Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html

by IBM • 11 years ago

708 422 11 years ago

east2west3• 11 years ago

Amazon does just have stack ranking, the company basks in it.

coldcode2• 11 years ago

You could't pay me enough to work in such a sweatshop. It's like Bezos read Karl Marx and figured people are stupid enough to exploit. And yes no matter the pay working people voluntarily as if they were slaves on plantation is still exploitation.

Of course the article might be hyperbole and people venting but I don't doubt there is truth in it.

100 years ago titans such a Carnegie and Rockefeller worked people to death and didn't care as long as they made money. The only difference today might be more money. Sometimes.

Amazon would never hire me anyway no matter my long skill set as I would never put up with such crap.

ForHackernews• 11 years ago

Is it reassuring that Amazon treats its white-collar office workers just as terribly as their blue-collar warehouse workers? http://gawker.com/amazon-warehouse-workers-are-treated-like-...

serge2k11• 11 years ago

No, they don't.

They treat the FC workers horribly on another level. Refusing to install air conditioning in a hot warehouse and just having ambulances outside instead. Having people wait in line 30 minutes coming and going and refusing to pay them for it.

potatolicious5• 11 years ago

I worked at Amazon right out of college - I wouldn't do it again, but there's a reason why Amazon continues to hire a lot of people despite their growing (and already rather notorious) reputation as a workplace.

Amazon is considered one of the big AAA-tier companies, at the same venerated level as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, et al. Having Amazon on my resume opened so many doors like you won't believe.

I think a lot of people join Amazon knowing the toxic workplace culture out of necessity - our industry doesn't have a fucking clue how to hire people and leans heavily on "signals" like working for specific famous companies.

As long as we continue to not be able to interview people effectively, and instead rely on things like "having worked at Amazon" as a positive hiring signal, the Amazon hiring machine will continue to function.

gozo• 11 years ago

When a friend relocated to London for a well-paying job to "move data around" at Google, I couldn't help to think how similar it seemed to banking. When I read you post about "paying your dues to be in the club" I think the same thing.

enraged_camel4• 11 years ago

>our industry doesn't have a fucking clue how to hire people

The software industry isn't special in this regard. There are many industries where having a Harvard degree, for example, is a very strong "signal" that you're a top-tier individual.

coldcode2• 11 years ago

"I worked at Amazon right out of college "

They count on finding people who want that on their resume and don't care about how awful it is for a couple of years. But once you get beyond that point you realize how terrible it is.

kelukelugames5• 11 years ago

I don't think Amazon pays well. I turned down an offer from Amazon recently. It was to work in an area that was nearest and closest to my heart. Unfortunately their offer was 50 to 100k behind other offers.

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

Amazon does _not_ pay as well as Google/FB/Apple/Twitter/Netflix/LinkedIn/Salesforce/etc.

reitzensteinm• 11 years ago

No matter the pay? That's nuts.

If you're on 200k you can save up and quit with a hell of a comfortable cushion. If you refuse to right size your life to be able to do that, you have nobody else but yourself to blame.

If you're on 20k living paycheck to paycheck, doing so is impossible.

I'm not normally of the persuasion to get all social justice-y, but I feel that there's a massive blind spot around here for the struggles of the poor, because the average user of this site can trivially get a high paying job (even if they choose not to).

Some things, like death, sickness and love, hit the poor and the rich alike. Career trouble is not one of those things.

savanaly• 11 years ago

And yes no matter the pay working people voluntarily as if they were slaves on plantation is still exploitation.

I don't follow this. I would certainly put up with a lot for one billion dollars per hour pay. I assume you would too. Would you really not take a job there for one billion dollars per hour? I know it's boring, but I think the simple calculation workers make of tallying salary vs working conditions still applies here.

paulhauggis2• 11 years ago

It sounds like they run their business like their seller marketplace...

falcolas2• 11 years ago

I'm glad I got out (well, was pushed out, largely due to my own ignorance) when I did. This sounds like a real grindhouse now. Perhaps some folks enjoy this kind of working environment, but personally I'm thankful for a 40 hour work week where I can innovate for my company and still have a life outside work.

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

David Streitfeld has written a number of strident, highly-critical articles on Amazon. What he's writing here doesn't reflect my experience as an SDE in a couple of different divisions in the company. I can't speak to what people in marketing or vendor management experience.

Take the first paragraph for instance:

They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs

I don't recall anyone telling me this

When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported

I don't recall hearing either of these phrases used.

To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

The leadership principles are repeated pretty frequently, although I think most people take them with a grain of salt. The quiz is called 100% Peculiar, not "I'm Peculiar". I don't recall it being about leadership principles at all. I recall it being about things like how Amazon doesn't delete negative customer reviews because the company sees it as being in its long-term interest for reviews to be trustworthy. The other thing on the quiz I remember is that Amazon likes to use informal language with customers, like "Where's my stuff". [Edit: I should also point out that it's not a mandatory thing and nobody cares if you don't do it or don't do well enough on it to get the little badge on your page in the company directory.]

gary__• 11 years ago

Did you see people crying while in work?

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

newobj• 11 years ago

i did.

throwaway765542• 11 years ago

Never.

zippergz• 11 years ago

I worked there for many years and never saw anyone cry.

enraged_camel4• 11 years ago

I don't work at Amazon, but I have a friend who is on the vendor management side and whenever she talks about how stressful her job is and how terribly they treat people (not just their employees but also their vendors), she's on the verge of tears. I'm not exaggerating.

eclipxe3• 11 years ago

Never

throwaway6541233• 11 years ago

Yep, I work there and I absolutely have seen coworkers upset and crying.

anawsthrowaway2• 11 years ago

Not over anything work related.

seansmccullough• 11 years ago

Never.

senderista3• 11 years ago

I didn't, but a coworker did when I wasn't in the office. Someone had just come out of a 1:1 with her manager and was sobbing at her desk, and no one was paying her any attention (this was an open plan office).

falcolas2• 11 years ago

It's worth remembering that Amazon was very choosey in who was able to contribute to this narrative, so you need to take that into account as well.

OJFord2• 11 years ago

The more I read, the more I get the feeling that Amazon has a divide between technical (dev) roles, in which is it's largely similar to any other large somewhat "hip" company, and non-tech roles, in which it sounds like something of a sweatshop.

I'm not surprised to see you disagree with the commentary on the "leadership principles" -- they (at com/principles) seem to me almost totally generic.

potatolicious5• 11 years ago

I'm a former Amazonian - things are definitely worse for non-tech roles, but I wouldn't say that on the dev side things are "similar to any other large somewhat hip company".

To put in context - Amazon's typical engineering tenure (when I was there) was 18 months - that's engineering roles only. I've worked many jobs since and by a wide margin Amazon still has the highest engineering churn rate I've ever seen.

My personal take on this article is that it seems a bit exaggerated based on my experiences at the company, but otherwise largely accurate. I haven't seen anyone cry, but definitely a lot of shellshocked people wallowing at their desks after being openly reamed out by managers in front of their peers. The general culture is extremely dog eat dog, and in my 2 years there I saw a whole lot of behavior lacking in basic human decency/empathy, justified under the notion that "we're doing hard work with hard technology and have high standards and if you can't keep up you can wash out".

In all my jobs since Amazon I have never once encountered the level of hostility routinely and openly displayed between manager/subordinate and between peers that I saw there. I didn't think much of it at the time - that whole type of behavior was normalized - but it's only once I got out and worked at much friendlier, more collaborative places that I realized how insane and aberrant it is.

There's also sometimes this curious notion that this sort of culture is a requirement for doing meaningful things, and that ditching Amazon for a place with less toxic workplace culture necessarily means you won't be able to achieve great things. This is laughably false of course, and makes me wonder if the people perpetuating it have seen what other companies are doing.

east2west3• 11 years ago

I have heard repeatedly that potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles. I wouldn't call that "taken with a grain of salt." Anecdotally their turnover rate is high and a larger proportion of tech workers have to be on call than other large tech companies-- this could be due to the nature of tech, clouds and probably the largest web portable on earth. Different divisions are going to be different, and the article focuses on more extreme cases, true, but Amazon is a "tough" place to work, no question about that, at least compared to Google or Netflix.

If Amazon is not a nice place to work, honest people writing good journalistic reporting on it are going to write negative stories, no way around that. As negative stories, this particular article isn't bad. At least it puts a leadership-principle spin on it.

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

Yes, it's true that as part of the interview process they ask behavioral questions to try to use the leadership principles to evaluate a candidate. An example might be, "can you tell me about a time when you had to build something but you had very vague requirements". So I think the leadership principles are taken seriously, but I don't think they're treated as gospel. Bezos usually says something in the all-hands meeting like "these are our leadership principles unless you know better ones". People usually roll their eyes at the "frugality" leadership principle - the term "frupid" is used pretty frequently.

The high on-call load is a pretty frequently complaint.

I haven't worked at Google or Netflix, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.

In general, I think Amazon is a pretty demanding environment, but I think if the environment was as Streitfeld describes it, I wouldn't do well. I don't think I have that great a work ethic and I don't think I handle stress or workplace conflict particularly well, yet I've managed to be successful at Amazon.

david-given• 11 years ago

raises hand

What's a behavioural question?

rdtsc11• 11 years ago

potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles.

