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Think before you join any large company. Nothing here is unique to AWS. We outside have the illusion that everything is perfect on the inside of these profitab

Think before you join any large company. Nothing here is unique to AWS. We outside have the illusion that everything is perfect on the inside of these profitable and successful companies, but in most cases it’s generally a lot of broken code and a boiler room. Staff is usually burned out after a few years - why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? The amount of bugs and issues in Facebook advertising is atrocious. Google is just getting some of their admin stuff right. The lesson to take away is that even if you have a small side business - perfection never usually makes money. It’s more important to get an imperfect product to market that’s held together on the back end by spit and strings. Or as my dad said, (he was an artist) - “I could continue working on this painting for months more, but I have you kids mouths to feed”.

Arainach 5y ago
We have more than enough data - be it Glassdoor, stories here, etc. - to say with certainty that this kind of thing is far more common at Amazon. Portraying it as "a thing everywhere" is deeply misleading. Many companies have teams that can push you hard (I burned out at Microsoft, who in general is fairly good for work/life balance), but none of them make it a core part of their identity. Amazon prides themselves on bare metal optimizations, tracking and micromanaging the smallest time quantums they can - it's why they have a fleet of warehouses that grind picking employees into a broken down mess, it's why their offices have almost no perks, and it's why there are so many stories of their codebase and process being a mess. Living in Seattle, I'm fortunate enough to have friends who work or have worked in all the big cloud orgs - AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. The ranting, burnout, and raw shitshow quotient of Amazon is off the charts. It's the only company that any personal friends have ever warned me against joining, and ALL my friends that have ever tried to work there eventually gave me that warning.
softwaredoug 5y ago
Not sure I agree. The tone from the top varies quite a lot across big tech companies, and sets the tone for the culture of the teams. Then within that context, a lot depends on your team, your manager, your ability to connect with stakeholders in the company, and the problem you’re working on. I work at Shopify, and while we have had intense projects, I haven’t experienced anything like what’s described here about Amazon. Shopify, culturally, is quite different than other large tech companies I’ve worked at. It’s opinionated about tooling instead of dozens of things that do the same thing. We emphasize sustainably doing work and not burning people out. After all, why would we want to burn people out when we want to retain them? We emphasize “building for the long term” and to do that we do seem to put people first. One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye.
- brtkdotse 5y ago
  > One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye. laughs in Swedish 480 parental days Seriously though, good to hear sane parental policies are spreading to more and more companies. Are those 10 months paid for by the employer?
kyawzazaw 5y ago
> why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? Pretty sure it's mostly driven by raises not being able to catch up with job hopping offer.
- eric4smith 5y ago
  It's driven by a lot of things. No only raises. Just like anything else in the world, its not one-dimensional. For example, someone might switch jobs because you think its the higher offer elsewhere. But its also the burnout at the old job. Or they did not like the manager, and they also want to work with another tech stack. The higher salary is the push, but there are other lesser reasons that add into the decision as well.

Arainach 5y ago

We have more than enough data - be it Glassdoor, stories here, etc. - to say with certainty that this kind of thing is far more common at Amazon. Portraying it as "a thing everywhere" is deeply misleading. Many companies have teams that can push you hard (I burned out at Microsoft, who in general is fairly good for work/life balance), but none of them make it a core part of their identity. Amazon prides themselves on bare metal optimizations, tracking and micromanaging the smallest time quantums they can - it's why they have a fleet of warehouses that grind picking employees into a broken down mess, it's why their offices have almost no perks, and it's why there are so many stories of their codebase and process being a mess. Living in Seattle, I'm fortunate enough to have friends who work or have worked in all the big cloud orgs - AWS, Azure, GCP, and Oracle. The ranting, burnout, and raw shitshow quotient of Amazon is off the charts. It's the only company that any personal friends have ever warned me against joining, and ALL my friends that have ever tried to work there eventually gave me that warning.

softwaredoug 5y ago

Not sure I agree. The tone from the top varies quite a lot across big tech companies, and sets the tone for the culture of the teams. Then within that context, a lot depends on your team, your manager, your ability to connect with stakeholders in the company, and the problem you’re working on. I work at Shopify, and while we have had intense projects, I haven’t experienced anything like what’s described here about Amazon. Shopify, culturally, is quite different than other large tech companies I’ve worked at. It’s opinionated about tooling instead of dozens of things that do the same thing. We emphasize sustainably doing work and not burning people out. After all, why would we want to burn people out when we want to retain them? We emphasize “building for the long term” and to do that we do seem to put people first. One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye.

brtkdotse 5y ago
> One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye. laughs in Swedish 480 parental days Seriously though, good to hear sane parental policies are spreading to more and more companies. Are those 10 months paid for by the employer?

kyawzazaw 5y ago

> why do you think turnover in the tech industry is so high?? Pretty sure it's mostly driven by raises not being able to catch up with job hopping offer.

eric4smith 5y ago
It's driven by a lot of things. No only raises. Just like anything else in the world, its not one-dimensional. For example, someone might switch jobs because you think its the higher offer elsewhere. But its also the burnout at the old job. Or they did not like the manager, and they also want to work with another tech stack. The higher salary is the push, but there are other lesser reasons that add into the decision as well.