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This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was

This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I can't help but feel it's just this kind of false consciousness that prevents developers from _getting organized_. Sidenote, payroll tax on Amazon in Seattle trying to get revived. It's a long and winding story. Check out taxamazon.net

alharith 6y ago
There is something about the human psyche that makes you partial to something that treats you well. My work treats me exceptionally well. It does not treat the sales center employees as well. I find it hard to say it's a terrible place to work, because as mentioned earlier, it takes tremendous care of me, and is the reason I am able to have the life I have, the house I have, and support the family I have in the way I can. It's ok to want to continue to be treated great, and also have them treat others better.
google234123 6y ago
Payroll tax? The website should be taxamazonworkers.net
- dlp211 6y ago
  Payroll taxes may or may not be borne by the worker. Oversimplifying tax burden is a dishonest argument that is consistently perpetuated.
  - jedberg 6y ago
    Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller. That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      Exactly. There's no such thing as totally "free shipping" or "free returns" either. One way or another, the customer is paying for it.
      - dlp211 6y ago
        This is only true in the sense that there is a cost to move goods, but it is not true in the sense that retailers charge more to move the good to you. If it were, I wouldn't be able to reliably purchase goods shipped to my door for equal or less than what I pay in physical stores. When shipping is included in the price, that means that the shipper bears the cost of shipping by taking a smaller margin. If I were to bear the cost, it would appear as an explicit cost or higher prices, neither of which are happening.
        sokoloff 6y ago
        Higher cost than what? By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.
        dlp211 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but I can't track the point you are trying to make. I'll reiterate my point that shipping is a cost that has to be paid, but who bears that cost is not necessarily the customer. If it was the case that the customer was the one bearing that cost, there would be a difference in the price you pay for goods at a physical store vs. goods shipped to your home, implicitly or explicitly. There is generally no difference, and in many cases, ship to home is cheaper because you can select from more retailers.
        jedberg 6y ago
        I think you're confusing who writes the check vs who bears the cost. The person writing the check isn't always the one bearing the cost.
- 8note 6y ago
  Or the revenue?
kick 6y ago
This guy didn't work in/for/on AWS: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i_would_like_to_know_some_real_world_applications/d23nicr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i... The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This was also four years ago; the gist is a copy of a post from 2015, by the above reddit poster.
- lowiqengineer 6y ago
  > The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This is incredibly offensive. I work in CDO and have friends in retail and AWS and the biggest difference day-to-day is that we have different systems to manage our AWS accounts. Equivocating me to a Wipro employee is honestly really disgusting. These sorts of microaggressions are the worst part of working at Amazon, the WLB is fine.
- whoisjuan 6y ago
  > The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This is not true. Amazon and AWS are exactly the same organizationally speaking. You could hardly tell who works in an Amazon team and who works in an AWS team. Maybe if they tell you their building. The cultural drift happens in the teams and orgs, not the parent "company". Everyone at Amazon knows this and that’s why many people know changing teams is a gamble and prefer staying at the same team doing the same menial tasks, than venturing into finding another team. Amazon and AWS have both great teams and shitty teams. There’s just not an easy way to tell, except for one internal tool that allows you to see how people are rating their managers but this is all bs because some teams don’t have enough data or any data at all. Also the data itself is probably skewed, since people are afraid of giving poor rates to their managers (this is a general problem in the modern workplace dynamics, not at an Amazon problem) The other way is asking a friend but I don’t know how people do that since I only knew people from my team and teams that sat nearby. Maybe I’m too socially incompetent.
AnHonestComment 6y ago
It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy. This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable. “Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seattle, and proponents try to focus on Amazon to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is. In 2010, the Seattle budget was 3.8B; in 2020, it’s 6.5B. An increase of 2.7B and growth of 71% in a decade. (Per capita, the Seattle budget is 37% more now than in 2010.) https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-construction-workers-clash-amazon-hq-tax-big-business/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-constructio... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-city-councilmember-sawant-says-her-tax-on-big-businesses-would-raise-300-million-a-year/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...
- dlp211 6y ago
  > to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is. That's a bold assertion without any citation.
  - fourmyle 6y ago
    The numbers were listed in the next sentence.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      They edited their post. Also, numbers don't mean anything without context. Why is that out of control spending?
      - fourmyle 6y ago
        IMO increased spending that requires a state that has no income tax to add one.
xamazn 6y ago
