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> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of

by gopalv 7y ago

> Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company Amazon and Oracle couldn't be more different in this point of view. Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer. Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy. The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon, while the consumers see instant access servers on EC2, Amazon Go for lunch breaks in a city or One hour shipping of diapers. In comparison, Oracle seems to be going after those who pay them already.

BookmarkSaver 7y ago
>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.
- kitten_mittens_ 7y ago
  I did leave the company after the article came out because of how it jived with my experience.
- Tsarbomb 7y ago
  I walked away from taking a job there after I had a "peer lunch" with the team I would be working and found out it was mostly vacant due to firings and departures for "performance reasons". Any place that can lay off a significant majority of a team has issues.
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
  Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backstab and move up in management. Amazon/AWS really shows this in it's core web sites and console, which are really backwards and show no signs of improvement or evolution, because all the people that built it have been fired by now or moved on. Microsoft originally thrived on this, but eventually the culture collapses into backstabbing and the worst breed of middle management Machiavellis, and any productivity is new bolt-on products. So IMO Bezos built a fundamentally good infrastructure ten years ago that is fuelling Amazon's continued growth, but if anyone fundamentally improves in some way that Amazon would need to fundamentally change the company it will be impossible.
  - the_reformation 7y ago
    Absolutely incorrect. I worked there for 3 years, saw one person fired, and everybody who joined with me ended up vesting their shares. Most got promoted too.
    - senderista 7y ago
      Shortly after I joined my team, everyone above SDE2 left and were replaced by college hires. There was literally no one around who knew anything about the original project.
      - hef19898 7y ago
        Could be related to the stock development. My personal theory is that everyone who was hired around 2014 turned out to incredibly expensive, Amazon seemed to be surprised by the stock going about almost tenfold in the next 4 years. That alone made it really hard for that generation of hire to stick around, of the people I know who joined with me at that time I only know of two who were still there (out of a dozen) in early 2018. That ratio is a lot higher for those who joined before or after 2015. Not that I would complain so, including RSUs my last pay turned out to more almost three times what other companies in the same region pay.
    - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
      When was that, roughly?
  - dabit3 7y ago
    100% not true in my experience, but can't speak for any org other than the one I work in (which has been by far the best job, team, and management I've ever worked with).
  - senderista 7y ago
    The console sucks because it's done by the individual back-end service teams who have no idea about UX or front-end coding, and don't coordinate with each other or any cross-service owners of the console.
- philwelch 7y ago
  The NYT hit piece came out when I worked at AMZN. I was honestly shocked and surprised at how the company was described because it didn’t match my experience nor those of anyone I knew there. It was the first time I’ve personally experienced Gell-Mann amnesia, except I didn’t forget.
senderista 7y ago
Great for the customer? Not so much these days. I would happily trade my 2-day shipping for a no-counterfeit/safety guarantee.
- sokoloff 7y ago
  I have gotten two counterfeit items from Amazon (that I know of, of course). In both cases, A2Z took care of the problem without fuss on my end. (One with a full refund-don't even send it back; the other with "send it back on us or keep it at half price".) Would I prefer a genuine article assurance? In general, yes. Would I prefer that over a wide selection of products and range of delivery services? Probably not.
  - wolco 7y ago
    That you know of.
    - bartread 7y ago
      This is salient: there are some items where I'm confident I could distinguish real from fake, but there are many more where I'm not. And returns/refunds or not, it's a hassle I can live without. For anything outside of books/music/movies/video games I nowadays mostly use other retailers, and generally those that specialise in that kind of item. I recently bought some shelves from Amazon that aren't as described and getting a return and refund has turned into a complete shitshow. Totally fed up of Amazon.
  - TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
    I ordered some lightbulbs with the wrong fitting by mistake. Amazon refunded me and told me to keep them, even though it was entirely my fault.
whack 7y ago
> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-million in yearly income, and people working 10-6 M-F. Most of them are very happy with their careers, and I don't know a single person who describes their work-life the way you just did. I'm not disputing that horror stories exist and that some people are being given bad reviews and are being managed out. However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception.
- freehunter 7y ago
  It's the same way with my company. In the rare situation I see my employer mentioned on HN, I can't even bother reading the comment. It's all so overwhelmingly negative. Not just on the management, but on the employees as well. HN's perception of the company who signs my paychecks is so wildly different from my own perspective as an employee there that I have a hard time believing anyone on HN who talks about a negative work experience at Company X or Company Y. If the consensus for my company is so wrong, the consensus on every company is highly suspect.
  - technofiend 7y ago
    :fistbump: I never bother to mention my employer because when I used to post job openings on Reddit I'd get vilified for even trying.
  - philwelch 7y ago
    HN isn’t even bad as far as Internet forums go, but the longer you work in the field, the more and more obvious it becomes that Internet forums are generally full of shit.
    - shard972 7y ago
      Or maybe internet companies are full of shit. People can rationalize a whole lot when it's their lifeblood.
throwaway981211 7y ago
I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes. Is Amazon predatory to its employees? Some organizations are - yeah absolutely. Are we worse than other companies I worked prior to Amazon? No. Does that mean it’s okay? No. I’m just saying there’s a public perception of Amazon being at the deepest level of hell and it’s not true. We absolutely burn people out. We overwork employees. We don’t promote them when we should. We try to find the tiniest bit pick reasons not to promote. We practice stupidity and call it frugality? You’re an engineer making $200K total comp a year? Your computer doesn’t work and is crashing? Oh too bad - we won’t replace it for you. Yeah I mean that kind of fucking stupidity. We encourage everyone to automate their role so we can replace those folks with college hires. Amazon is not a place you can have a long career at. You’ll have to jump teams or orgs every couple years and eventually you’ll get tired enough that you learn to manage upwards yourself and stick with a manager that you can manage.
- trustfundbaby 7y ago
  > Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes. You could probably just replace "Amazon" with "Silicon Valley"
  - throwaway981211 7y ago
    I mean - I haven’t worked at any other large tech company so I don’t have any data point to make that claim.
- wolco 7y ago
  Most places are not like this. Imagine getting respect and $200k?
- AtlasBarfed 7y ago
LordFast 7y ago
Thanks for putting this so succinctly into words that I've struggled to find for the past few years without rambling on and on.
dkersten 7y ago
> while being mostly great towards the customer. I know you only said "mostly", but I find their product comingling to be very bad for the consumer and products in general on Amazon.com seem to be a lot worse now. If we're specifically talking about AWS, I'm not anti-AWS and do use them, but lets be honest here: they are very expensive, especially for bandwidth, and their pricing models are definitely not consumer friendly. I find it very hard to determine ahead of time how much my bill will be.

