8 ms·

I'm really shocked to read that (and the OP's rant about Amazon). Of course, I've never had a corporate job. It amazes me that Amazon managed to be so successf

by revorad 15y ago

I'm really shocked to read that (and the OP's rant about Amazon). Of course, I've never had a corporate job. It amazes me that Amazon managed to be so successful, despite treating their employees so badly.

bambax 15y ago
Yes, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? If those horror stories are true (and we have no reason to doubt they are), it kinda shows that the way you treat your employees doesn't really matter to your success. It certainly matters a lot to them; it matters from a moral point of view; but from a practical point of view the only individuals whose happiness matters are the customers. Of course, if your employees are so unhappy that they make your customers' life miserable, you have a problem. But Amazon is still very far from that.
- nirvana 15y ago
  Amazon internal propagand emphasizes that Amazon is a startup. "It's day one!" is a phrase I heard way too many times. They have "door desks" -- which actually cost them more than regular off the shelf furniture would-- but they pretend like they're being frugal to perpetuate the perception that they're a startup. (When I found out about the door desks costs, I was sworn to secrecy, it is very important for morale.) I think the result of this is that a lot of employees believe it. I think people generally, want something to believe in. If you give them something to believe in, and it seems plausible, and especially if its tied to their income, they'll believe it. And they'll work harder for it. It worked on me-- that's why I didn't just go back to sleep that night. That's why I stayed on for several months after that, until things became untenable for me. Hell, I was going to stay with the company, I had met the AWS team, had gotten an offer for a position there and was in the process of transferring, and only quit when that transfer was blocked! In a way, "well run" could mean that you get a lot of work out of your employees, even if they are miserable. I think optimizing for employee happiness can help you, but it isn't necessarily the only way to have high productivity.
  - rachelbythebay 15y ago
    I have an acid test for any place which claims to be a startup. When someone proclaims this, ask them to answer any two of the following questions: - What's my name? (Covering your badge, naturally) - What am I working on? - Where am I from? If the bigwigs can't answer that, I'm sorry, you've moved past actual startup-dom and you're just in la-la land where you just think you are one. Unfortunately, I only thought of this acid test after leaving a place with 30K employees which had started proclaiming it semi-regularly during their Friday get-togethers.
    - nirvana 15y ago
      My benchmark is this: If they're a startup, then I want at least %1 equity on a fully diluted basis in stock options! Also, if they're public, they're not a startup!
    - phillmv 15y ago
      Uhm, I think you lost the game when you had a BADGE to cover up.
    - Sukotto 15y ago
      If you have a name badge, it's not a startup.
    - nostrademons 15y ago
      Google never actually claims they're a startup, they just say they want to be like a startup. There're varying degrees of success at this, ranging from "if I squint really hard, I could almost see it" to "Yeah...I don't think so." But I give 'em props for trying, as most companies with 30k employees don't even make the effort. BTW, I could go all the way up to the VP level within the Search bigwigs and they'd be able to answer this.
  - tytso 15y ago
    I have to agree with your last point. IBM is a "well run" company; they take very good care of their shareholders. Some of the things they have to do in order to take care of shareholders is one of the reasons why I no longer work there. But I still hold on to my IBM stock....
- potatolicious 15y ago
  On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream of people leaving the company isn't a trickle as it is a well-managed places. It isn't even a modest stream. It's an outright deluge, particularly in this market where everyone else is desperate and willing to pay (protip: Amazon, as a rule, is not). This is starting to show itself in many places in the company. In a lot of places there are no longer any senior engineers left who know how the system works. In their place are fresh-faced college grads struggling to contend with a system they neither have the experience nor the documentation to maintain, much less extend. The average tenure of the Amazon engineer is embarrassingly short, and coupled with the company's notorious lack of documentation, it means that technical debt is accumulating at an alarming rate. There are constantly projects to completely revamp/redesign some portion of Amazon's systems. In my observation this is less about an honest improvement over the old system (sometimes there IS no improvement) but rather because nobody knows how the fuck the old thing works. The truly sad thing is, they have trouble keeping engineers around long enough to even see that redesign through. If you know where to look on Amazon's site, you would see lots of evidence of this already. Extremely deep integration into systems that literally no one still with the company understands. Tons