I worked at AWS. Your experience may vary significantly depending on which team you are in, either at AWS or plain-Amazon. Some people are having the time of their lives there. Some are working horrible hours, maintaining crap old code that they hate, and struggling with performance reviews that saps their morale and prevents them from seeking a better team or leaving the company. Some people genuinely like the competitiveness, the politics, and know the Leadership Principles like it's the law. Amazon is a fascinating company, it's Big Capitalism in a way no other company is today, and as such it's writing History, for better or worse. For the average developer it's not great, though.
- kulig 6y ago
  Yeah writing history like the egyptians did building all those pyramids. So fascinating.
gameswithgo 6y ago
Every company is full of nightmares, especially anyone doing something big enough to be interesting. For instance that guy who started blogging about how janky Tesla's software was, most of us who have been around a while read all that and shrugged. Not that bad. It is easy to imagine perfection or competence but very hard to actually achieve it at large scales with humans. So at the same time it can be true that company X is a great place and also true that company X is a nightmare.
- spottybanana 6y ago
  This. Amazon maybe has thousands of developers working in various departments. The departments can be totally different from each other, have different culture, values whatever. Even in very small companies I have seen this effect.
derg 6y ago
>Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I think this might be a big part of it. The idea that "I'm college educated and don't perform physical labor means I'm not like them" seems to be a pervasive societal thought not even strictly related to tech.
uoaei 6y ago
It's good to be on top. The reason AWS is so great for those with voices whom we pay attention to, is because of the misery of a whole lot of people below them. It's not even programmers like OP but also all the servicepeople and staff at datacenters, and the rest of the crew which makes up the infrastructure that makes it work.
MattGaiser 6y ago
> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I just need to switch to my remote desktop. I have colleagues and friends who will log in on weekends or evenings out of boredom to do work. No pressure to do it, but they just want something to do. I fill my time with internet commenting and various online contests, but if they need help at 9PM, I am fine with jumping on the VPN to help and have done that a few times myself. Amazon still has problems beyond the long hours and the 3AM calls, but there are people ok with those things or at least ok enough with them to not put up a fuss.
- troughway 6y ago
  >The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential.
  - MattGaiser 6y ago
    > Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential. Eh, you leave the university environment of all its clubs, hackathons, etc, likely to another city where you know far fewer people. You need to wake up the next morning, so gaming until 5AM with your friends no longer works. Someone is also on on-call, so they can't join, so you postpose it further. The end result is a lot more free time.
- SamuelAdams 6y ago
  Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5. Those different expectations is what caused him to have a very bad experience.
amelius 6y ago
> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair
amelius 6y ago
Perhaps the first thing they should arrange is to have lunch breaks together with the low-wage work-force, i.e. in the same physical space. Or perhaps a company outing. That could result in some awareness and perhaps solidarity. If these developers don't ever see or talk to the people who are suffering from the company strategy, then the problem may remain to appear imaginary or abstract.
pragmatic 6y ago
Tbray is going to have a different experience at any org he joins. He's not coming in as a no name peon. He's financially well off, internet famous and would (and could) probably leave at the first sign of mistreatment. He's in Canada, do health insurance isn't tied to job.
hinkley 6y ago
I have a suspicion. If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies. The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look hard to find managers exploiting this characteristic, and I suspect the most of the ones who thrive in such an environment do it. I worked a brief contract there and it was clear that the manager was used to making statements designed to trigger his subordinates' insecurities. When your self worth is tied to the quality of your work, but your ability to self-evaluate is not solid. you are vulnerable to manipulation. I have that trigger too, it's just harder to hit, especially by some punk who is used to saying 'frog' and having people jump. I felt sometimes like he was waiting for me to react to some subtly passive-aggressive statement he just made and I just shrugged it off and stopped talking or kept going. A master can be very tied to the quality of their work, and hand you your ass if you try to disagree with them. This doesn't develop overnight, and it's a winding road, but it's very undeveloped in a bunch of 25 year olds with a toxic cocktail of Impostor and Dunning-Kruger, and any 28 year old who spent more time honing their interpersonal skills in college has some ideas how to get what they want out of such people. And those people think this is okay. Normal. That it's only what they deserve. And then we have a culture of avoiding psychotherapists, who would tell you two sessions in that this is bullshit and you shouldn't have to live this way.
- DonnyV 6y ago
  ^^^^ This guy right here, just cracked the code. Agree 110%
- valbaca 6y ago
  amznymous here you're 100% right

alharith 6y ago

There is something about the human psyche that makes you partial to something that treats you well. My work treats me exceptionally well. It does not treat the sales center employees as well. I find it hard to say it's a terrible place to work, because as mentioned earlier, it takes tremendous care of me, and is the reason I am able to have the life I have, the house I have, and support the family I have in the way I can. It's ok to want to continue to be treated great, and also have them treat others better.