Interviewed for AWS. Got asked "behavioral" and "leadership principle questions". There were very few technical questions except for some stupid whiteboard "sort this thing..." questions. (Read more about my experience in a top-level comment) But it was all "tell me about your worst failure". "Tell me about a time...". Basically you are supposed to learn their leadership principles than parrot those back to them using your own experiences.

jmspring• 11 years ago

Interviewed twice with Amazon, had an offer the first time decided to not continue the second. I don't recall any particularly blatant behavioral questions. The one I do recall (and was part of a writing sample) was writing about one of the hardest challenges career-wise and how I handled/approached/etc. the problem. It could have been technical, but I went with a non-technical issue (delivering for a customer when it was out of scope). It was actually one of the better parts of the interview -- in terms of back and forth.

Both times I've decided no on Amazon was due to commute and flexibility first, narrowness of the role in the first occasion was the other issue.

amzn_thrwy_1585• 11 years ago

Calling them behavioral questions makes it sound like a psychology experiment. What it actually is is a way to get candidates to talk about specific situations they've encountered in their careers and how they handled them. Different interviewers have different principles to focus on, so it prevents them from covering the same territory.

Amazon has its problems, but the interview process has always felt pretty fair to me, and I've been on both sides of it.

That said: I would never, ever, ask a candidate to tell me about their biggest failure. Jesus fuck that's a landmine. What happens when you expect them to say "I championed the use of TCL as our primary systems language", but they actually say "I got drunk, crashed the car, and killed my fiancee". Yikes.

hyperbovine• 11 years ago

I guess it comes down to your personal anecdotes versus those of "more than 100 current and former Amazonians — members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch". Strictly on the weight of the evidence...

(Not that everything NYT prints is true, but your can be certain that a front-page story trashing one of the most successful companies and founders in history has been vetted and fact-checked to a fair degree.)

throwaway765542• 11 years ago

I've had the same experience as the commenter your replying to did, as has most everyone on my team. I work at AWS, though, and no one from web services seems to have been interviewed for this article.

cscurmudgeon• 11 years ago

> They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs I don't recall anyone telling me this

Maybe one of those poor habits is remembering information like this and you got so good at it that you forgot this :)

noahm3• 11 years ago

Agreed, I noticed all those things as well. The article seemed to invent a lot of the new hire orientation stuff. Either that or it's changed quite a bit since I went through it a few years ago, which is certainly possible. And the "100% peculiar" thing really is just a game. It's a toy to add a little icon to your internal profile, and literally doesn't mean a thing. Other such awards are for things like having participated in broomball in 2002 or something silly like that.

amzn_thrwy_1585• 11 years ago

The author clearly had this format in his mind: illustrate Amazon's cruel environment by cleverly tagging each anecdote with a couple of leadership principles.

I'm a deeply frustrated engineer at Amazon on the verge of quitting, but even I like and respect the leadership principles. To me, they mostly represent what's good about Amazon.

What's bad about Amazon is better illustrated by the experiences shared in this thread than by the article.

npalli• 11 years ago

So from the article we read

> Jeff Bezos turned to data-driven management very early. He wanted his grandmother to stop smoking, he recalled in a 2010 graduation speech at Princeton. He didn’t beg or appeal to sentiment. He just did the math, calculating that every puff cost her a few minutes. “You’ve taken nine years off your life!” he told her. She burst into tears.

The weird thing is that I actually watched the Princeton video and Bezos learnt a very different lesson (by his grandfather). Makes you wonder if yet again the need for simple narratives makes this article kind of useless.

http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/S27/52/51O99/inde...

> At that age, I'd take any excuse to make estimates and do minor arithmetic. I'd calculate our gas mileage -- figure out useless statistics on things like grocery spending. I'd been hearing an ad campaign about smoking. I can't remember the details, but basically the ad said, every puff of a cigarette takes some number of minutes off of your life: I think it might have been two minutes per puff. At any rate, I decided to do the math for my grandmother. I estimated the number of cigarettes per days, estimated the number of puffs per cigarette and so on. When I was satisfied that I'd come up with a reasonable number, I poked my head into the front of the car, tapped my grandmother on the shoulder, and proudly proclaimed, "At two minutes per puff, you've taken nine years off your life!"

I have a vivid memory of what happened, and it was not what I expected. I expected to be applauded for my cleverness and arithmetic skills. "Jeff, you're so smart. You had to have made some tricky estimates, figure out the number of minutes in a year and do some division." That's not what happened. Instead, my grandmother burst into tears. I sat in the backseat and did not know what to do. While my grandmother sat crying, my grandfather, who had been driving in silence, pulled over onto the shoulder of the highway. He got out of the car and came around and opened my door and waited for me to follow. Was I in trouble? My grandfather was a highly intelligent, quiet man. He had never said a harsh word to me, and maybe this was to be the first time? Or maybe he would ask that I get back in the car and apologize to my grandmother. I had no experience in this realm with my grandparents and no way to gauge what the consequences might be. We stopped beside the trailer. My grandfather looked at me, and after a bit of silence, he gently and calmly said, "Jeff, one day you'll understand that it's harder to be kind than clever."

What I want to talk to you about today is the difference between gifts and choices. Cleverness is a gift, kindness is a choice. Gifts are easy -- they're given after all. Choices can be hard. You can seduce yourself with your gifts if you're not careful, and if you do, it'll probably be to the detriment of your choices.

geyang• 11 years ago

this is very nice.

shard• 11 years ago

So is he saying that he made the deliberate choice to be unkind when he decided to run his company in the brutal fashion that we've been reading about?

yaman12• 11 years ago

Back in 2005 I interviewed for a director of engineering role at Amazon. But after I learned about the culture and methods Amazon uses to "manage" it's people I lost interest. It's just not how I want to be remembered. I don't see the value of a harsh dehumanizing environment ironically used to create a feeling in customers that people come first. And I just don't think these tactics work over the long term. Google will be around long after Amazon fails because it retains and inspires it's best engineers.

djhworld• 11 years ago

I remember a few months ago a senior manager from their security team came to our workplace to give a presentation (we use AWS a lot)

He was talking about how he and his team are constantly evaluated on metrics, down to the minutest detail that are recorded and reviewed regularly.

caiob• 11 years ago

Is Seattle the modern-day Detroit?

johneth• 11 years ago

Personally, I think Amazon's successful despite their workplace culture, not because of it.

raverbashing2• 11 years ago

It seems to me it's pretty much like the Army.

Push people hard, a lot will give up, but whoever remains is pretty strong and performant (for how long who knows, of course)

serge2k11• 11 years ago

Hard to say. For me it really comes down to they do not give a shit about their employees. Not at all. You can say that about other companies, but Amazon sets the bar very very low.

noir_lord2• 11 years ago

Jeff Bezos has always been a bit of a dick.

This just codifies his dickishness, this kind of crap a century from now will be written about like Dickens wrote about 19th century London.

Appalling in every way, I think I'm going to shop elsewhere in future.

tootie3• 11 years ago

So were Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Like Henry Ford or Andrew Carnegie before them. It's part and parcel of being aggressive, creative and demanding. You can't build an industry that goes against the grain of established practice and drag 10,000 followers with you unless you're a big of an egomaniac. There's probably 1000 people out there smart enough to envision an Amazon-like business, but they are content to enjoy what they have and not stress themselves out by building a giant corporation.

wpietri2• 11 years ago

I think there's a big difference between "a bit of an egomaniac" and "a controlling, abusive asshole".

Also, it's worth considering whether "look at all the successful assholes" argument is basically circular. It sounds a lot to me like saying, "well of course ISIS should be like that. Look at how well Stalin, Mao, and Hitler did."

I can't deny that there are many prominent assholes. But does that mean that they were the only ones who could have created successful companies? Or just that, by being horrible people, they managed to exclude the other competent and effective people who could have done as well or better, and without the same sort of collateral damage?

jsudhams• 11 years ago

I am not sure if agree with Bill Gates. I am defitely sure that though if the company becomes big and understands importance of people this will change if it does not change or not realized by leaders then amazon cannot survive that is sure. I worked with Microsoft, DuPont and the likes and all of them seem to support workers as respectable as possible. May be as worker (blue/white or whatever) we should look for and go to companies which care for the employees than other companies. Just think about key folks leaving to competition not for themselves but citing how others are treated.

skj2• 11 years ago

Larry Page (my boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss's boss) seems like a pretty decent human being, to me.

spitfire• 11 years ago

Henry ford was one of the first people to investigate industrial efficiency - he codified the 8 hour (7 for white collar) workday. Along with paying his workers enough that they could afford his product.

I don't buy what you're selling.

ZenoArrow• 11 years ago

"Appalling in every way, I think I'm going to shop elsewhere in future."

Same here. This article convinced me to stop shopping at Amazon. I'd even consider avoiding services that used AWS.

noir_lord2• 11 years ago

I'd even consider avoiding services that used AWS.

AWS customer support already did that for me.

