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As a Googler I was approached by Amazon, and when I started to look at the culture, a photo came out with Jeff Bezos using a door because he was too ,,frugal’’
by xiphias2 5y ago
As a Googler I was approached by Amazon, and when I started to look at the culture, a photo came out with Jeff Bezos using a door because he was too ,,frugal’’ to buy a desk… I would never join an office where people are proud of that.
- missedthecue 5y agoAmazon today and Amazon in 1996 are two different things.
- xiphias2 5y agoIt may be true, but the perception didn't change much (and the glassdoor scores are still bad). I love Amazon as a customer though
- strikelaserclaw 5y agothis the dude who just bought a 500mm yacht?
- awestley 5y agoWhat is that? A yacht for ants?
- hangonhn 5y agoThe yacht has to be at least.... three times bigger than this!
- whoomp12342 5y agoworth 500 million after he graced it with his presence. Its a repurposed shipping container
- heavyset_go 5y agoSays a lot that they need to trot out an old photo to keep the myth alive.
- zoolily 5y agoThat is one tiny yacht. (-;
- khazhoux 5y agoEven Stonehenge is larger
- anonporridge 5y agoTo be fair, that's a smaller fraction of his wealth than almost everyone spends on a car.
- padobson 5y agoHow many people do you think it took to build that yacht?
- xxpor 5y agoSeems pretty easy to me to differentiate someone's personal spending from their business values.
- DesiLurker 5y agosounds like roundabout way of saying being super stingy with employees so he can live large. pretty much in line with everything else I know about Amazon/Bezos.
- xdennis 5y agoIs that the size of the main gun?
- QuarterReptile 5y agoThat would be just slightly larger than the largest (modern) naval gun ever fielded (on the Yamato in WW2).
- throwhauser 5y agoI don't think improvised desks are inappropriate for early-stage startups, especially in the 1990s. Apple started in Steve Jobs parents garage.
- krinchan 5y agoYeah but when I interviewed on site in Seattle for the S3 DevOps team, they kept bringing up how they all use cheap doors on concrete blocks for their desks to remind themselves of that “frugality” and that was just the first red flag of how weird their top-down corporate culture was at the time. This was in 2010.
- koboll 5y agoRight, but Amazon isn't an early-stage startup. It's a tech giant that wants all the employee-squeezing benefits of being an early-stage startup: sacrifice your life and comfort for the sake of the company. It's Day One, after all. The problem is that what makes that sacrifice potentially worth it at an early-stage startup is the potential for equity before hypergrowth. Amazon has virtually no chance of startup-like hypergrowth anymore; recently its stock has even started declining. So employees are being asked to provide outsized sacrifice for declining returns. Predictably, massive resignation and retention problems are the result.
- dgemm 5y agoThe door desk story you are commenting on is from the 1990s.
- hobo_mark 5y agoGoogle started the same way: > Brin and Page filled the garage with desks made of old pine doors set on sawhorses, a turquoise shag carpet, and a Ping-Pong table. https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-rosenberg-affair https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2014/04/sergey-brin-amanda-...
- mikeyouse 5y agoBrin and Page plausibly could have needed to do so since they were grad students when they founded Google.. Bezos was a SVP at a hedge fund before starting Amazon. Slightly different circumstances. Made a good marketing / "culture" shibboleth though.
- azemetre 5y agoI mean there's nothing wrong with this. A solid wooden door is nearly the perfect desk size and width. I feel like the OP was being a little too drastic, there are many reasons to dislike Amazon but one being that Bezos used a door as a table is a little out there.
- somebodythere 5y agoI use a door as a desk at home. With some finishing it looks as good as a solid wooden desk, and its much sturdier and nicer feeling than a plastic desk, while being the same price.
- foobarian 5y agoHonestly, a proper solid wooden door may well cost a lot more than a cheap folding table. Yes, missing the point, I know :-)
- d136o 5y agoJeff was even an early google investor, maybe the door desk idea got around… https://www.growthink.com/content/story-jeff-bezos-250000-investment-google-1998 https://www.growthink.com/content/story-jeff-bezos-250000-in...
- deltaonefour 5y ago
- mattferderer 5y agoYou may enjoy this article that argues the door desks were both more expensive & possibly more about marketing an idea to employees than actually saving money - https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_the_amazon_door-desk https://glog.glennf.com/blog/2011/10/16/the_true_story_of_th... Either way the door desk is an interesting piece of tech history.
- iso1210 5y agoSorry I can't picture this - had he taken it off it's hinges and put it on a couple of stools?
- dehrmann 5y agohttps://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/how-a-door-became-a-desk-and-a-symbol-of-amazon https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/workplace/how-a-door-became...
- yumraj 5y agoAm curios if the Google founders were frugal in their early days or not.. BTW, a frugal startup is better any day than a startup that blows up all its cash on unimportant activities and subsequently closes shop.
- bluedino 5y ago'Frugality' is an Amazon core value.
- lostcolony 5y agoThat's one of my issues with Amazon. 'Frugality' invites so many idiocies and abuses that I can't help but assume it's penny wise/pound foolish in practice, as well as lots of ill will.
- jeffbee 5y agoAs a Xoogler I would have been very pleased indeed with a door-sized desk instead of the little A4-sized desks they were cramming everyone on when I left in 2018. The downward trend of personal space in the industry has been awful. As a part-time undergraduate sysadmin I had a private office. At my first commercial job in the 90s I had a door on filing cabinets. My last desk at Google wasn't even big enough for my display and laptop at the same time. The only bright side of permanent WFH, IMHO.
- xiphias2 5y agoSure, open offices were a disaster, I was mostly working at Google until 2013, and when I joined again later, all the walls were taken out to ,,save space''. I also think WFH is the only way to go at this point.
- AlwaysRock 5y agoWhat a weirdly specific issue to have. Almost every company will have stories like this where founders were being scrappy or wanted to be perceived as scrappy.
- Tempest1981 5y agoAren't plastic Costco tables now the new door desk, for startups? Maybe due to earthquake safety?
- sparrc 5y agoGenuinely interested...Why does that bother you? I think it's well-known that Amazon doesn't provide in-house meals and haircuts and kombucha like many of the SV companies. Personally it's something I appreciate because it makes the area around the office a bit more lively with more foot traffic and private businesses catering to the office workers.