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It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are bei

by MCRed 12y ago

It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. The people building things like amazon movies are being taken off of key things like product search. Bugs I fixed there were regressed in later years and are still broken-- this is key product sales bugs that are still there. The team I was on that wrote the code got dissipated away. Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook. Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever. I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company. If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either. My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result! Company is pretty much a joke. I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)

serge2k 12y ago
> He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- MCRed 12y ago
  WOW. From interacting with him on bug reports, I'm surprised to read that. I think the problem was he was never a practicing engineer, so he didn't understand things like unit tests, the fact that we need to fix a bug in october, or make a change in october for the thanksgiving weekend-- we got told to defer on something that he then filed a ticket for the middle of the night before thanksgiving. Etc.
bederoso 12y ago
Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it. Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid or what I work on, they are there to support the business and are accountants, financial managers, etc. > It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. Who isn't? Most companies are short on talented engineers. > Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. Shows how little you know about the company. Instant Video is huge, Website is huge, other/restricted projects are huge, and there are a lot of engineers on all those teams. Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are. > If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer. > All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least). The other points you make are either subjective or anecdotes, but overall I think you just hate the company for some reason and are spilling every negative interaction you ever had. I truly hope talented people don't buy on your negativity. Amazon is definitely not a terrible place to work at, even though it does have some problems (what company doesn't?).
- LunaSea 12y ago
  The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-UEZdQ4D9zd883gw8tn3D&show_recommendations=true https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1... and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.
  - 12y ago
franze 12y ago
book recommendation: "Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life" Barry Oshry http://books.google.at/books/about/Seeing_Systems.html?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC http://books.google.at/books/about/Seeing_Systems.html?id=wt... and read read the sections "pinball" & "manager of the heart" now http://books.google.at/books?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.at/books?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC&pg=PA3&source=g...
jasonlotito 12y ago
> I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless of what else you have to say, this type of commentary is what hurts conversation. Clearly, you are wrong about the culture of HN.
- MCRed 12y ago
  I'm wrong about the culture of HN? I've been on this site since 2006 or 2007. I've earned 5,000+ karma on most of my previous accounts. Everyone of them was shadowbanned at one point or another. In one case I linked to a scientific paper about global warming that does not agree with global warming hysterics. That was the only post in several months at the time and the only commentary I added was "these guys disagree!"..... shadowbanned. For linking to a peer reviewed paper! Another time, the last comment was talking about how I had met Grace Hopper. Nothing negative in it, Nothing "childish". Just relating how she gave me a "nanosecond". Shadowbanned. I stopped putting effort into this site for several years because of that-- why try to discuss things with an extremely ideological and narrow minded group (which HN really is) if you're going to get banned for disagreeing? I only created this account because I don't care. I do expect to get shadowboxed because the moderators of this site, in my experience, are unethical. But of course, those who believe in rigid narrow minded censorship are incentivized to believe that all those who were shadowbanned were being "childish". Because of course you want to believe you're broad minded and that criticizing Amazon is allowed, and the like. (Hey maybe it is, so far I've been allowed to.... but that's the thing about arbitrary shadow bans, you can't know what's verboten and what's allowed.)
  - FD3SA 12y ago
    My experience matches yours precisely. Certain viewpoints here are ruthlessly censored, to the point of insanity. The justification is always "that is so wrong as to be offensive", which of course is absurd to a community that purportedly values free speech. If the views are so absurd, why not allow them to stand and be downvoted? Why the need to flag and ban? For example, regarding the Pao issue, numerous reaction articles from differing viewpoints were instantly flagkilled. I find that HN is a group of clever people who conform an extremely narrow ideology.
GabrielF00 12y ago
When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.
- txru 12y ago
  I'd say most people here are concerned about the engineers. The culture around the warehouses is pretty well understood, from my experience. Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors. Also, people make similar generalizations all the time around small towns and neighborhoods (with often dubious accuracy, sure), but the only difference is one's structure develops bottom-up, and the other top-down.
  - MCRed 12y ago
    And culture comes from the top. Right from Jeff Bezo himself. One of the things that has since become a red flag for me is that Amazon is very cult like.
- MCRed 12y ago
  When you work in PacMed, where the entire company was basically located at the time, you pretty much rub elbows with people across all departments (literally, you're stuffed in there so close) and so you can make sweeping generalizations about the engineering team behind Amazon.com. Without making any comments about warehouse workers and the like. Which is what I did. This is also not one persons perspective, but a common perspective in Seattle, so common that I knew about it in 1996, repeatedly heard horror sorries for the next 10 years ,and still went to work there after hearing horror stories from other ex-employees. Yeah, they caught me at point where I was a bit desperate. In seattle, the horribleness of working there is pretty widely known. Not sure why its so shocking and unbelievable here on Hacker News.
jeffmorrisjr 12y ago
You sound like a bitter ex-employee. Why would you ever waste your energy on trashing a former employer? Go build something else - it's a much better use of your time.
- MCRed 12y ago
  I have built something else. Several other else. I do think it's unfortunate that Software Engineers are held in such low regard. Calling me "bitter" is just blaming the victim. I'm here so that other engineers can be forewarned about a bad actor in our midst. I think that's a good use of my time because I hate how engineers are disrespected, and increasingly so.
- Devthrowaway80 12y ago
  Because he doesn't want other people to waste part of their lives at Amazon? His experiences there mirror mine. I've warned people away from going there for exactly the same reason. Amazon treats their employees like shit.
markpundmann 12y ago
It's kind of ironic how condescending you are towards amazon stemming from what seems primarily based upon them not being a "tech company". In school, you probably had the jock type people looking down on you, and now that you are in your own subculture of tech oriented people, you've taken their place at the top of the arrogance pyramid. I think you need to reevaluate your outlook on giving advice. You seem to have a preference for more tech oriented companies which is perfectly fine, but their are a lot of other people on HN that aren't as techie as you. Don't trash a company and shout advice to everyone based on your own personal preferences for work.
- dang 12y ago
  Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, even when someone else's comment is wrong and/or unduly negative. Please respond to negativity on HN with less of it, not more. Otherwise the threads spiral into toxicity.
- MCRed 12y ago
  The person who warned me about Amazon -- before I ever applied there-- was not an engineer. She was a receptionist. She'd worked in the main office in a low level office job. She told me the company had no respect for employees. I was foolish (and a little desperate) when I applied at Amazon. Because I had been told. This has nothing to do with them not being a tech company-- I just don't like tech people misclassifying them. This is all about them disrespecting their employees. Not having competent managers for engineers is a form of disrespect. But all the sexist, obnoxious and rude things done to my friend who was non-technical are also disrespectful. This isn't about me being "arrogant" at all. This is me just warning you about a terrible experience I had!

