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It's funny to see new waves of Amazon developers discover year after year after year that they work in a shit engineering culture. No, nothing has changed in th

• vinnymac 3y ago
  I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and getting to see the sun. Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
  • throwaway8877 3y ago
    Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not fair.
    • ambicapter 3y ago
      Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not fair.
    • laidoffamazon 3y ago
      In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.
      • khazhoux 3y ago
        Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.
        • laidoffamazon 3y ago
          Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get offers and thus have many choices.
      • shermantanktop 3y ago
        My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are good or great. Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach. Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university. And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo. Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.
        • laidoffamazon 3y ago
          This sounds like a Google experience - not something that happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor joined Amazon again after complaining.
          • shermantanktop 3y ago
            I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened there as well.
        • analognoise 3y ago
          > e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!” Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.
    • goostavos 3y ago
      I quit and went back. "Boomerangs" are extremely common. The golden handcuffs are hard to shed. Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.
      • mjr00 3y ago
        > Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people. yep, working at Amazon (AWS specifically) is like playing for the 2000/10s Patriots. Belicheck will work you to the bone and indoctrinate you into the AWS Leadership Princip... er, I mean the "Patriot Way", and your SVP Tom Brady will chew you out in the "correction of error" process. But if you want to be at a place where people want to win at all costs--with all of the pros and cons that entails--there's no better place to be. Amazon hate comes from people who don't see a problem with getting the Washington Commanders giving you a $100 million contract to put in the bare minimum effort. To some people that's a dream deal, but not for everyone. To each their own.
        • caslon 3y ago
          Given the average tenure of an NFL player is relatively short, wouldn't it make more sense to go for what would offer the highest reward with lowest CTE risk? A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars. Washington doesn't even have income tax.
          • finnh 3y ago
            The "Washington" in "Washington Commanders" is Washington, DC. Not Washington State (which has no income tax).
          • mjr00 3y ago
            That's what I mean, it depends on what the "highest reward" means for each person. $100m is $100m, but what's Tom Brady remembered for, and what's Albert Haynesworth remembered for? One is near-unanimously considered the greatest of all time, and the other is known for being one of the worst free agent acquisitions of all time. They both have more money than they know what to do with, but one probably feels a bit better about his career. This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine too! There's room on the planet for both types of companies, thankfully.
  • hef19898 3y ago
    Oh, Amazon absolutely is cut throat and ruthless. But always within the law, never caught cheating. And it moves incredible fast at incredible scale, so you learn more in a year there than you do in 5 elsewhere. Some people are repulsed by that, others drawn to it and some thrive under these conditions. Heck, I really enjoy my life and job after Amazon. And still I miss the speed, the fast feedback on decisions and actions, the laser focused pursuit of a common goal, ruthlessly focused on efficiency, risk and details. Thought about going back there myself, lucky I didn't. Propably wouod have been equally lucky if I did. Amazon is a peculiar place.
    • milkshakes 3y ago
      amazon seems to be the place where the worst leaders i've experienced who have been forced out of the organizations i've been a part of all inevitably wind up. based on this, i don't think i'd ever like to work there.
      • hef19898 3y ago
        Usually, people quality follows a normally distributed curve at any place I worked that had enougj peoole in each grouo to make it mathematically work. Amazon transfromed tgat, IMHO, into a bathtub curve, really great (and ruthless, driven, qualified) folks at the top end, then nothing, finally those only checking one of the above mentioned boxes and offsetting the others with excelling at politics. S I said, a peculiar place. Something else I learned the very hard way: what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective. That being said, realizing Amazon is not a place for you before joining is the best thing you can do. I have seen my fair share of people that realized after being hired, and for them the place was hell. Careerwise, and I explicity talk about white collar folks, Amazon had no negative impact on them. But going through personell hell 50+ hours a week for months until ypu found something else or you are let go during probation is torture. I know, I had the same thing after Amazon once, it sucks and drains you dry.