by gopalv 7y ago

BookmarkSaver 7y ago

>the crying software engineers Just like to point out that that NYT hit piece didn't actually interview any software engineers IIRC.

kitten_mittens_ 7y ago
I did leave the company after the article came out because of how it jived with my experience.
Tsarbomb 7y ago
I walked away from taking a job there after I had a "peer lunch" with the team I would be working and found out it was mostly vacant due to firings and departures for "performance reasons". Any place that can lay off a significant majority of a team has issues.
AtlasBarfed 7y ago
Amazon IT employees are carrot-dangles a rolling set of future stock and other money, but as it stands now almost every new hire won't see that money. Amazon will get what they can out of them, and then mark them underperforming and fire them before it pays out any money. Some of the best people I know that have gone to work there have been subjected to this. After cycles of this, the only way to survive is to backstab and move up in management. Amazon/AWS really shows this in it's core web sites and console, which are really backwards and show no signs of improvement or evolution, because all the people that built it have been fired by now or moved on. Microsoft originally thrived on this, but eventually the culture collapses into backstabbing and the worst breed of middle management Machiavellis, and any productivity is new bolt-on products. So IMO Bezos built a fundamentally good infrastructure ten years ago that is fuelling Amazon's continued growth, but if anyone fundamentally improves in some way that Amazon would need to fundamentally change the company it will be impossible.
- the_reformation 7y ago
  Absolutely incorrect. I worked there for 3 years, saw one person fired, and everybody who joined with me ended up vesting their shares. Most got promoted too.
  - senderista 7y ago
    Shortly after I joined my team, everyone above SDE2 left and were replaced by college hires. There was literally no one around who knew anything about the original project.
    - hef19898 7y ago
      Could be related to the stock development. My personal theory is that everyone who was hired around 2014 turned out to incredibly expensive, Amazon seemed to be surprised by the stock going about almost tenfold in the next 4 years. That alone made it really hard for that generation of hire to stick around, of the people I know who joined with me at that time I only know of two who were still there (out of a dozen) in early 2018. That ratio is a lot higher for those who joined before or after 2015. Not that I would complain so, including RSUs my last pay turned out to more almost three times what other companies in the same region pay.
  - AtlasBarfed 7y ago
    When was that, roughly?
- dabit3 7y ago
  100% not true in my experience, but can't speak for any org other than the one I work in (which has been by far the best job, team, and management I've ever worked with).
- senderista 7y ago
  The console sucks because it's done by the individual back-end service teams who have no idea about UX or front-end coding, and don't coordinate with each other or any cross-service owners of the console.
philwelch 7y ago
The NYT hit piece came out when I worked at AMZN. I was honestly shocked and surprised at how the company was described because it didn’t match my experience nor those of anyone I knew there. It was the first time I’ve personally experienced Gell-Mann amnesia, except I didn’t forget.

