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Wow congrats on making $300K doing nothing! I realized this is very much the culture in Amazon now. Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts peo

by lvl102 4y ago

Wow congrats on making $300K doing nothing! I realized this is very much the culture in Amazon now. Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture.

currio 4y ago
> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more Thats most (big) tech companies
- lvl102 4y ago
  Amazon is going to rot from the inside by the MBAs they hired to run the company instead of engineers.
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    having worked there for shy of a year (not in AWS, by random placement), i think your verb tense is true but misses the fact it long has been rotting. but they exact a huge "tax" on items sold on the site, so they can survive incompetence for quite some time.
nawgz 4y ago
People who pan individuals in a capitalist society for taking high-paying jobs make no sense to me. You assume people that like to have financial security have what culture about them exactly? Pragmatism? Realism?
mataug 4y ago
> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture. Are you suggesting that because the pay is high the culture of Amazon is bad ? Why is working for money a bad thing ? Everyone is selling their time in exchange for money. The primary reason for Amazon's bad culture is the management, and their insistance on firing 6% of workers each year[1]. This creates a culture where the people who understand this system well will actively sabotage newbies and naive devs to avoid getting canned. A lucky few with good VPs and directors may have a good experience overall, but at some point the Amazon culture catches up to everyone, except the executives who don't face the same pressures. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-percent-of-office-workers-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-...
- lvl102 4y ago
  No that’s not my point at all. If you’re in that category of engineers who basically chase money and work as little as you can instead of chasing projects that align with your passion, well, Amazon is probably where you will go. Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it completely sours the culture and it becomes an irreversible black hole.
  - amazonthrow1231 4y ago
    It's entirely possible to chase both of those things. :)
    - lvl102 4y ago
      And of course you can but usually the money just follows along. And I've not met a single person in my life who works two hours a day on his/her passion. None. Edit: correction it was two hours per WEEK.
      - nawgz 4y ago
        Yeah, because most people spend 0 hours a day working on their passion, instead exchanging hard time doing an activity they hate for too little money. Working 2 hours a day for a fat paycheck sounds like a better way to enable yourself to spend time on your passions than deluding yourself into the belief that the capitalist entity extracting multiples of your TC as value for itself is enabling you to "follow your passion" while you work
        ensan 4y ago
        What I have observed is that in Silicon Valley culture, when compensation becomes your defining identity, you can’t ever be satisfied with yourself if someone else with similar accomplishments makes more money than you. Also, many of people actually like their jobs. But a lot of developer jobs especially at big companies are fundamentally boring hence the unstoppable chase of higher TC and the desperate need for hobbies.
lotsofpulp 4y ago
> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture. Do you think this is less prevalent at lower labor prices?
ab_testing 4y ago
I would bet, for most of the people, money is what they work for. To keep a roof on their head and be able to afford food.
JumpCrisscross 4y ago
> doing nothing Every person I know who earns well "working" for 2 to ten hours a week spends a good fraction of their "free" time doing things that make those hours hyper productive. It could be as direct as a developer working on software side projects. More often, it's tangential. Working on demanding problems. Comfort with the unfamiliar. Mind you, none of this is done for that purpose. But when you watch someone who couldn't keep their office plants alive for ten minutes noodle, for a week, through designing and building a smart irrigation and remote soil chemistry monitoring system for a backyard pot farm, it makes sense why, when they look at a problem in a domain they're experts in, decades of parameter space can be searched and resolved in seconds.

by lvl102 4y ago

currio 4y ago

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more Thats most (big) tech companies

lvl102 4y ago
Amazon is going to rot from the inside by the MBAs they hired to run the company instead of engineers.
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  having worked there for shy of a year (not in AWS, by random placement), i think your verb tense is true but misses the fact it long has been rotting. but they exact a huge "tax" on items sold on the site, so they can survive incompetence for quite some time.

nawgz 4y ago

People who pan individuals in a capitalist society for taking high-paying jobs make no sense to me. You assume people that like to have financial security have what culture about them exactly? Pragmatism? Realism?

mataug 4y ago

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture. Are you suggesting that because the pay is high the culture of Amazon is bad ? Why is working for money a bad thing ? Everyone is selling their time in exchange for money. The primary reason for Amazon's bad culture is the management, and their insistance on firing 6% of workers each year[1]. This creates a culture where the people who understand this system well will actively sabotage newbies and naive devs to avoid getting canned. A lucky few with good VPs and directors may have a good experience overall, but at some point the Amazon culture catches up to everyone, except the executives who don't face the same pressures. [1]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-percent-of-office-workers-2021-6 https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-...

lvl102 4y ago
No that’s not my point at all. If you’re in that category of engineers who basically chase money and work as little as you can instead of chasing projects that align with your passion, well, Amazon is probably where you will go. Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it completely sours the culture and it becomes an irreversible black hole.
- amazonthrow1231 4y ago
  It's entirely possible to chase both of those things. :)
  - lvl102 4y ago
    And of course you can but usually the money just follows along. And I've not met a single person in my life who works two hours a day on his/her passion. None. Edit: correction it was two hours per WEEK.
    - nawgz 4y ago
      Yeah, because most people spend 0 hours a day working on their passion, instead exchanging hard time doing an activity they hate for too little money. Working 2 hours a day for a fat paycheck sounds like a better way to enable yourself to spend time on your passions than deluding yourself into the belief that the capitalist entity extracting multiples of your TC as value for itself is enabling you to "follow your passion" while you work
      - ensan 4y ago
        What I have observed is that in Silicon Valley culture, when compensation becomes your defining identity, you can’t ever be satisfied with yourself if someone else with similar accomplishments makes more money than you. Also, many of people actually like their jobs. But a lot of developer jobs especially at big companies are fundamentally boring hence the unstoppable chase of higher TC and the desperate need for hobbies.

lotsofpulp 4y ago

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture. Do you think this is less prevalent at lower labor prices?

ab_testing 4y ago

I would bet, for most of the people, money is what they work for. To keep a roof on their head and be able to afford food.

JumpCrisscross 4y ago

> doing nothing Every person I know who earns well "working" for 2 to ten hours a week spends a good fraction of their "free" time doing things that make those hours hyper productive. It could be as direct as a developer working on software side projects. More often, it's tangential. Working on demanding problems. Comfort with the unfamiliar. Mind you, none of this is done for that purpose. But when you watch someone who couldn't keep their office plants alive for ten minutes noodle, for a week, through designing and building a smart irrigation and remote soil chemistry monitoring system for a backyard pot farm, it makes sense why, when they look at a problem in a domain they're experts in, decades of parameter space can be searched and resolved in seconds.