Adam_O• 11 years ago

I was watching a talk from Richard Karlgaard [1] recently where he argues you can run a company in either a rough or nurturing manner, but you should not vacillate between the two. He suggests that constantly sending mixed signals to employees is even worse than just being a full time jerk.

Personally I agree with the opinion that a company can get away with being more pushy toward its employees if it has top5 or even top10 status. I think there will always be people out there willing to accept 2-3 years of this in exchange for the doors it opens later.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VjGmf9vgp6I

dpflan• 11 years ago

Here are Amazon's Leadership Principles, complete with phrases and stock photos: http://www.amazon.jobs/principles

seiji6• 11 years ago

Wow, it actually says this:

"Leaders are right a lot. They have strong business judgment and good instincts. They seek diverse perspectives and work to disconfirm their beliefs."

Don't question. Obey. Leaders are leaders because they are better than you.

retailengineer4• 11 years ago

The entire point of the leadership principles at Amazon is that they apply to everybody at the company. The handouts with leadership principles they give out to everyone all start with "Please be a leader". No one's obeying anyone.

chwahoo2• 11 years ago

You're misreading. Everyone they hire is intended to be a leader, and being right is one of the qualities they care about in employees. Not "management is usually right, so trust them".

serge2k11• 11 years ago

No, it's actually saying you aren't a leader if you aren't capable of being right a lot of the time.

tootie3• 11 years ago

It's like a tl;dr or Steve Yegge's blog.

outside12342• 11 years ago

This sounds like a boom/bust company. This all works while the stock is going up consistently. Eventually it won't, and this place will implode.

mtbcoder• 11 years ago

This sounds like a big enterprise company taking the next evolutionary step. Soon the tactics will be labelled as "best practices", talks and conferences will be given, the mentality accepted and the rest of the herd will continue to froth at the mouth to be more enterprise-y than the next. As the article states:

"Amazon may be singular but perhaps not quite as peculiar as it claims. It has just been quicker in responding to changes that the rest of the work world is now experiencing: data that allows individual performance to be measured continuously, come-and-go relationships between employers and employees, and global competition in which empires rise and fall overnight. Amazon is in the vanguard of where technology wants to take the modern office: more nimble and more productive, but harsher and less forgiving.

“Organizations are turning up the dial, pushing their teams to do more for less money, either to keep up with the competition or just stay ahead of the executioner’s blade,” said Clay Parker Jones, a consultant who helps old-line businesses become more responsive to change."

x5n12• 11 years ago

The world is a big enough place to say f-you to companies like this and live your life well. At the end of the day work is work. Doesn't matter what you actually do in the long run.

plonh4• 11 years ago

That's nonsense and unsupported. Steve Jobs had asshole management patented before the New Economy, and Google and Facebook are doing fine without Amazon culture.

Come-and-go employment is Uber/AirBnB 1099s, and MSFT's old practice of hiring contractors , not Amazon full-time SDEs

brown9-25• 11 years ago

Note how in the conclusion of the article it mentions that Amazon is already running out of candidates in the Seattle area.

walshemj5• 11 years ago

And I suspect that Mr Bezos has a long list of people who have "put him down for later" to quote my mate who's a v senior HR person (think a real version of Malcom Tucker)

mkozlows• 11 years ago

On the one hand, I zero percent want to work in that environment. On the other hand, I can see why it would appeal to some people.

If you've ever worked at a place with stifling bureaucracy, where building consensus laboriously over months is necessary to move forward with even relatively minor decisions, then you know how liberating and empowering it feels to work in a place where people are focused on getting things done, where you can make decisions and drive forward quickly, and where ideas get debated openly and decisively.

But yeah, I suspect most people would prefer that taken down a few notches.

wilsynet4• 11 years ago

Only thing I would add is: and leave people with their dignity intact whenever possible because 1) it's the decent thing to do and 2) it's cheaper to keep someone than it is to hire someone new after the person has quit.

Clearly that's not something that Amazon prizes.

They seem to know that their culture drives people to quit. Which is why stock doesn't meaningfully vest until years 2, 3 and 4.

rjayatilleka• 11 years ago

* Years 3 and 4. It starts vesting at the end of year 2.

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at some point promoted to SDE II ;)

It's a shark eat shark environment. I never cried, but I saw others (specially female colleagues) do. After 2 years of waking up in the middle of the night for bullshit on-call pages (wack-a-mole with production issues) and increasingly heavier deadlines, I developed stress related medical issues. That was a wake up call for me, and as soon as I realized the shit place that I was in, I started showing up at the office detached, practicing interview questions and doing phone screen interviews from work. I eventually got offers from Facebook/Google, and moved on. It was only then that I realize I was actually paid at the 50th percentile for my position's level and experience all along.

Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.

I get Amazon recruiters contacting me all the time, and I'm always nice to them because I know the shit environment they're stuck in. Though in the back of my mind I'm thinking "there's no way in hell I'd ever go back"

Fuck Jeff, fuck Amazon, fuck AWS, and fuck their leadership principles.

solutionyogi• 11 years ago

I am curious. If work environment was so toxic, why did you stick around 5 long years? What was your thought process? I have had similar happened to my friends who somehow get stuck at one place for one reason or other and don't realize what they are missing out. Right now, I am trying to help another friend who is stuck in similar situation (not at Amazon).

enraged_camel4• 11 years ago

People stick around in toxic environments mostly because of social reasons. Adversity breeds camaraderie. When you commiserate with people on a regular basis about the shitty work environment and terrible company policies, you build mutual trust tend to become really good friends with them. Leaving those people behind can be tough for a lot of people, especially if it is their first job out of college (and they don't know what they are missing out on).

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

That's a very good question! I should have left after 3 years. I did not know any better. Specially when it came to compensation, I only knew about my promised stocks' grown value, and not what other companies would have offered me.

Year 1: learning, excitement, keen to prove myself, also economy had just crashed

Year 2: under pressure, but feeling ownership and hopeful that we would "fix our problems"

Year 3: jaded, but waiting for the growing stock to vest (Amazon's RSUs start vesting in the 3rd year)

Year 4: over-stressed, extremely unhappy

Year 5: detached, not really working, interviews, exit.

enraged_camel4• 11 years ago

>Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises.

Is that 75% number normalized for the area's cost-of-living? Seattle isn't nearly as expensive as the Bay Area (which is where those other companies you mentioned are located), so of course the nominal salaries will be substantially lower.

jvolkman• 11 years ago

All three have offices in Seattle.

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

All of the friends whom I helped, and myself included have transferred from Amazon to Facebook/Google/Apple located in Seattle.

I went from ~$150 total comp to ~$260 after a couple of rounds of negotiations with the companies who gave me offers. This was a couple of years ago, and I was happy to see another friend who left Amazon for Google get offered over $300k recently at the same SDE II level.

dastbe• 11 years ago

So what's your coaching strategy?

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

Read cracking the coding interview and solve every single problem in it.

Then start with the leetcode.com problems and solve every single one.

Hen do 5 practice interviews with companies that you don't care about.

That's all. It's simple but it takes determination and time to do.

cesarbs10• 11 years ago

My wife works there as an SDET and her experience so far is vastly different from yours and from what the article says. Most days it's a 9-5 job. The only times she has stayed late were because she really wanted to finish something that day i.e. she was never told to do that. Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs? But she says the devs seem to work about as much, at least from her perspective.

jdubs• 11 years ago

SDET?

untog2• 11 years ago

It's interesting - all (I think?) the people interviewed in the article sounded like they worked in non-dev roles. Might not be the case, but it might explain why your wife hasn't had the same experience.

retailengineer4• 11 years ago

My job is 10-7, only because I take an hour off playing ping pong every day. My major complaint is that they don't have enough ping pong tables. Also, having to decide which food truck to eat at on a particular day is annoying. I'd much rather have free cafeteria food.

chuckcode• 11 years ago

Can definitely see how different parts of the company operate differently but no paternity leave an minimal maternity leave speaks a lot to the general philosophy of the overall company.

Crito2• 11 years ago

Amazon treats SDETs much nicer in my experience. I can't really say why or how that is, but that's my experience. They seem to be shielded from the bulk of company politics, and don't seem to be common targets for throwing other people under the bus.

cesarbs10• 11 years ago

I'm curious about one thing: what exactly was the source of your work-related stress, apart form the on-call pages? This is something people rarely elaborate on and I think is very important to get a good picture of the place.

I see two different sources of stress in engineering work: large volume stress and "hostile dev environment" stress (sorry, I wish I could come up with a better term). The first means just that you have a large load of things to do. Personally I am not that much bothered by it if my environment allows me to execute on that volume of tasks. What often has me going into mad rages is the second type of stress: IDE slowness, random unexplicable build crashes, inefficient engineering systems, poorly designed code that makes it really hard to test it quickly. You get the idea. You have a task to get done and you could get it done if it depended on your competence alone, but the development environment is so fucked up that you constantly battle it when trying to make the smallest of changes. That builds up a ridiculous amount of stress because now you feel like you're lagging behind, and it's not because you don't know how to do something, but simply because the very thing that should enable your work prevents you from doing so.