of mission critical code whose original author is long gone, no documentation exists, and in fact the code isn't owned by any team. I've seen many hacks to work around these problems, though I doubt they'd be super apparent to the common Amazon shopper. The problem here, like many other companies in a similar stage, is that very little of Amazon's management has a technical background at this point. Bezos certainly does, and I still think he's one of the best CEOs in the industry right now, but many of his underlings... not so much. A lot of management do not see this accumulation of technical debt. Difficulties working with said debt is perceived as either "natural" difficulties of working with technology, or worse, incompetence. Amazon's internal existence is a depressing cycle of: hire people, people spend eons learning how the previous guys did it, people write code, people get fed up and leave, hire more people, people spend eons learning how the previous guys did it... If any Amazonian management is reading, I have one thing I really want to drive home: stop being so fucking "frugal" with equipment. It is a travesty that my development desktop was a Celeron worth $300 on eBay. Not because I like having the newest shiny, because I couldn't even run multiple dev environments on it, like I had to for my JOB, and building my code took 12 full minutes, instead of, say, 3. Stop shitting on your devs with dinky 5 year-old monitors and give them some screen real estate. There are plenty of studies that outright prove the productivity boost that comes with bigger monitors.
- deleted 15y ago
  [deleted]
- simplekoala 15y ago
  I kind of agree. They are at a stage, where their treatment of developers doesn't matter much. Walmart treats it employees miserably but they are doing quite well, and rakes ginormous profits. The way a company treats its employees says a lot about management. Amazon's top level management is super sharp. They are not idiots. It is not like they don't get it. The fact is they don't give a shit. As long as you are a success story, no-one really cares. If it ain't broken don't fix it. If there is an objective way to measure developer happiness across all top tech-companies, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon ends up dead last.
nirvana 15y ago
I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortunately, others there at the time have posted in the thread as well. But come back to HN in a couple weeks when AWS has done their next press release, and say that, and you'll likely be down voted to oblivion. The thing is, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos are damn good at spin. You see glowing articles that talk about Jeff as if he were a visionary, boldly leading his commerce site into the future of web services. (As I understand it, AWS was pirate operation, which got cover from a politically endowed VP in the company, and they were able to get it far enough along that Jeff saw the value of it, when he'd previously wanted to knife that baby.) Their manipulative ways extend to other people as well.. and when you're getting most of your stuff from them, and you've had good customer services, you naturally inclined to want to believe in them. People believe Amazon must be good in all ways, because they are good in one way. Amazon is really, FREAKING, good at fulfillment. Amazon prime, their return policies, their streamlined ordering policies... at this point, ordering things from other websites has so much more friction that they just feel old. "You mean I have to enter my credit card? Why don't you just sell this thing on Amazon.com and let them do it right!" I don't know how Amazon treats their stockholders. They treat their employees terribly (but they do tend to hire a mix of type-A aggressive and meek. The meek just are grateful to keep their jobs and the Type-As love the political sport). But they treat their customers damn good. And they have the fulfillment thing nailed cold. I give them respect for that.
- 0x12 15y ago
  > "You must be disgruntled" But you are disgruntled. You've got excellent reasons for being so. I always wonder why people will use things like that as stoppers for the discussion, the fact that someone is disgruntled alone should not be cause for dismissal, the underlying reasons are what matter. And you've gone over and beyond the call of duty in my opinion here and I am frankly surprised that Amazon manages to operate if they treat their employees like this.
heathkit 15y ago
My first job was at a company that I'd say was much, much worse than Amazon. Smaller, no real engineering practices, and they'd just chew through developers paying them as little as possible. Yet they made money! I was migrating a legacy system to a new platform and we got a call from an irate customer. Apparently, he had just paid us last week but now his account was shut off. The odd thing was, no one I talked to even knew what product he was talking about, or what website he was on. I checked with our payments person, and he had sent us a check, but no one knew what it was for! Eventually I tracked it down to some legacy discontinued product that had been handed off between three successive engineers who left the company, then forgotten. You don't have to treat your employees well, or even make a good product, to be successful. You just have to get people to give you money.

