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Obviously it's difficult to compare companies in completely different industries, so I wouldn't worry much about minor differences between #1 and #11. What IS

by ronyeh 7y ago

Obviously it's difficult to compare companies in completely different industries, so I wouldn't worry much about minor differences between #1 and #11. What IS notable to me as an engineer, is how Google is ranked #11 but Amazon isn't on the list at all. Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️

akhilcacharya 7y ago
They aren’t. Disclaimer: I turned down higher paying/more prestigious companies for Amazon so YMMV
KingMachiavelli 7y ago
Possibly, but it's far more likely that it's the non-tech/engineering employees who have well publicized subpar to inhumane working conditions that are skewing Amazon's rating. There are some reports of that culture permeating into it's cloud/tech business areas but it's difficult to know the relative ratio (both # of user reports and rating effect size) between the two.
gdulli 7y ago
> Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️ Back around 2007 I was considering moving to Seattle and read up on working there. At the time their first round of bad press hadn't yet hit and I started with no impression about them. It's too long ago to remember the details, but from searching around I remember being definitively turned off from considering them an option. And then a few years later I think it was, it broke into the mainstream. It wasn't a one-time thing, there was a consistent story told about it for years. The central theme was a culture of terrible treatment of people. Nothing specific to engineering. They've had years now to do damage control. I have a friend whose husband works there and she says that there's a culture of treating people in such a way as to never allow any further bad press. (Which is subtly different from treating people well.) She says he's on pager duty a certain number of nights/weeks per month and gets calls regularly overnight. That's not related to the narrative of bad treatment of people, just a fact of life in engineering that she called out as being stressful for them. Since she got regularly woken up too. And she said the benefits aren't great, he doesn't even get a free Prime account. There's a culture of non-competitive benefits because you're supposed to feel privileged to work there, to see that as its own benefit.
- CobrastanJorji 7y ago
  I remember from my stint at Amazon many years ago that everyone at Amazon, including me, felt that surely our total compensation was higher than our peers at other companies to make up for the lack of benefits. Otherwise everyone else would have left, right? Long story short, we were wrong. There was nothing better about being at Amazon than the other top tech companies. That said, I didn't find the work as bad as some others experienced it. My team's pager only went off once a day or so at most.
- jimbokun 7y ago
  "She says he's on pager duty a certain number of nights/weeks per month and gets calls regularly overnight. That's not related to the narrative of bad treatment of people, just a fact of life in engineering that she called out as being stressful for them." That's a fact of incompetent engineers who can't keep their code operating reliably without human intervention.
  - saagarjha 7y ago
    Can you?
  - rconti 7y ago
    It's a very narrow world of people who carry pagers and are directly responsible for how often they go off.
draw_down 7y ago
I’ve heard some first-hand. Really bad. I don’t think I would ever work there.
bduerst 7y ago
>Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️ Anecdotally I've heard mixed accounts, where some ex-Amazon employees say they never had issues, but still some others have some pretty bad stories to tell. Recently Bezos said he only wants "to hire missionaries, not mercenaries", so take that statement as you will.
shadowgovt 7y ago
Depends on the horror story and what employees factor into their happiness. Steve Yegge (former Amazon and Google employee) once had to walk back a flippant remark about "dread pirate Bezos," in which he explained that while the work was fulfilling and he was successful at it, the background message he perceived of a consistent drumbeat of "Be useful to the company or we'll fire you" weighed on him psychologically. https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2011/10/google-engineer-on-the-dread-pirate.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2011/10/g...

by ronyeh 7y ago

akhilcacharya 7y ago

They aren’t. Disclaimer: I turned down higher paying/more prestigious companies for Amazon so YMMV

KingMachiavelli 7y ago

Possibly, but it's far more likely that it's the non-tech/engineering employees who have well publicized subpar to inhumane working conditions that are skewing Amazon's rating. There are some reports of that culture permeating into it's cloud/tech business areas but it's difficult to know the relative ratio (both # of user reports and rating effect size) between the two.

gdulli 7y ago

> Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️ Back around 2007 I was considering moving to Seattle and read up on working there. At the time their first round of bad press hadn't yet hit and I started with no impression about them. It's too long ago to remember the details, but from searching around I remember being definitively turned off from considering them an option. And then a few years later I think it was, it broke into the mainstream. It wasn't a one-time thing, there was a consistent story told about it for years. The central theme was a culture of terrible treatment of people. Nothing specific to engineering. They've had years now to do damage control. I have a friend whose husband works there and she says that there's a culture of treating people in such a way as to never allow any further bad press. (Which is subtly different from treating people well.) She says he's on pager duty a certain number of nights/weeks per month and gets calls regularly overnight. That's not related to the narrative of bad treatment of people, just a fact of life in engineering that she called out as being stressful for them. Since she got regularly woken up too. And she said the benefits aren't great, he doesn't even get a free Prime account. There's a culture of non-competitive benefits because you're supposed to feel privileged to work there, to see that as its own benefit.

CobrastanJorji 7y ago
I remember from my stint at Amazon many years ago that everyone at Amazon, including me, felt that surely our total compensation was higher than our peers at other companies to make up for the lack of benefits. Otherwise everyone else would have left, right? Long story short, we were wrong. There was nothing better about being at Amazon than the other top tech companies. That said, I didn't find the work as bad as some others experienced it. My team's pager only went off once a day or so at most.
jimbokun 7y ago
"She says he's on pager duty a certain number of nights/weeks per month and gets calls regularly overnight. That's not related to the narrative of bad treatment of people, just a fact of life in engineering that she called out as being stressful for them." That's a fact of incompetent engineers who can't keep their code operating reliably without human intervention.
- saagarjha 7y ago
  Can you?
- rconti 7y ago
  It's a very narrow world of people who carry pagers and are directly responsible for how often they go off.

draw_down 7y ago

I’ve heard some first-hand. Really bad. I don’t think I would ever work there.

bduerst 7y ago

>Are the horror stories about working at Amazon true? ️ Anecdotally I've heard mixed accounts, where some ex-Amazon employees say they never had issues, but still some others have some pretty bad stories to tell. Recently Bezos said he only wants "to hire missionaries, not mercenaries", so take that statement as you will.

shadowgovt 7y ago

Depends on the horror story and what employees factor into their happiness. Steve Yegge (former Amazon and Google employee) once had to walk back a flippant remark about "dread pirate Bezos," in which he explained that while the work was fulfilling and he was successful at it, the background message he perceived of a consistent drumbeat of "Be useful to the company or we'll fire you" weighed on him psychologically. https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2011/10/google-engineer-on-the-dread-pirate.html https://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2011/10/g...