What of those kinds of stresses did you have at Amazon? I'm genuinely curious.

ams61103• 11 years ago

A bad carpenter blames his tools.

throwaway6541233• 11 years ago

I'm not the OP but I've worked at Amazon for four years as an SDET. I think "hostile dev work environment" is a good description of working here but it's different from what you describe. What you describe is more like just dealing with a culture of pervasive incompetence.

Just a couple of examples. There is an immense amount of pressure to perform and deliver results. A lot of the time I don't even know what we are supposed to be delivering but I can tell there's a lot riding on delivering it. I've seen multiple managers demoted to individual contributor roles for, well I'm not sure what for. Presumably not delivering.

As for my own personal experience, there is the expectation that you as a developer will perform the work of several developers. I am expected to keep up with sometimes a thousand email messages a day, many of which require some action on my part, work on JIRA tickets assigned to me, attend meetings, answer questions from coworkers and fix bugs. But that is not nearly enough. One needs to "deliver results". So on top of the full time job described above, it is expected that I will conceive, plan, organize, and implement new features and new projects that deliver value. And I have to organize meetings so everyone knows about the new project and is aware of the value our team is delivering.

And yes, as you described, we also have to deal with figuring out how to get things done in spite of the incompetence of other teams we are working with.

uncre4tive• 11 years ago

Not the OP, but I worked at amazon for a year. I didn't want to pay back the signing bonus and relocation fees, or I would have quit earlier. Seattle has tons of way better opportunities for software developers.

Honestly, the stress originates from both. There was a lot of pressure to work ridiculous hours during the week and come in during the weekends (wtf??)

On top of that, the tools sucked. They give you a shitty laptop (frugality) that would go to the "locked" screen after x minutes if you were idle, and logging in could take 10 minutes because it was attached to an AD network and sometimes decided to use the server in China for authentication (seriously?) If your keyboard broke or something of the sort you had to wait in line for hours to get another (crappy) working one. They force you to use homegrown tools and plugins that are crashy and frustrating. I was soo tempted to just spend all the time fixing the tools, but I'm sure that would have gotten me into trouble, though it would have probably improved every software engineer's productivity. This was a few years ago. Maybe someone has fixed all this by now :)

umanwizard3• 11 years ago

I worked at Amazon for 2 years and it was literally nothing like this. I feel like the article is talking about a completely different company.

Why didn't you change teams?

omouse• 11 years ago

Yeah it's a big enough company that I wouldn't be surprised if some middle managers are forcing the devs/employees to do a lot of work. It's kinda like Microsoft, I heard there were just a few good teams or departments that were really good and the rest were meh.

serge2k11• 11 years ago

For me I quit rather than switching teams because I felt like I was in a lousy position to switch. Level 1 SDE, didn't want to lengthen my time before promotion and didn't want to go be the ops bitch on another team. Decided to look outside the company and wound up getting a job with higher pay, promotion, and a nicer company overall.

MCRed5• 11 years ago

When you have a toxic manager at Amazon-- and I did-- you can't change teams. I had an offer from the manager of another team, but was fired when I attempted to change teams.

The idea that you can change teams is kinda a fallacy... sure it happens sometimes but it's more like horse trading than anything else

oneshot9088• 11 years ago

IMO Even if you love your current gig, you should interview elsewhere at least once or twice a year to estimate your market value. Do not let your HR department establish your value for you, they will always sell you short.

xur17• 11 years ago

Serious question: It feels a little weird to interview somewhere with little intention of accepting the offer (unless it is a huge pay boost / much better position).

I've been at my job just over a year, and enjoy the job / believe I am paid fairly well, but I'd like to see what else is out there (as I'm very flexible on locations, etc). Do I just apply for a few jobs in different areas, and only accept if it's a huge pay boost? Is it wrong to go into the interview like that?

DaveWalk• 11 years ago

I can't agree with this; does nobody in the software industry regularly just network? Networking correctly done is all the positives of a job interview without the immediacy of a vacant position being filled.

And yes, most of us are probably at-will employees. But I know if word got back that I was interviewing--like when incompetent HR called my current boss for a working reference--I'll be more than just "estimating my market value."

Much safer to ask recently promoted people in my network what they used to make; people often share this information easily, versus never sharing what they make now.

seiji6• 11 years ago

Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval

Literally cult de-programming. Kinda amazing we let companies go so far.

Fuck Jeff

Always good to re-read Steve's platform rant (https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX):

  7) Thank you; have a nice day!

  Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course
  realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in,
  because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit
  about your day.

x5n12• 11 years ago

Perhaps I should abandon AWS.

rebootthesystem• 11 years ago

It is interesting to read some of these accounts. We have several hundred clients who sell on Amazon. I can probably say we hear horror stories on a daily basis.

If I were to summarize the stories and reach a conclusion it would be that Amazon (retail side) exists as a set of silos characterized by incompetence mixed with a solid dose of indifference and total lack of consideration for sellers.

I've seen sellers damaged to the point where they lost everything. Business, home, cars, everything. Why? Well, in the one case I can think of we heard from this seller who had been doing millions of dollars per year on Amazon for about four years. One morning he wakes up to an email from Amazon telling him that his "Selling privileges have been revoked permanently". And, in the true style of a lot of large internet companies there was no way to engage with someone at Amazon to try to solve the problem that led to the permanent suspension. In fact, apparently he was only given one opportunity to send and email. It was rejected. He was told they do not discuss the reasons for these decisions.

This person lost everything they built over four years of hard work and had to file for bankruptcy when the commitments made by the business to support a multi-million-dollar-per-year supply pipeline caught-up with what had happened. If you ask me, that says a lot about Amazon and the people who work there. They are willing to make decisions that can destroy families and don't seem to care enough to engage in a proper business-to-business discussion aimed at solving problems. Instead it's "off with their heads" and that's it. Businesses are not machines, they are people. What Amazon is doing to families with businesses is sick and disgusting.

The latest trend we've been hearing has to do with their ads platform. Apparently click fraud is rampant and Amazon is doing exactly nothing about it. And, if what I am reading is correct, it is entirely possible they aren't even equipped to deal with click fraud at all. A number of our clients are reporting click through rates that are 10x to 60x historical rates and no sales whatsoever out of thousands of clicks per day/week. Their experience isn't far different from that of the people who face suspensions: Amazon refuses to discuss what is going on. Advertising on Amazon, for some sellers, has turned into the equivalent of throwing dollars into a bonfire.

I could go on but I don't think it's necessary. My conclusion based on what I've read here and experienced through our clients is that it almost makes sense that the third party seller side of Amazon seems to be as messed-up as it is. If portions of their operation are as caustic and abusive as some of the accounts on this thread relate nothing good can come out of that. As I said before, business, ultimately, is about people. And if the people who are the business are not happy, the business isn't going to run well. That's what our clients are seeing out of the side of the Amazon monster they face every day.

ScottWhigham2• 11 years ago

Substitute eBay for Amazon in your post and it's a likely parallel. You might even be able to swap out "Apple App Store" for Amazon and come up with a fairly close-knit venn.

JabavuAdams2• 11 years ago

I wonder how much mental illness and poor decision making this culture has caused. Staying up days in a row or working 80+ hour weeks is not a recipe for good decision making.

Not even considering the human angle, this makes me very concerned for Amazon's future business prospects. Disclosure: I'm an AMZN shareholder.

amzn_throw_away4• 11 years ago

I work for Amazon and this has not been my experience. I can't speak to what others have said, but in my org it would be extremely unusual, and considered alarming, for people to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The only times I've really worked over 40-50 hours would be while I was on-call, which occurs about once every two months for a week, and even then only during major issues (maybe once or twice a year?).

The culture, once again, at least in my org, is actually pretty chill - I had a doctor's appointment last week, I just sent an email the morning of saying "Hey everyone, I'll be in around 1:00, cya then, here's my status for standup" and it's cool. My boss actually chided me for checking my email too aggressively during my time off.

So yeah, I can't speak to everything mentioned in the article, I can only say that my experience has not matched up with this.

throwaway64972• 11 years ago

I heard few stories from friends/colleagues who worked there

- There was a production outage once at Amazon and my friend's manager and her team (including my friend) gave a post-mortem to a large audience. Port-mortem sessions are open for everyone to attend. He mentioned, it was a free-for-all. Execs were hurling F-bombs every sentence and the team was publicly humiliated. The manager was in tears and was later demoted. I could see how my friend was feeling for her as a person/human being.

- One employee asked about possibility of providing free food ala Google/FB in a org level all-hands. Exec pooh-poohed Google for being highly irresponsible and that they can never sustain themselves spending so much on free food. Lazlo Block says it is one of the best things at Google.

- Frugality - I heard you don't even free get pop at Amazon. No paternity leave. Maternity leaves are much shorter compared to what people take at Google/Facebook out of fear. Poor health benefits and 401K matching compared to Microsoft/Google/FB.

- Sweatshop - People are over worked and are working on weekends/holidays a good chunk of time. 70 hr weeks seem to be the norm. Get only one day-off for Christmas and Thanksgiving.