by revorad 15y ago

bambax 15y ago

Yes, that's kind of interesting, isn't it? If those horror stories are true (and we have no reason to doubt they are), it kinda shows that the way you treat your employees doesn't really matter to your success. It certainly matters a lot to them; it matters from a moral point of view; but from a practical point of view the only individuals whose happiness matters are the customers. Of course, if your employees are so unhappy that they make your customers' life miserable, you have a problem. But Amazon is still very far from that.

nirvana 15y ago
Amazon internal propagand emphasizes that Amazon is a startup. "It's day one!" is a phrase I heard way too many times. They have "door desks" -- which actually cost them more than regular off the shelf furniture would-- but they pretend like they're being frugal to perpetuate the perception that they're a startup. (When I found out about the door desks costs, I was sworn to secrecy, it is very important for morale.) I think the result of this is that a lot of employees believe it. I think people generally, want something to believe in. If you give them something to believe in, and it seems plausible, and especially if its tied to their income, they'll believe it. And they'll work harder for it. It worked on me-- that's why I didn't just go back to sleep that night. That's why I stayed on for several months after that, until things became untenable for me. Hell, I was going to stay with the company, I had met the AWS team, had gotten an offer for a position there and was in the process of transferring, and only quit when that transfer was blocked! In a way, "well run" could mean that you get a lot of work out of your employees, even if they are miserable. I think optimizing for employee happiness can help you, but it isn't necessarily the only way to have high productivity.
- rachelbythebay 15y ago
  I have an acid test for any place which claims to be a startup. When someone proclaims this, ask them to answer any two of the following questions: - What's my name? (Covering your badge, naturally) - What am I working on? - Where am I from? If the bigwigs can't answer that, I'm sorry, you've moved past actual startup-dom and you're just in la-la land where you just think you are one. Unfortunately, I only thought of this acid test after leaving a place with 30K employees which had started proclaiming it semi-regularly during their Friday get-togethers.
  - nirvana 15y ago
    My benchmark is this: If they're a startup, then I want at least %1 equity on a fully diluted basis in stock options! Also, if they're public, they're not a startup!
  - phillmv 15y ago
    Uhm, I think you lost the game when you had a BADGE to cover up.
  - Sukotto 15y ago
    If you have a name badge, it's not a startup.
  - nostrademons 15y ago
    Google never actually claims they're a startup, they just say they want to be like a startup. There're varying degrees of success at this, ranging from "if I squint really hard, I could almost see it" to "Yeah...I don't think so." But I give 'em props for trying, as most companies with 30k employees don't even make the effort. BTW, I could go all the way up to the VP level within the Search bigwigs and they'd be able to answer this.
- tytso 15y ago
  I have to agree with your last point. IBM is a "well run" company; they take very good care of their shareholders. Some of the things they have to do in order to take care of shareholders is one of the reasons why I no longer work there. But I still hold on to my IBM stock....
potatolicious 15y ago
On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually). Attrition at Amazon is at horrific rates. I know the actual number, though I'm pretty sure that'd violate my NDA to reveal. It's high. It's really high. Guess a really truly terrible number. It's probably higher than that. The stream of people leaving the company isn't a trickle as it is a well-managed places. It isn't even a modest stream. It's an outright deluge, particularly in this market where everyone else is desperate and willing to pay (protip: Amazon, as a rule, is not). This is starting to show itself in many places in the company. In a lot of places there are no longer any senior engineers left who know how the system works. In their place are fresh-faced college grads struggling to contend with a system they neither have the experience nor the documentation to maintain, much less extend. The average tenure of the Amazon engineer is embarrassingly short, and coupled with the company's notorious lack of documentation, it means that technical debt is accumulating at an alarming rate. There are constantly projects to completely revamp/redesign some portion of Amazon's systems. In my observation this is less about an honest improvement over the old system (sometimes there IS no improvement) but rather because nobody knows how the fuck the old thing works. The truly sad thing is, they have trouble keeping engineers around long enough to even see that redesign through. If you know where to look on Amazon's site, you would see lots of evidence of this already. Extremely deep integration into systems that literally no one still with the company understands. Tons of mission critical code whose original author is long gone, no documentation exists, and in fact the code isn't owned by any team. I've seen many hacks to work around these problems, though I doubt they'd be super apparent to the common Amazon shopper. The problem here, like many other companies in a similar stage, is that very little of Amazon's management has a technical background at this point. Bezos certainly does, and I still think he's one of the best CEOs in the industry right now, but many of his underlings... not so much. A lot of management do not see this accumulation of technical debt. Difficulties working with said debt is perceived as either "natural" difficulties of working with technology, or worse, incompetence. Amazon's internal existence is a depressing cycle of: hire people, people spend eons learning how the previous guys did it, people write code, people get fed up and leave, hire more people, people spend eons learning how the previous guys did it... If any Amazonian management is reading, I have one thing I really want to drive home: stop being so fucking "frugal" with equipment. It is a travesty that my development desktop was a Celeron worth $300 on eBay. Not because I like having the newest shiny, because I couldn't even run multiple dev environments on it, like I had to for my JOB, and building my code took 12 full minutes, instead of, say, 3. Stop shitting on your devs with dinky 5 year-old monitors and give them some screen real estate. There are plenty of studies that outright prove the productivity boost that comes with bigger monitors.
deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
simplekoala 15y ago
I kind of agree. They are at a stage, where their treatment of developers doesn't matter much. Walmart treats it employees miserably but they are doing quite well, and rakes ginormous profits. The way a company treats its employees says a lot about management. Amazon's top level management is super sharp. They are not idiots. It is not like they don't get it. The fact is they don't give a shit. As long as you are a success story, no-one really cares. If it ain't broken don't fix it. If there is an objective way to measure developer happiness across all top tech-companies, I wouldn't be surprised if Amazon ends up dead last.

