue oh, those people are actually working for a contractor, but let's agree for a moment that this is purely a matter of paperwork, those are Oracle cleaners, that guy is on the door of Oracle's HQ building.