Many Amazon execs are probably laughing their asses off looking at companies in the valley one-upping each other with great pay, quality free food, extending maternity/paternity leaves, generous health benefits and 401K contributions. "Look at these losers in the valley, and look at us, we pay employees pea-nuts, treat them like garbage, don't give a fuck about their well-being or families but still get a ton of shit done. Our stock is soaring! "

A good chunk of their engineers who are willing to take this kind of abuse are H1-Bs waiting for greencards. All new college grads wisen up after looking at their friends from Google/Facebook/Mircosoft, jump ship after a couple of years. Only people who stay there for a long time seem to be people who really like this kind of confrontational/psychopathic environment or incompetent engineers who rose into management, and cling onto their jobs.

retailengineer4• 11 years ago

22 days ago, you commented:

"For a 25-30 year time frame AMZN will beat S&P and Walmart by several X. AMZN, GOOG are companies which will have a huge impact on how we live. I have put some money into them. They are Berkshire Hathaways of our time."

So you seem fine with whatever (exaggerated and imaginary) evil things the execs are up to, as long as you profit from that as well.

nu2ycombinator• 11 years ago

The public humiliation you are talking about happens only with AWS team, their dev's are scared to check in stuff.

ElComradio• 11 years ago

The correct response to being chewed out this way is "If I suck so much you must have been a fucking idiot to hire me."

TrevorJ• 11 years ago

How the heck does AMZ avoid hostile work environment lawsuits? Good lord.

tlogan• 11 years ago

My experience with working with people from Amazon and visiting them is that it is the same as any other big corporation: hard work or initiative does not get you anywhere. Just make your boss happy and try to work as least as possible and you will be fine.

If you are ambitious and you want to grow or something - I do not know. I'm not aware of any big corporation where hard work or new ideas/initiative will get you somewhere.

You can say "fuck Jeff" - but that is because you were naive and Amazon is not red cross.

(I have to make a note about initiative: my previous company sent us to some management classes and on these classes they told us that "Initiative is the key to becoming a star employee" - and we all were laughing since real-world experience thought us that "initiative is easiest way to get yourself sidelined".)

untog2• 11 years ago

So, you haven't ever worked for Amazon. And yet you're telling an Amazon employee what they should have made of an environment that they lived in, and that you've never experienced.

Why?

anawsthrowaway2• 11 years ago

hard work or initiative does not get you anywhere. Just make your boss happy and try to work as least as possible and you will be fine.

I would say that's probably the least true thing here. Amazon is many things, but unrewarding to hard work and initiative is not one of them.

One of the most prized traditions at the company is writing "one pagers". Many new services and product offerings come out of people writing and championing these.

acd• 11 years ago

A danger with Amazon since they are not based in California but in Seattle, there is non competition clauses enforced by contract. Amazon has sued ex engineers leaving the company. http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-sues-employee-taking-goo...

I choose not to choose Amazon. Quote from the movie Trainspotting "But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else"

mgkimsal• 11 years ago

Wow.... it sounds like the software side of things isn't too much better than the warehouse side of things. I know it's not a direct comparison, but... amazon warehouse workers seem to be treated on the low end of warehouse worker jobs, and from what you're saying, the tech side is in a relatively similar position.

Also... unrelated, but re: recruiters - I've had a friend who's been pinged... 5 (6?) times over the past 8 years for Amazon - was flown out and interviewed and at least once that I know of, and went through a separate phone screen process as well - both times was rejected, but... they still keep calling. He's asked that they stop calling, but 10 months later some other recruiter will call up and try to start things rolling again...

bane3• 11 years ago

That happens to me too. I don't think there's a good central system of information on past candidates there. I just tell them that I previously interviewed there and look up my file, but that doesn't seem to get anywhere, so I just tell them I'm not interested at the moment (it's always better to keep more doors open).

bane3• 11 years ago

I interviewed there once and made it through the entire gauntlet only to stumble on the salary. They asked me what I was looking for and talked about how the vesting of stock grants worked. At the time I was making decent, but not great, East Coast money, and I figured that the cost of living is about the same where I lived and in Seattle so I asked for about the same.

I've never seen a recruiter's eyes fall out of their head before, after a moment of stammering he said..."you realize that's more than what the senior directors, maybe some of the C-levels, earn?"

It seemed kind of a bizarre statement, because I knew a couple SDEs at Amazon and their total compensation package had been far in excess of that figure, but a big piece had been due to stock grants that had, over the vesting period, exploded in size due to Amazon's stock growth. I have no doubt many of the senior management made some tiny salary, but it didn't matter because they made multiples of that every year in stock grants.

I definitely came away with a very weird feeling about the place and was kind of glad when they called back a week later and said they just couldn't do it and thanked me for coming in.

I'd much rather work for places that pay me a lot more to develop cool things using Amazon's infrastructure.

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

Base salaries for execs top out at something like $175,000. Is that what you're defining as "decent but not great"?

hellbanner• 11 years ago

Do you think Amazon will continue to do as well as they do in the long run? Will they run out of talent?

teaneedz• 11 years ago

So many similar stories like this - Amazon sounds like a place without humanity which originates from the highest leadership roles. However, what does this say about those who support and buy from Amazon?

minimaxir• 11 years ago

Remember the "Dear Amazon interns, some advice from an old man who has been at Amazon way too long." post that was made a month ago:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Seattle/comments/3ce0s8/dear_amazon...

Disruptive_Dave• 11 years ago

At least they seem to be upfront about it (inside their own walls, perhaps). There are plenty of companies who preach work/life balance and give lip service to employees being rewarded based on their output, and everyone knows it's complete BS.

unauthorizedsde• 11 years ago

I have worked all over Amazon as an SDE and Manager, and still do (11 years and counting.) I have certainly seen parts of the company that resemble parts of this article, especially OLR backstabbing, which I especially despise. As someone in a technical job family, it has always been easy for me to transfer internally to better-run corners of the company.

I stick around because I find that I like the low-fat culture, and working with extremely high achievers. Most of those top-tier people that I know in the tech families that have left end up coming back within a few years because they get bored on the outside. The exceptions overwhelmingly are those who left for Google, they never look back.

I cannot imagine literally crying about criticism in a meeting, and have never seen it myself. Working in a place with high standards and honest criticism is preferable to the alternatives. The real danger is inadequate mechanisms to deal with toxic org politics, and especially jackasses who think 80 hour weeks are not a sign of a problem. This definitely needs to change.

nemtaro8• 11 years ago

If you've been at Amazon for 11 years, your stock has grown from $40 to $500. I can see why you stick around in addition to the other positives that you mentioned...

I've been at Google for a few years now in Seattle, and know of exactly 1 person who left Google to go back to Amazon for a title boost. In contrast, I know dozens of SDEs who have been coming from Amazon to Google.

crucifiction4• 11 years ago

Google is the new Microsoft, its where talented engineers go to retire.

plonh4• 11 years ago

Amazon is so stingy with RSUs ( and base salary and 401k and benefits ) that 10x growth doesn't make it worthwhile.

kelukelugames5• 11 years ago

to be fair there are way more amzn employees than googlers in seattle so the ratio is not as far

rdtsc11• 11 years ago

Ok since we are talking Amazon, let me share my interviewing experience with them. I was talking to an AWS team.

Had a phone interview scheduled. They forgot about me. Ok, it happens in a big company. Had another one, went pretty well. They invited me over.

I show up and my contact person (my future manager) wasn't there that day. They had me wait for 30min, I guess until they scrambled to find a replacement. Except 2 people I talked to that day, everyone else seemed like they didn't expect to be interviewing anyone and were pulled in last minute. Needless to say that made for a pretty bad experience.

Oh and they promised lunch, ok, I wasn't hungry but they actually forgot about me during lunch. I was just sitting there in the conference room by myself.

I thought, ok, this is pretty bad. But no, that's not all, they promised "we'll get back to you with an answer in 2 days". Took almost 3 weeks. At that point I was just curious how long they would take and just waited.

So anyway, I hear people like working there. But judging by me experience, there are some red flags. I think it points to how things are run internally.

skynetv23• 11 years ago

My experience was polar opposite. I interviewed with AWS. The entire process was very well organized and very professional. The recruiters were very professional, everyone showed up as promised, manager took me to lunch - overall a very pleasant experience. The HR rep took me thru the benefits, comp. package etc before the interview.

The only thing I hated was the "bar raiser". He was a guy who came in made up his mind for sure. I could see it in his face. He was not pleasant, did not smile. And he started with "I have a lot of questions to ask, and I want to get through all of them in our time. So give me short straight answers and dont take too much time". At that moment I knew I was a goner. Just to compare, I have 12 years of experience in areas of open source, big company, big university research on large systems. A few patents and a ton of publications. Either he walked in feeling insecure and wanted to crush me with his power or feeling that I am full of shit and he is going to let me know about it. The bar raiser has veto on the candidate and I think it was abused severely. He did not like any answer I gave, and keep in mind that the questions he asked are not the kind that have black and white answers but the answers vary on your background and experience. Since I signed an NDA saying I wont reveal any questions, let me give a simple example:

What have you ever done for a customer that was not planned?