google234123 6y ago

Payroll tax? The website should be taxamazonworkers.net

dlp211 6y ago
Payroll taxes may or may not be borne by the worker. Oversimplifying tax burden is a dishonest argument that is consistently perpetuated.
- jedberg 6y ago
  Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller. That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    Exactly. There's no such thing as totally "free shipping" or "free returns" either. One way or another, the customer is paying for it.
    - dlp211 6y ago
      This is only true in the sense that there is a cost to move goods, but it is not true in the sense that retailers charge more to move the good to you. If it were, I wouldn't be able to reliably purchase goods shipped to my door for equal or less than what I pay in physical stores. When shipping is included in the price, that means that the shipper bears the cost of shipping by taking a smaller margin. If I were to bear the cost, it would appear as an explicit cost or higher prices, neither of which are happening.
      - sokoloff 6y ago
        Higher cost than what? By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.
        dlp211 6y ago
        I'm sorry, but I can't track the point you are trying to make. I'll reiterate my point that shipping is a cost that has to be paid, but who bears that cost is not necessarily the customer. If it was the case that the customer was the one bearing that cost, there would be a difference in the price you pay for goods at a physical store vs. goods shipped to your home, implicitly or explicitly. There is generally no difference, and in many cases, ship to home is cheaper because you can select from more retailers.
        jedberg 6y ago
        I think you're confusing who writes the check vs who bears the cost. The person writing the check isn't always the one bearing the cost.
8note 6y ago
Or the revenue?

kick 6y ago

This guy didn't work in/for/on AWS: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i_would_like_to_know_some_real_world_applications/d23nicr/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i... The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This was also four years ago; the gist is a copy of a post from 2015, by the above reddit poster.

lowiqengineer 6y ago
> The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This is incredibly offensive. I work in CDO and have friends in retail and AWS and the biggest difference day-to-day is that we have different systems to manage our AWS accounts. Equivocating me to a Wipro employee is honestly really disgusting. These sorts of microaggressions are the worst part of working at Amazon, the WLB is fine.
whoisjuan 6y ago
> The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This is not true. Amazon and AWS are exactly the same organizationally speaking. You could hardly tell who works in an Amazon team and who works in an AWS team. Maybe if they tell you their building. The cultural drift happens in the teams and orgs, not the parent "company". Everyone at Amazon knows this and that’s why many people know changing teams is a gamble and prefer staying at the same team doing the same menial tasks, than venturing into finding another team. Amazon and AWS have both great teams and shitty teams. There’s just not an easy way to tell, except for one internal tool that allows you to see how people are rating their managers but this is all bs because some teams don’t have enough data or any data at all. Also the data itself is probably skewed, since people are afraid of giving poor rates to their managers (this is a general problem in the modern workplace dynamics, not at an Amazon problem) The other way is asking a friend but I don’t know how people do that since I only knew people from my team and teams that sat nearby. Maybe I’m too socially incompetent.

AnHonestComment 6y ago

It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy. This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable. “Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seattle, and proponents try to focus on Amazon to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is. In 2010, the Seattle budget was 3.8B; in 2020, it’s 6.5B. An increase of 2.7B and growth of 71% in a decade. (Per capita, the Seattle budget is 37% more now than in 2010.) https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-construction-workers-clash-amazon-hq-tax-big-business/ https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-constructio... https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-city-councilmember-sawant-says-her-tax-on-big-businesses-would-raise-300-million-a-year/ https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/seattle-c...

dlp211 6y ago
> to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is. That's a bold assertion without any citation.
- fourmyle 6y ago
  The numbers were listed in the next sentence.
  - dlp211 6y ago
    They edited their post. Also, numbers don't mean anything without context. Why is that out of control spending?
    - fourmyle 6y ago
      IMO increased spending that requires a state that has no income tax to add one.