by MCRed 12y ago

serge2k 12y ago

> He [Bezos] attended Princeton University, intending to study physics, but soon returned to his love of computers and graduated summa cum laude, with a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in electrical engineering and computer science http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_life http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l... I guess that's not engineering though.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
MCRed 12y ago
WOW. From interacting with him on bug reports, I'm surprised to read that. I think the problem was he was never a practicing engineer, so he didn't understand things like unit tests, the fact that we need to fix a bug in october, or make a change in october for the thanksgiving weekend-- we got told to defer on something that he then filed a ticket for the middle of the night before thanksgiving. Etc.

bederoso 12y ago

Seems like you had a very bad experience at Amazon, but you are also spilling a lot of lies about the company, and I'm afraid people might buy it. Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid or what I work on, they are there to support the business and are accountants, financial managers, etc. > It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers. Who isn't? Most companies are short on talented engineers. > Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business. Shows how little you know about the company. Instant Video is huge, Website is huge, other/restricted projects are huge, and there are a lot of engineers on all those teams. Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are. > If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer. > All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least). The other points you make are either subjective or anecdotes, but overall I think you just hate the company for some reason and are spilling every negative interaction you ever had. I truly hope talented people don't buy on your negativity. Amazon is definitely not a terrible place to work at, even though it does have some problems (what company doesn't?).

LunaSea 12y ago
The amount of horror stories coming from Amazon like this one: https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1&view_mode=scroll&access_key=key-UEZdQ4D9zd883gw8tn3D&show_recommendations=true https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1... and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.
- 12y ago

franze 12y ago

book recommendation: "Seeing Systems: Unlocking the Mysteries of Organizational Life" Barry Oshry http://books.google.at/books/about/Seeing_Systems.html?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC http://books.google.at/books/about/Seeing_Systems.html?id=wt... and read read the sections "pinball" & "manager of the heart" now http://books.google.at/books?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC&pg=PA3&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=4#v=onepage&q&f=false http://books.google.at/books?id=wtK9aFmM9zgC&pg=PA3&source=g...

jasonlotito 12y ago

> I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless of what else you have to say, this type of commentary is what hurts conversation. Clearly, you are wrong about the culture of HN.