Now if you come from a hardware product development background, there is nothing you can do without it being POR. Engineers cannot randomly decide to change specs or features without the entire supporting organizations knowing about it. If an engineer decides to add some feature to help some customer, who is going to test it, document it, train the support organization, tell the factory about the changes in the process etc? You can't do stuff without anyone approving it. yes, you can affect change and try to get buy in from the rest of the organization but thats all you can do.

If you come from a web dev company, maybe there is more leeway in what an anyone can do individually.

So there is no black and white answer here and he just said "thats not satisfactory". Shortly after that the hiring manager came in and said the process wasnt going well and basically told me to go home.

One would think someone who is given that much veto power is more professional and objective and unbiased.

boomzilla• 11 years ago

Someone seriously said: "that's not satisfactory" in an interview? That's so unnecessary. The strongest language I've ever said when interviewing is "I think there might be some perspectives that you've not considered". Interviewing is a two-way street. You'd want to hire good candidates and usually good candidates have multiple options, so you'd also want to make the candidate want to work for you too.

amznawsthrow9• 11 years ago

I work at Amazon, I interview a lot, in fact I teach an internal course for conducting interviews. What you experienced is 100% against our policies, and what we teach interviewers. You don't give candidates negative feedback like that.

And you never ever EVER end an interview loop early. EVER. You finish the day. You collect as much data as you can. And you let the recruiters reject candidates if and only if everyone has submitted their feedback into an internal tool (without being able to see other people's feedback first), and then discussed it.

I kind of want to see if I can reach out to you another way to find out your info so that I can find what bar raiser/hiring manager you had and have a word with him.

amzn_thrwy_1585• 11 years ago

My own Amazon interview experience went smoothly, but when I showed up in Seattle for my first day of work, they were all like "Your manager's not in today and nobody booked you into orientation, so we decided your start date is actually next week, can you just pause your life for a week while we don't pay you?"

The next week happened to roll over to the next month, which meant that my benefits were postponed. They direct-deposited my starting bonus for the original month, and then yanked it out of my bank account without notifying me. Then they deposited it again at the end of the next month.

senderista3• 11 years ago

I had a similar experience. My new manager (not the hiring manager I was supposed to work for, it was a bait-and-switch they announced on my first day) was on vacation for 2 weeks and unreachable via email. Since no one else could give me the access permissions I needed to do anything, I had to literally twiddle my thumbs for the next 2 weeks--I couldn't even complete the SDE bootcamp. It was a comically terrible onboarding experience that made me seriously question my decision to join.

dkural7• 11 years ago

People seem to fundamentally misunderstand what a company is. It exists for the benefit of its shareholders, and secondarily, customers. It will take whatever actions necessary towards achieving this. It'll accrue benefits to the employee to the extent it helps towards these goals.

Now what happens in a lot of publicly-traded large companies is, the inmates start running the asylum. The workplace primarily starts to exist for the benefit of the employee. Since internally most companies are structured as an oligarchy or dictatorship, most of these benefits accrue to "management" - another type of employee. Harmonious behavior and not creating too much trouble become the premium value. Everything seems to be going great, until you implode and fire thousands of people, or get acquired and the same things happen. The lucky ones retire before that. All of this, of course, happens to the detriment of shareholders.

Look at Microsoft. Great employee satisfaction. They missed out on the internet, on search, on social, on mobile, all the while bringing in HUNDREDS of BILLIONS in revenue over the last 20 years. Ballmer gets a lot of the blame, but everybody else also kind of just went with it. Asleep at the switch.

A company doesn't exist for the employee to have good work-balance, to get self-worth, nurture your creativity or whatever. It exploits your very human needs and desires to create wealth for its shareholders. Google would like you to think it's just like college, and to give you great social opportunities and make as many friends as possible, so it replaces your original parent-in-standing, The College Campus. The more of your psyche and social world is tied to the corporation, the more meaning you'll ascribe to your work, the more likely you'll stay.

pkinsky• 11 years ago

Fortunately my skills are in demand enough that hopefully I will never be forced to sell my labor to such a company.

wilsynet4• 11 years ago

The idea that a company exists for the benefit of shareholders is not universally agreed.

For example:

http://www.propublica.org/thetrade/item/how-shareholders-are...

Anyway, you're free to be cynical about Google, but it is clear that Larry is not trying to maximize shareholder value.

dkural7• 11 years ago

A company is the property of its shareholders. Like your house is your property. As long as you follow the law, you can do whatever you'd like with it - in that sense, it exists for your benefit. You have no obligation to buy new chairs for the plumber to take a break, or allow the house cleaner to have a coffee break.

I agree with the link you're providing though: I'm not saying management should have an ideology of "shareholder value" - it's circular. "Make money" is not substitute for having a vision for what you'll build & sell.

I don't think it's clear at all that Larry is pursuing a suboptimal growth strategy. Clearly other shareholders believe that too, as evidenced by strong demand for Google stock. I think Larry is doing what he'd like to do, considering he & Sergei are the largest shareholders. I do think in the long run his long-shot investments are really smart, since ad revenues will grow more slowly.

itg• 11 years ago

Well shareholders should figure out that having management treating employees like shit isn't a good idea for the long term health of a company.

Apocryphon3• 11 years ago

So you're saying we should transition to an economy that's less dominated by organizations that exist solely for the benefit of shareholders? Perhaps co-ops are the future.

hwstar3• 11 years ago

Another way would be to have the people elect polititians to force the conversion of 'C' corporations to 'B' corporations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation.

Aleman3604• 11 years ago

I'm sorry but that's a parasitic perspective. What's the meaning of life? To work 80 hours a week to ensure someone gets their Elsa doll delivered in half an hour?

We're all caught up in consumerism and no one seems to care. You're perpetuating dystopia.

paulhauggis2• 11 years ago

"I'm sorry but that's a parasitic perspective. What's the meaning of life? To work 80 hours a week to ensure someone gets their Elsa doll delivered in half an hour?"

The meaning of life is whatever you make of it. If you want nice things, you will need to work your ass off to get it.

dkural7• 11 years ago

Of course it sucks for the employees! You're right that it's a meaningless life that way.

But the fallacy is that it's somehow up to the "world" to fix that - Many people have this feeling that it "should" be better, but well, it's their company eh? You are always free to figure out how to do better on your own, instead of work for somebody else. You could always save up / borrow some money and then buy some land / start a shop / figure out how to do make it on your own. Why should you not work 80 hours? Why would anyone else owe you that?

eli_gottlieb• 11 years ago

It exploits your very human needs and desires to create wealth for its shareholders.

Well, at least you admit to supporting an inhuman, inhumane horror-show of an institution. At least you're honest and willing to use the word "exploit".

dkural7• 11 years ago

Of course I "admit" it - my whole point in the above post is, the first step in gaining "work-life" balance is understanding that the company will never do it as a matter of principle. It will only do it tactically insofar it helps the business. It will cut any resemblance of balance or benefits when it can justify. A company is not set up as a societal institution. It is property owned by someone. It sets up contracts between itself and the employee. It tries to trick the employee into thinking it has the employees best interest, it's a community, etc. which the employee wants to believe to feel like their work matters beyond making the company owners wealthy, their life is more meaningful due to said work beyond renumeration etc.

The first step to having a "happy" work life is to realizing work is just that -- work, and to expect nothing more, or less out of it, and to decide for yourself the overall importance of it in your life. The company won't do it for you. It's not a "community that cares about its members". All this propaganda of equality exists to mask the inherent power relations that dominate work life.

parasubvert2• 11 years ago

Not so much.

There is a wide range of divergent opinion of what's in the shareholders/partners interests, or what actually constitutes a representative shareholder. There also is limited need for equity financing for a company once it is profitable.

Where there is little doubt is what is required for a company to exist: a customer. Therefore, companies exist to create customers first. A company will exist regardless of what shareholders do - they can hollar/scream/sell their shares/replace the management. A company cannot exist for very long without a customer.

Digging further, most shareholders in practice have abdicated any interest in how the company is actually run to management. Only board members (at times) and activist investors have influence, and the latter's priorities can have mixed results.

Voting structures limit benefits further. In the case of a company like Google, for example, the share structure makes it Larry and Sergey's company - i.e. owned by management - public shareholders basically have zero say. There will be no activists. Larry and Sergey don't act or have goals like typical shareholders. This also goes similarly for Facebook and Mark Zuckerberg, Berkshire Hathaway and Warren Buffett (who has been great for shareholders - but he has all the say), or Echostar and Charlie Ergen.

All of this makes "shareholder value" a nebulous concept. Of course, customers aren't the entire story. They're just Step 1.

Step 0 is that companies exist because we prefer to organize a society for decentralized wealth production and consumption - it's more effective, freer, innovative, etc., than centralized planning and production, or anarchistic free association. But that's a whole other rathole.

So, what does a a company do, again? It's a bunch of people working together to create & retain customers for a profit. How does one describe management's mission in this? Instead of shareholder value maximization, Peter Drucker has suggested that management is all about maximizing the "wealth-producing capacity of the enterprise": “It is this objective that integrates short-term and long-term results and that ties the operational dimensions of business performance—market standing, innovation, productivity and people and their development—with financial needs and financial results. It is also this objective on which all constituencies depend for the satisfaction of their expectations and objectives, whether shareholders, customers or employees.”

amznawsthrow9• 11 years ago

I've worked at Amazon for the last 3 years as a Software Developer both on AWS and on the Retail side and I can answer any questions people have.