nirvana 15y ago

I've thought a lot about this. In part because, you can't generally say anything bad about Amazon without being attacked. "You must be disgruntled" etc. I only made my post because I had the cover of Steve Yegge saying very similar things (Though I went into more detail.) Most people believe Amazon's press releases. In 2006, they said that AWS powered Amazon.com. It was a flat out lie. But how could I prove it? Fortunately, others there at the time have posted in the thread as well. But come back to HN in a couple weeks when AWS has done their next press release, and say that, and you'll likely be down voted to oblivion. The thing is, Amazon, and Jeff Bezos are damn good at spin. You see glowing articles that talk about Jeff as if he were a visionary, boldly leading his commerce site into the future of web services. (As I understand it, AWS was pirate operation, which got cover from a politically endowed VP in the company, and they were able to get it far enough along that Jeff saw the value of it, when he'd previously wanted to knife that baby.) Their manipulative ways extend to other people as well.. and when you're getting most of your stuff from them, and you've had good customer services, you naturally inclined to want to believe in them. People believe Amazon must be good in all ways, because they are good in one way. Amazon is really, FREAKING, good at fulfillment. Amazon prime, their return policies, their streamlined ordering policies... at this point, ordering things from other websites has so much more friction that they just feel old. "You mean I have to enter my credit card? Why don't you just sell this thing on Amazon.com and let them do it right!" I don't know how Amazon treats their stockholders. They treat their employees terribly (but they do tend to hire a mix of type-A aggressive and meek. The meek just are grateful to keep their jobs and the Type-As love the political sport). But they treat their customers damn good. And they have the fulfillment thing nailed cold. I give them respect for that.

0x12 15y ago
> "You must be disgruntled" But you are disgruntled. You've got excellent reasons for being so. I always wonder why people will use things like that as stoppers for the discussion, the fact that someone is disgruntled alone should not be cause for dismissal, the underlying reasons are what matter. And you've gone over and beyond the call of duty in my opinion here and I am frankly surprised that Amazon manages to operate if they treat their employees like this.

heathkit 15y ago

My first job was at a company that I'd say was much, much worse than Amazon. Smaller, no real engineering practices, and they'd just chew through developers paying them as little as possible. Yet they made money! I was migrating a legacy system to a new platform and we got a call from an irate customer. Apparently, he had just paid us last week but now his account was shut off. The odd thing was, no one I talked to even knew what product he was talking about, or what website he was on. I checked with our payments person, and he had sent us a check, but no one knew what it was for! Eventually I tracked it down to some legacy discontinued product that had been handed off between three successive engineers who left the company, then forgotten. You don't have to treat your employees well, or even make a good product, to be successful. You just have to get people to give you money.