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I live very near here - the area used to house a proud Jaguar Cars manufacturing plant. It's distasteful to know that Amazon have come here, and are doing their

I live very near here - the area used to house a proud Jaguar Cars manufacturing plant. It's distasteful to know that Amazon have come here, and are doing their union busting tricks here too. When Amazon has software engineering recruiters contact me, this stuff, distasteful practices like this are in the forefront of my mind. When people are wondering why AWS or Alexa or other Amazon's products seem clunky or behind, I suspect a big problem they have is retaining talent, because from everything I've read, it seems that their employees are treated badly. They say they obsess over customer satisfaction, but it seems that this does not extend to employee satisfaction. Unfortunately, I am a customer of theirs and stuff like this makes me want to get as far away from their products as I can, and many of them are overall of sufficiently reasonable quality, that I have not yet. But stuff like this happening, almost on my door step is a good reminder to look at alternatives even with the friction from switching.

crabbone 2y ago
I haven't worked for Amazon, but have a few acquaintances who work there at different levels of hierarchy (but not very high-level execs). To comment on quality: Amazon software divisions have very few QAs per developer compared to many other large software corporations. This doesn't really mean they test less, it just means their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated to people with less ability and less aptitude. Most developers would be afraid of their resume mentioning a QA position, as that would imply some sort of deficiency. So, the reason isn't really the lack of testing or even as you suggested, talent retention (Google does even worse than AWS at this, for example), it's low morale. Also, when Amazon first came to Israel, for example, they didn't just offer competitive compensation, they beat everyone, even very high-paying places by something like 25%. It took petitioning them and signatures of a lot of local / international companies to get them to tone it down, as they would've disrupted local job market substantially and have a lot of local employers in a pickle. So, at least, on this front, Amazon invests into talent. From yet another perspective: Amazon, from the inside, looks more like a typical US s/w company. That is, lots of red tape, IT department that's trying to make developers' life miserable. Rigid hierarchy. Orders come from above, feedback never propagates back to the management. In other words: they pay a lot, but want you to shut up and do what you are told, don't get creative, don't challenge the PRD, or you might not do so well in the yearly review.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated They need reminding that testing != QA.
a_vanderbilt 2y ago
I was contracted with AWS to provide engineering support during their Blink acquisition, back when that was news. It was horrible. While my boss was great, the same couldn't be said for some of the others I had to work with. All around very high stress for everyone, which I think caused a lot of interpersonal conflict. I quit after three months.

crabbone 2y ago

I haven't worked for Amazon, but have a few acquaintances who work there at different levels of hierarchy (but not very high-level execs). To comment on quality: Amazon software divisions have very few QAs per developer compared to many other large software corporations. This doesn't really mean they test less, it just means their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated to people with less ability and less aptitude. Most developers would be afraid of their resume mentioning a QA position, as that would imply some sort of deficiency. So, the reason isn't really the lack of testing or even as you suggested, talent retention (Google does even worse than AWS at this, for example), it's low morale. Also, when Amazon first came to Israel, for example, they didn't just offer competitive compensation, they beat everyone, even very high-paying places by something like 25%. It took petitioning them and signatures of a lot of local / international companies to get them to tone it down, as they would've disrupted local job market substantially and have a lot of local employers in a pickle. So, at least, on this front, Amazon invests into talent. From yet another perspective: Amazon, from the inside, looks more like a typical US s/w company. That is, lots of red tape, IT department that's trying to make developers' life miserable. Rigid hierarchy. Orders come from above, feedback never propagates back to the management. In other words: they pay a lot, but want you to shut up and do what you are told, don't get creative, don't challenge the PRD, or you might not do so well in the yearly review.

chrisjj 2y ago
> their developers are tasked more with testing. And... they don't like it. Frankly, we've developed s/w development culture in which QA is relegated They need reminding that testing != QA.

a_vanderbilt 2y ago

I was contracted with AWS to provide engineering support during their Blink acquisition, back when that was news. It was horrible. While my boss was great, the same couldn't be said for some of the others I had to work with. All around very high stress for everyone, which I think caused a lot of interpersonal conflict. I quit after three months.