Most of the things I see in this article are bullshit, at least as a software developer is concerned. Maybe the business side is way worse, but I doubt it.

I've never seen anyone refer to "Climbing over the wall" when hitting it. People talk about "working hard and making history", but what major leading software company (Google, Facebook, anything in Silicon Valley) doesn't talk about changing the world?

The internal "anytime feedback" tool is geared towards giving people unprompted POSITIVE feedback when they do something you think is worthy of recognition. It is not meant to undermine each other's bosses, that's laughable.

Yes, once you reach a high enough level (Senior Manager (ie manager of managers), Director, VP), you hear stories all the time of your bosses emailing you things on Sundays and expecting a response the same day, but again, at the level of responsibility that we are talking about, where you are paid six figures multiple times over with additional six figures worth of stock, that's common expectations from most leading software companies that are in a cuthroat business.

I've never seen developers or senior developers be expected to respond to emails on Sunday or after midnight. In fact, right now, because of StageFright, most developers don't even have access to work email on their Android devices.

"workers are encouraged to tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings"?

Don't make me laugh. If anything, the emphasis on "Leadership principles" emphasizes that as leaders we are more than our ideas, we are meant to build relationships, and not act as assholes where the idea is king.

"Secrecy is required; even low-level employees sign a lengthy confidentiality agreement".

NOPE. Just a standard boilerplate NDA and non-compete clause the same as at every software company I've worked at before - small and local, or large and multinational. OF COURSE there are teams that are under stricter security (e.g. the Kindle Fire team before it was announced), but again, that's not unorthodox.

I've never seen anyone cry at the office, not even close.

"Within Amazon, ideal employees are often described as “athletes” with endurance, speed (No. 8: “bias for action”), performance that can be measured and an ability to defy limits (No. 7: “think big”)."

NOT EVEN CLOSE. "Bias for action" simply means that when faced with a choice to either try something and fail, and ultimately risk wasting that time, versus sitting around and trying to analyze the tradeoffs, we want to err on the side of trying. It's kind of like Facebook's "Move fast and break things", only without the breaking. It just says that we want our people to experiment, attempt moonshots, and figure out quickly if something will work or not.

"Think big" means that every decision we make needs to be considered at Amazon scale. If you build a caching library, think about what happens if every team at amazon started using it. If you build a feature to solve some problem for Amazon.fr, consider if every single marketplace needed it, and then 10 more regional marketplaces showed upworldwide. Would the same solution work?

"Workers are expected to embrace “frugality” (No. 9), from the bare-bones desks to the cellphones and travel expenses that they often pay themselves. "

Typical standard per-diem when travelling like I have at other companies. Frugality isn't supposed to be "be cheap". It's "consider before spending". There is a whole Amazon legends about how you get a door for a desk, and it's not supposed to be literal. The point isn't that Amazon makes you use a door for a desk. It's that at some point in the company history, they realized they could get doors from Home Depot for cheaper than a simple office desk and thought "hey that's a good idea". These days desks are not doors. If you request you can get an adjustable ergonomic sit/stand desk. And no, if you're a developer, you don't have to buy your own second monitor. The company provides 2 monitors just like anywhere else, and reasonable developer-friendly specs for the machines.

"Instead, Amazonians are instructed to “disagree and commit” (No. 13) — to rip into colleagues’ ideas, with feedback that can be blunt to the point of painful, before lining up behind a decision."

The bullshit just won't end. Disagree and commit isn't "Disagree and be aggressive". It's "If you disagree but are overruled, make your point AND MOVE ON." Don't sabotage the chosen approach if you were overruled. Don't make passive aggressive comments. Don't celebrate if it turned out you were right after all. Make the best argument you can, but if it's overruled, you go with the decision, and be a team player.

brown9-25• 11 years ago

It's not "bullshit" if other people's experiences are not your own, unless you can claim to have worked in every job role and every team at Amazon.

You should really consider that as a SDE in AWS, you probably have one of the most prized roles in the company and therefore are perhaps treated the best.

Not every team is in the cloud services business. Retail orgs have to necessarily run with as little expense as possible.

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

I don't think the description of people's experiences is bullshit. I can only speak for what I've witnessed in the company, which is a fair amount. However, there are cases where the writers clearly misconstrue things or take things out of context. See, for instance, their treatment of Bezos' Princeton commencement speech, highlighted above. So I don't see the article as an even-handed description of Amazon's corporate culture. When I look at the totality of David Streitfeld's reporting, I think he has an agenda when it comes to Amazon.

amznawsthrow9• 11 years ago

While being in AWS is "prized", it also comes with a LOT more pressure.

I now work on the Retail side and if anything feel less pressure, but do not feel any less appreciated.

cesarbs10• 11 years ago

My wife is an SDET there and the article doesn't resonate with her either. Most days it's a 9-5 job. Sometimes she'll work a bit late until 7 or 8pm, but only because she wants to.

Maybe SDETs have it easier? :)

serge2k11• 11 years ago

reasonable developer-friendly specs for the machines. Nope.

The frugality principle is a disaster. It's a bad joke and the company uses it to justify the stupidest things.

amznawsthrow9• 11 years ago

I do most of my work on my Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and a 256 SSD.

The frugality comes from the fact that it's not Retina. Big whoop.

msoad2• 11 years ago

Nice try Amazon tech recruiting team!

eitally4• 11 years ago

A lot of this sounds a lot like Google, but with a completely different management style driving the ship. I prefer Google's method, but Amazon's sounds way more "normal" and comparative to any large enterprise. I was an IT senior director at a large multinational until May and managed a large team of devs/SQA/DBAs/analysts and most of the stuff I've read here resonates with my experiences.

erispoe• 11 years ago

If you're sincere, I think your response would be much more valuable, and prone to be taken seriously, if you stayed on the factual side, instead of deriding the article with comments on how "laughable" and "bullshit" it is.

outside12342• 11 years ago

The most depressing thing about this is that this abusive mode of working started by apple and Amazon seems to be winning. I don't see how this is sustainable - while it leads to probably good business results - how many relationships is it destroying and how many children are going unparented? Amazon in general seems like a net loss for society.

gress5• 11 years ago

Apple doesn't operate like this at all. You are confusing Steve Jobs personal behavior with the company culture.

WorldWideWayne4• 11 years ago

No, Apple is known to be a bad employer too - http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-employees-confess-all-t...

wilsynet4• 11 years ago

Apple employees are not abused like this. They're siloed, secretive, and they work hard -- but it's not like this.

Apocryphon3• 11 years ago

It really depends on which team you're working on. There's plenty of toxicity to go around

analog31• 11 years ago

Sometimes I wonder what saves the rest of us from working under such conditions. Given the continual adoration of "leaders" from Jack Welch onward, managers everywhere should aspire to replicate those conditions within their own empires.

Why not utopia everywhere?

I think there are a couple of reasons. First, within the exponential (or whatever) distribution of company sizes, most companies aren't big enough to operate such programs efficiently. Just as some processes can't be scaled up, others are hard to scale down. At my own employer, despite 30k+ employees, we are quite diverse and scattered. The kind of orientation and monitoring that the AAA companies can give their employees, we just can't afford.

Second, there may be a very small number of top managers with the self discipline and emotional stamina to actually carry it out.

brown9-25• 11 years ago

Amazon is a retail business. They can only earn money from razor-thin margins by pushing to keep costs down so hard.

This is why it is fundamentally unfair to compare Amazon to Apple, Microsoft, Facebook or Google. They are in different businesses. Other companies are fortunate to not have to treat humans so poorly to be able to exist.

serge2k11• 11 years ago

I disagree completely with the idea that they have to treat people this way.

They choose to because it's easier and more profitable. It's scummy as hell.

tonetheman• 11 years ago

That is a shitty place to work period.

thecombjelly2• 11 years ago

Seeing as this isn't close to the first report on Amazon treating its workers horribly, why do people continue to use AWS? There are alternative companies that provide AWS like services and don't put workers in a sweatshop. So if you continue to use AWS aren't you just encouraging Amazon to do more of the same?

jacalata• 11 years ago

Same reason they continue to buy clothes made in actual sweatshops, because most people don't care as much about the workers making their products as they do about the cost (and sometimes quality) of those products.

thecombjelly2• 11 years ago

This isn't the same. In this case we know Amazon does it whereas with many products we don't know exactly how the item is produced. As well, AWS is not the best value whereas with commodity products the item may be the best value, from a monetary to quality standpoint. Not to mention, in most cases, technology companies can afford to pay more for a more ethical product even if AWS was the best value whereas for many people the price of a commodity is very important.

Using AWS is either laziness, the "we use Java because everyone uses Java" syndrome, or internal inertia. The only partially excusable reason is internal inertia.

gdulli• 11 years ago

I use AWS because it's a choice my company has made that I can't overturn. But I've phased buying from Amazon out of my personal life.