MCRed 12y ago
I'm wrong about the culture of HN? I've been on this site since 2006 or 2007. I've earned 5,000+ karma on most of my previous accounts. Everyone of them was shadowbanned at one point or another. In one case I linked to a scientific paper about global warming that does not agree with global warming hysterics. That was the only post in several months at the time and the only commentary I added was "these guys disagree!"..... shadowbanned. For linking to a peer reviewed paper! Another time, the last comment was talking about how I had met Grace Hopper. Nothing negative in it, Nothing "childish". Just relating how she gave me a "nanosecond". Shadowbanned. I stopped putting effort into this site for several years because of that-- why try to discuss things with an extremely ideological and narrow minded group (which HN really is) if you're going to get banned for disagreeing? I only created this account because I don't care. I do expect to get shadowboxed because the moderators of this site, in my experience, are unethical. But of course, those who believe in rigid narrow minded censorship are incentivized to believe that all those who were shadowbanned were being "childish". Because of course you want to believe you're broad minded and that criticizing Amazon is allowed, and the like. (Hey maybe it is, so far I've been allowed to.... but that's the thing about arbitrary shadow bans, you can't know what's verboten and what's allowed.)
- FD3SA 12y ago
  My experience matches yours precisely. Certain viewpoints here are ruthlessly censored, to the point of insanity. The justification is always "that is so wrong as to be offensive", which of course is absurd to a community that purportedly values free speech. If the views are so absurd, why not allow them to stand and be downvoted? Why the need to flag and ban? For example, regarding the Pao issue, numerous reaction articles from differing viewpoints were instantly flagkilled. I find that HN is a group of clever people who conform an extremely narrow ideology.

GabrielF00 12y ago

When you have a company the size of Amazon (100,000+ employees, thousands of engineers) I think its very dangerous to make sweeping generalizations about the culture based on one person's experience.

txru 12y ago
I'd say most people here are concerned about the engineers. The culture around the warehouses is pretty well understood, from my experience. Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors. Also, people make similar generalizations all the time around small towns and neighborhoods (with often dubious accuracy, sure), but the only difference is one's structure develops bottom-up, and the other top-down.
- MCRed 12y ago
  And culture comes from the top. Right from Jeff Bezo himself. One of the things that has since become a red flag for me is that Amazon is very cult like.
MCRed 12y ago
When you work in PacMed, where the entire company was basically located at the time, you pretty much rub elbows with people across all departments (literally, you're stuffed in there so close) and so you can make sweeping generalizations about the engineering team behind Amazon.com. Without making any comments about warehouse workers and the like. Which is what I did. This is also not one persons perspective, but a common perspective in Seattle, so common that I knew about it in 1996, repeatedly heard horror sorries for the next 10 years ,and still went to work there after hearing horror stories from other ex-employees. Yeah, they caught me at point where I was a bit desperate. In seattle, the horribleness of working there is pretty widely known. Not sure why its so shocking and unbelievable here on Hacker News.

jeffmorrisjr 12y ago

You sound like a bitter ex-employee. Why would you ever waste your energy on trashing a former employer? Go build something else - it's a much better use of your time.

MCRed 12y ago
I have built something else. Several other else. I do think it's unfortunate that Software Engineers are held in such low regard. Calling me "bitter" is just blaming the victim. I'm here so that other engineers can be forewarned about a bad actor in our midst. I think that's a good use of my time because I hate how engineers are disrespected, and increasingly so.
Devthrowaway80 12y ago
Because he doesn't want other people to waste part of their lives at Amazon? His experiences there mirror mine. I've warned people away from going there for exactly the same reason. Amazon treats their employees like shit.

markpundmann 12y ago

It's kind of ironic how condescending you are towards amazon stemming from what seems primarily based upon them not being a "tech company". In school, you probably had the jock type people looking down on you, and now that you are in your own subculture of tech oriented people, you've taken their place at the top of the arrogance pyramid. I think you need to reevaluate your outlook on giving advice. You seem to have a preference for more tech oriented companies which is perfectly fine, but their are a lot of other people on HN that aren't as techie as you. Don't trash a company and shout advice to everyone based on your own personal preferences for work.

dang 12y ago
Personal attacks are not allowed on Hacker News, even when someone else's comment is wrong and/or unduly negative. Please respond to negativity on HN with less of it, not more. Otherwise the threads spiral into toxicity.
MCRed 12y ago
The person who warned me about Amazon -- before I ever applied there-- was not an engineer. She was a receptionist. She'd worked in the main office in a low level office job. She told me the company had no respect for employees. I was foolish (and a little desperate) when I applied at Amazon. Because I had been told. This has nothing to do with them not being a tech company-- I just don't like tech people misclassifying them. This is all about them disrespecting their employees. Not having competent managers for engineers is a form of disrespect. But all the sexist, obnoxious and rude things done to my friend who was non-technical are also disrespectful. This isn't about me being "arrogant" at all. This is me just warning you about a terrible experience I had!