        • milkshakes 3y ago
          > what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective. for myself, and the organizations i worked for, it was about results. these leaders swooped in from other prestigeous organizations, introduced toxic politics to completely disrupt existing cultures and working processes, and in the end, for all that drama, they never delivered
• chris_wot 3y ago
  I hate to say this, but I genuinely think customers are going to find AWS become more unreliable as time goes on. It seems to me that you can have high levels of reliability, a great working culture and high levels of staffing, but if you mess with any one of these elements you will find the wheels start falling off the train.
  • arrakeenrevived 3y ago
    I think this is true of any company. As things get larger, red tape increases, and the mess of spaghetti code and complexity/inter-dependencies of systems means it gets harder and harder for any one person or team to fully understand the environment and avoid/recover from issues. I actually think that the "pizza team" model in Amazon can help mitigate this, as each individual team operates as its own entity that is discouraged from relying on other teams for uptime... but this is only effective to a point.
    • chris_wot 3y ago
      As the article points out, this is a very expensive way of operating and requires very high headcount. They don’t want mass layoffs because of the cost of doing so, thus they employ the unethical tactic of making life miserable for the ones they would have tried to lay off. What it also means is that they can use younger and cheaper workers. They can also outsource their work. Thus my concerns about reliability. It seems like a house of cards. I truly wonder for how long they can keep this up. Given our reliance on cloud computing and their prominent position within it, it may become a very rocky ride at some point for businesses who have transitioned their operational infrastructure to AWS. I think a lot of people treat AWS as an infinite resource that will never run out and will be completely reliable forever. I think, sadly, many organisations may get a shock some time into the near future.
      • pylua 3y ago
        Here is maybe an uncomfortable truth for software engineers: it’s more efficient from a cost perspective to just something out there that is good enough, even if it makes no logical sense and is a mess. Maintainability and readability are best solved through brute force hiring instead of better practices.
• arrakeenrevived 3y ago
  Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last several years to now not allowing it.
  • paxys 3y ago
    Company culture can change over time but that does not mean it will change for the better over time. The problems I mentioned - cutthroat culture, stack ranking, PIPs, forced cuts, high attrition - have all been a thing at Amazon for at least the last 15 years.
    • arrakeenrevived 3y ago
      I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in context of this article. The article doesn't mention most of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.
      • paxys 3y ago
        The mass layoffs were 1.7% of the company, and the author himself says they didn't have much of an impact. It's no different than what every other big tech company did, and their numbers were a lot worse. The rest of what he talks about ("Making them miserable and silently sacking them.") is what I'm referencing. RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift. Amazon has never been an employee friendly company. Forcing people to quit when a department's salary gets too much or when they are nearing their 3rd or 4th year vesting periods is basically part of the manager handbook over there.
        • 3y ago
• iLoveOncall 3y ago
  That's not true though. I've been working there for 6 years and the scale at which layoffs have been happening since 2022 is unparalleled to what has happened in the past. There may have been some rare team closures here and there before, but people could easily join another team and it was a rare event anyway. Now, since 2022 it has been massive team shutdowns with hundreds of people laid off every time, while there is a hiring freeze in the whole company. And this will continue in 2024. Amazon always had a cutthroat culture but at least if you were good (aka not PIPed) you knew you'd fine another team and weren't worried about not having a job the next day. This is not the case anymore.
  • Kephael 3y ago
    Google has been doing the same thing. The fact is that these companies simply have too many employees and they aren't able to properly utilize everyone.
• laidoffamazon 3y ago
  And yet… it’s one of the most highly valued companies on the planet, and a clear #1 in cloud services.
  • Podgajski 3y ago
    This is a really ignorant comment. Of course this number one because the big money gets in early and gets out early. All the suckers are left behind. Financial capitalism doesn’t care about companies, It cares about profit.
    • laidoffamazon 3y ago
      There’s no evidence of a big money exodus. The only potential company to leave for is Azure.
      • Podgajski 3y ago
        There’s no evidence of a big money exodus….YET.
      • randerson 3y ago
        Or more companies can realize that they can be almost as productive on their own hardware as they can in The Cloud but at a fraction of the cost.
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    Blackberry was at its most valuable 2 years after the iPhone came out and a year before Android was released.