senderista 7y ago

Great for the customer? Not so much these days. I would happily trade my 2-day shipping for a no-counterfeit/safety guarantee.

sokoloff 7y ago
I have gotten two counterfeit items from Amazon (that I know of, of course). In both cases, A2Z took care of the problem without fuss on my end. (One with a full refund-don't even send it back; the other with "send it back on us or keep it at half price".) Would I prefer a genuine article assurance? In general, yes. Would I prefer that over a wide selection of products and range of delivery services? Probably not.
- wolco 7y ago
  That you know of.
  - bartread 7y ago
    This is salient: there are some items where I'm confident I could distinguish real from fake, but there are many more where I'm not. And returns/refunds or not, it's a hassle I can live without. For anything outside of books/music/movies/video games I nowadays mostly use other retailers, and generally those that specialise in that kind of item. I recently bought some shelves from Amazon that aren't as described and getting a return and refund has turned into a complete shitshow. Totally fed up of Amazon.
- TwoHeadedBeast 7y ago
  I ordered some lightbulbs with the wrong fitting by mistake. Amazon refunded me and told me to keep them, even though it was entirely my fault.

whack 7y ago

> Amazon's predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-million in yearly income, and people working 10-6 M-F. Most of them are very happy with their careers, and I don't know a single person who describes their work-life the way you just did. I'm not disputing that horror stories exist and that some people are being given bad reviews and are being managed out. However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee's experience, and public perception.

freehunter 7y ago
It's the same way with my company. In the rare situation I see my employer mentioned on HN, I can't even bother reading the comment. It's all so overwhelmingly negative. Not just on the management, but on the employees as well. HN's perception of the company who signs my paychecks is so wildly different from my own perspective as an employee there that I have a hard time believing anyone on HN who talks about a negative work experience at Company X or Company Y. If the consensus for my company is so wrong, the consensus on every company is highly suspect.
- technofiend 7y ago
  :fistbump: I never bother to mention my employer because when I used to post job openings on Reddit I'd get vilified for even trying.
- philwelch 7y ago
  HN isn’t even bad as far as Internet forums go, but the longer you work in the field, the more and more obvious it becomes that Internet forums are generally full of shit.
  - shard972 7y ago
    Or maybe internet companies are full of shit. People can rationalize a whole lot when it's their lifeblood.

throwaway981211 7y ago

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT. Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes. Is Amazon predatory to its employees? Some organizations are - yeah absolutely. Are we worse than other companies I worked prior to Amazon? No. Does that mean it’s okay? No. I’m just saying there’s a public perception of Amazon being at the deepest level of hell and it’s not true. We absolutely burn people out. We overwork employees. We don’t promote them when we should. We try to find the tiniest bit pick reasons not to promote. We practice stupidity and call it frugality? You’re an engineer making $200K total comp a year? Your computer doesn’t work and is crashing? Oh too bad - we won’t replace it for you. Yeah I mean that kind of fucking stupidity. We encourage everyone to automate their role so we can replace those folks with college hires. Amazon is not a place you can have a long career at. You’ll have to jump teams or orgs every couple years and eventually you’ll get tired enough that you learn to manage upwards yourself and stick with a manager that you can manage.

trustfundbaby 7y ago
> Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes. You could probably just replace "Amazon" with "Silicon Valley"
- throwaway981211 7y ago
  I mean - I haven’t worked at any other large tech company so I don’t have any data point to make that claim.
wolco 7y ago
Most places are not like this. Imagine getting respect and $200k?
AtlasBarfed 7y ago

LordFast 7y ago

Thanks for putting this so succinctly into words that I've struggled to find for the past few years without rambling on and on.

dkersten 7y ago

> while being mostly great towards the customer. I know you only said "mostly", but I find their product comingling to be very bad for the consumer and products in general on Amazon.com seem to be a lot worse now. If we're specifically talking about AWS, I'm not anti-AWS and do use them, but lets be honest here: they are very expensive, especially for bandwidth, and their pricing models are definitely not consumer friendly. I find it very hard to determine ahead of time how much my bill will be.