xamazn 6y ago

I worked at AWS. Your experience may vary significantly depending on which team you are in, either at AWS or plain-Amazon. Some people are having the time of their lives there. Some are working horrible hours, maintaining crap old code that they hate, and struggling with performance reviews that saps their morale and prevents them from seeking a better team or leaving the company. Some people genuinely like the competitiveness, the politics, and know the Leadership Principles like it's the law. Amazon is a fascinating company, it's Big Capitalism in a way no other company is today, and as such it's writing History, for better or worse. For the average developer it's not great, though.

kulig 6y ago
Yeah writing history like the egyptians did building all those pyramids. So fascinating.

gameswithgo 6y ago

Every company is full of nightmares, especially anyone doing something big enough to be interesting. For instance that guy who started blogging about how janky Tesla's software was, most of us who have been around a while read all that and shrugged. Not that bad. It is easy to imagine perfection or competence but very hard to actually achieve it at large scales with humans. So at the same time it can be true that company X is a great place and also true that company X is a nightmare.

spottybanana 6y ago
This. Amazon maybe has thousands of developers working in various departments. The departments can be totally different from each other, have different culture, values whatever. Even in very small companies I have seen this effect.

derg 6y ago

>Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I think this might be a big part of it. The idea that "I'm college educated and don't perform physical labor means I'm not like them" seems to be a pervasive societal thought not even strictly related to tech.

uoaei 6y ago

It's good to be on top. The reason AWS is so great for those with voices whom we pay attention to, is because of the misery of a whole lot of people below them. It's not even programmers like OP but also all the servicepeople and staff at datacenters, and the rest of the crew which makes up the infrastructure that makes it work.

MattGaiser 6y ago

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I just need to switch to my remote desktop. I have colleagues and friends who will log in on weekends or evenings out of boredom to do work. No pressure to do it, but they just want something to do. I fill my time with internet commenting and various online contests, but if they need help at 9PM, I am fine with jumping on the VPN to help and have done that a few times myself. Amazon still has problems beyond the long hours and the 3AM calls, but there are people ok with those things or at least ok enough with them to not put up a fuss.

troughway 6y ago
>The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential.
- MattGaiser 6y ago
  > Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential. Eh, you leave the university environment of all its clubs, hackathons, etc, likely to another city where you know far fewer people. You need to wake up the next morning, so gaming until 5AM with your friends no longer works. Someone is also on on-call, so they can't join, so you postpose it further. The end result is a lot more free time.
SamuelAdams 6y ago
Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5. Those different expectations is what caused him to have a very bad experience.

amelius 6y ago

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair

amelius 6y ago

Perhaps the first thing they should arrange is to have lunch breaks together with the low-wage work-force, i.e. in the same physical space. Or perhaps a company outing. That could result in some awareness and perhaps solidarity. If these developers don't ever see or talk to the people who are suffering from the company strategy, then the problem may remain to appear imaginary or abstract.

pragmatic 6y ago

Tbray is going to have a different experience at any org he joins. He's not coming in as a no name peon. He's financially well off, internet famous and would (and could) probably leave at the first sign of mistreatment. He's in Canada, do health insurance isn't tied to job.

hinkley 6y ago

I have a suspicion. If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies. The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look hard to find managers exploiting this characteristic, and I suspect the most of the ones who thrive in such an environment do it. I worked a brief contract there and it was clear that the manager was used to making statements designed to trigger his subordinates' insecurities. When your self worth is tied to the quality of your work, but your ability to self-evaluate is not solid. you are vulnerable to manipulation. I have that trigger too, it's just harder to hit, especially by some punk who is used to saying 'frog' and having people jump. I felt sometimes like he was waiting for me to react to some subtly passive-aggressive statement he just made and I just shrugged it off and stopped talking or kept going. A master can be very tied to the quality of their work, and hand you your ass if you try to disagree with them. This doesn't develop overnight, and it's a winding road, but it's very undeveloped in a bunch of 25 year olds with a toxic cocktail of Impostor and Dunning-Kruger, and any 28 year old who spent more time honing their interpersonal skills in college has some ideas how to get what they want out of such people. And those people think this is okay. Normal. That it's only what they deserve. And then we have a culture of avoiding psychotherapists, who would tell you two sessions in that this is bullshit and you shouldn't have to live this way.

DonnyV 6y ago
^^^^ This guy right here, just cracked the code. Agree 110%
valbaca 6y ago
amznymous here you're 100% right