    • laidoffamazon 3y ago
      If there was a cloud equivalent to the iPhone I feel like I would have heard about it. It could have been Kubernetes, but it hasn’t been. Maybe it’s them being behind on GenAI. Of course all of the OpenAI competition is trained on commodity cloud services that are basically lift and ship to any cloud with GPU capacity - so Amazon is at worst in the middle of the pack.
• lbrito 3y ago
  "it wasn't like this X years ago. It is a shame you joined at this time." Heard that multiple times during my short tenure. Always smelled like bs to me.
  • fnordpiglet 3y ago
    Well, another option is it’s true and it’s monotonically getting worse. From my time at aws, it appears to be that’s the case. It was better X years ago, and it will be worse at X+n years for all values of n and X.
    • refulgentis 3y ago
      Same at Google - was there from 2016 to 2023. And i strongly believe everyone at BigCo underwent a step-change in 2023. I do give the VP in TFA some credit for trying to give shelter and time. Google went rancid, you'd go to work one morning, get an unannounced event on your calendar, and be informed as a group you were locked out of everything except the internal job posting site and had 8 weeks to find a job. Meanwhile everyone had negative headcount. I've heard at least two dozen stories like that personally. Another effect is best communicated by a quote: "there's a fuck you got mine attitude." The internal peer support group i was a location lead for was overwhelmed by people with just bonkers stories of aggression and antisocial behavior from middle management punching down. I heard so many stories that wouldn't have gone down at even the strangest and most inexperienced startups I worked at. (Hiring friends with 0 experience, outright lying, pushing out people) The bullwhip effect of management not really needing to learn to capital-M manage and now being asked to really exposed a lot of issues. Breaks my heart. (I left because of this)
      • LargeTomato 3y ago
        Many managers don't know how to handle firings/layoffs and there's little incentive to because you're gone after the event anyway.
    • belter 3y ago
      "This year was worst than last year...But it will be better than next Year..."
• ajkjk 3y ago
  It is true now, and has always been true, that parts of the company are healthy places to work and parts are not. Despite the 'all bad' narrative you see around here. Not to defend Amazon, I mean, they ought to just get it to all be good and of course they won't. But it's annoying having to argue about this all the time instead of everyone just understanding that it's a mixed bag and which org you end up in counts for everything.
  • gdiamos 3y ago
    It’s great to win, until you lose.
  • scarface_74 3y ago
    Amazon will always eventually Amazon.
  • arrakeenrevived 3y ago
    Maybe this is true for many parts of Amazon culture, but the big factor recently is that the RTO mandate is company-wide. With very few exceptions, it doesn't matter what org you're in, RTO affects you, and can have a drastic change on the entire company's culture.
  • pas 3y ago
    > which org you end up in counts for everything maybe... then maybe it's time to name those orgs instead of just weaving their legendarium web...
  • snotrockets 3y ago
    Every big enough company, is, for those not on the c-suite, a collection of 1000s of different companies with a single HR department.
  • reducesuffering 3y ago
    And it's also annoying to argue that "it's a mixed bag" is not an excuse for Amazon being in general or on average a huge step worse in terms of work life balance and pleasantness. You are much more likely to end up in a more excruciating role than the average software co.
• belter 3y ago
  Even more funny to see a Developer still employed at Amazon publicly bashing his Company and Manager on a public blog. The Next one-on-one will be embarrassiiiiiing...
  • lambdasquirrel 3y ago
    He knows he’s been laid off. His managers through the VP level know they’re done for as well.
  • refulgentis 3y ago
    It's not his manager, VP might as well be on the moon. They're people who were in early enough or have enough experience to have their job be arguing about other creatures of their species re: things like headcount. That's why blogs completely fine blasting him, the whole overarching point is the VP's sociopathic nonsense (firing-not-firing-but-you-better-get-a-job is so VP can keep headcount) is in the way of OP's goal. (getting on paper "you're fired" so he can get severance). The more awkward the next 1:1 is with the VP (which will never happen, people are by and large cowards), the more likely it is reality has asserted itself and the VP can't keep lying to his employees to avoid getting in trouble with HR.
• deleted 3y ago
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