It wasn't even difficult. If you just look a bit and stop assuming Amazon is always the best deal, you'll find it's not.

Recently I wanted to buy some cheap $7 earphones. At Amazon they would have been 30 cents cheaper but I had to buy $35 worth of stuff to get free shipping. (Or pay $100/year, which would amortize to very expensive shipping for me.)

Elsewhere I paid 30 cents extra for the product but got free shipping for just the one item. That's a great tradeoff.

ilurkedhere• 11 years ago

Sounds like hell is filled with suckers.

ck2• 11 years ago

I don't get how they keep anyone more than 6 months?

What the hell are they dangling over people that makes them stay?

dontmentionit• 11 years ago

Most of their engineers are fresh out of college who don't know anything better. Some stay for stocks, while others are just biding their time. At Amazon, you definitely learn a lot - that keeps some people too.

brown9-25• 11 years ago

Amazon retains new workers in part by requiring them to repay a part of their signing bonus if they leave within a year, and a portion of their hefty relocation fees if they leave within two years.

potatolicious5• 11 years ago

Amazon's stock packages vest non-linearly (exponentially) over 4 years, so if you leave after only one year you get only ~5% of the total package.

As opposed to the industry standard which is linear vesting.

They also have onerous clawback clauses on signing bonuses and relocation, and I know of one instance where the clawback stipulated that the signing bonuses would be paid back pre-tax (e.g., $10k signing bonus, of which you got $6k after tax, but if you quit you have to cough up $10k) - meaning you are actually in the hole if you leave.

They also have a habit of putting 2-year clawbacks on their bonuses rather than the more common 1-year, so leaving even in your second year at Amazon would result in substantial financial loss.

Even in this environment I know multiple people who left before their 1-year anniversary, that's how bad it is in many parts of the company. I personally know multiple people who suffered substantial financial loss in order to leave.

ljk2• 11 years ago

They also have onerous clawback clauses on signing bonuses and relocation, and I know of one instance where the clawback stipulated that the signing bonuses would be paid back pre-tax (e.g., $10k signing bonus, of which you got $6k after tax, but if you quit you have to cough up $10k) - meaning you are actually in the hole if you leave.

so if you get fired then you don't have to pay it back?

curiousjorge3• 11 years ago

I made 10k in a year by playing the slot machine once a week

whateveracct• 11 years ago

At least in my case, the clawback clause for the first year bonus is on a pro-rated, daily basis. So you'd only have to pay back the difference. The second year bonus is paid out monthly, and the last monthly chunk has to be paid back on a pro-rated, daily basis. So no, you don't have to pay back the entire $10k or $20k or whatever if you quit 9 months in.

plonh4• 11 years ago

if you pay back pre-tax, you also reduce your income by that amount, so you pay less taxes. You aren't "in the hole".

blueside2• 11 years ago

This makes me recall Bezos posting to usenet in 1994 looking for potential new hires...

"You must have experience designing and building large and complex (yet maintainable) systems, and you should be able to do so in about one-third the time that most competent people think possible. "

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/mi.jobs/poXLCW8udK4/_G...

technofiend• 11 years ago

That attitude still prevails. Last time I talked to someone at Amazon he said something "we get more done in one quarter than you finance guys get done in a year."

thewarrior• 11 years ago

Employees ratting on each other is straight out of 1984.

lamontcg• 11 years ago

I left in 2006.

It seems to have actually gotten substantially worse there.

Wow...

noahm3• 11 years ago

I worked at Amazon for 3+ years, leaving just under a year ago. "It’s the greatest place I hate to work" pretty much sums up how I felt about the place. The crazy thing is, I kinda want to go back! The scope and scale of the engineering problems is simply unmatched, especially if you're like me and you don't want to work for a primarily advertising funded company.

I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site. It sounds like most of the people interviewed for the article were on the retail side. In AWS, I never felt any sort of competition with my peers, nor did I feel like people were trying to sabotage me with the anytime feedback tool. In fact, it really felt like there was a refreshing lack of office politics there. Everybody worked very hard and there was mutual respect among all my peers. The workloads are heavy, for sure, but never really unmanageable, and the work is almost always interesting.

Ultimately what finally ended it for me was the complete lack of paternity leave. Amazon offers, to the letter, the bare minimum family leave that they can legally get away with. If the company isn't interested in my health or that of my family, should I really be putting effort into helping them succeed? I think policies like that really run counter to their "hire and develop the best" principle. How exactly do they plan on doing that if they don't treat them with respect?

retailengineer4• 11 years ago

I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site.

I'm an SDE on the retail side, and the funny thing is, there seems to be a consensus among the engineers on the retail side that it's much harder to work at AWS, because of poor management. Glad to know that's not the case.

My engineering team at least is pretty chill. The business teams have the harder job, but not nearly as hard as the article suggests ("cancer? screw that!" -- sure, that's how it is). Totally agree about the lack of paternity leave, though. One of the guys on the team who has a two-month-old hardly gets any sleep at all. Perhaps all this bad PR (and all the customers saying "I won't buy Amazon anymore!") will make Amazon address this issue.

msoad2• 11 years ago

So many new accounts defending Amazon here! Nice try Amazon!

brianpgordon• 11 years ago

How many hours per week did the engineers work in AWS when you were at Amazon?

noahm3• 11 years ago

Typical tech hours. 40-50, maybe more during crunch time right before a new feature launch or something. Not really any worse than any other place I've worked. Hours were flexible, too; I'm the type who arrives at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and leaves after 6 PM, but I had co-workers who worked 7 to 4 or something.

scurvy3• 11 years ago

From the comments posted so far, it sounds like the author put a very bright spotlight on a few bad cases and blew certain things out of proportion. That said, it does sound like Amazon is very different, bottom-to-top, from other tech companies -- especially those that got their start in the Valley. Right or wrong, Amazon is trying something different. Every company in the Valley just mimics each other and clones their "corporate values" from each other as well as practices, benefits, etc.

That said, there are some refreshing things I read in the article. It's nice to hear there are tech companies where you're not required to be everyone's friend and sing kumbaya. I currently work at one where one of the company's ideals is "extreme respect" -- meaning you must respect every employee even if they have never earned such respect and have done several things to make them lose respect in your eyes. Criticizing bad ideas is extremely difficult to do because someone's feelings might get hurt and then they'll tattle on you to a manager than you're not respecting them. Never mind the fact that their idea was a bad one that would have cost the company money, caused setbacks, or lost customers. In the founder's mind, everyone is going to get a gold star and the company will succeed with this idea of respect, not the best decisions.

I think I'm stuck at the other end of the spectrum from Amazon, and I'll leave shortly after working out financing to sell my options via warrants to a third party. Extreme respect and gold stars for everyone, but how dare you try and sell your precious shares to the unwashed?

eclipxe3• 11 years ago

Mind sharing what company it is?

scurvy3• 11 years ago

I will after I sell my shares. They might preach respect, but they don't take criticism too well.

chad_strategic• 11 years ago

I'm sure this is going to piss a lot of people off...

This is #firstworldproblems.

If you don't want to work there, then don't. I just quit a crappy/work intensive/crazy/insane/no structure cannabis startup and I feel a heck of lot better.

I would have been thrilled to be making the Amazon money out of college, instead I went to Boot Camp (USMC), that was low pay and stress environment.

Let's put this all in perspective...

(Let's not forget Bezos owns the Washington Post, and well this was written by the NYT?)

Zigurd• 11 years ago

I wonder if Amazon runs 126 Labs this way. If they do, I think they are reducing the chances that they will turn Fire OS into a serious competitor in phones and tablets, even for media consumption.

serge2k11• 11 years ago

I don't think it matters.

tzs• 11 years ago

Many more anecdotes from former or current Amazon employees in the biggest Reddit discussion of this: https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/3h391m/amazon_e...

esturk• 11 years ago

Interesting to see Amazon's lack of damage control on reddit vs the damage control on here.

S_A_P• 11 years ago

I can see the perspective of wanting Amazon on your resume. But otherwise it sounds like an awful place to work. I've known three people who have worked there. 1 made it 6 months, another 2 years, and the last is going on 3 years if his LinkedIn profile is correct. I suspect he will stay due to H1B reasons.

cesarbs10• 11 years ago

My feeling is that these things vary greatly from group to group within Amazon. My wife works there as an SDET and nothing in that article applies to her. Most days she is home by 6:30-7pm, and would be even sooner if it weren't for the long commute (we live on Eastside).

A co-worker's wife also works there as an SDET and it's the same - very 9-5, very rarely she has to work a bit later. Our wives are in completely different groups by the way.

Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs, but my wife says that the devs in her group don't seem to be under a lot of pressure/stress either.

mud_dauber• 11 years ago

I got through 3/4 of the article and had to quit. Simply FUCKING APPALLING organizational behavior. I can say with reasonable confidence that if I had discovered those tricks being done to my reputation behind my back, there would be fisticuffs. Fuck Bezos.

tr4• 11 years ago

Fisticuffs...or worse. I've heard developer colleagues joking at times of excessive pressure and management nastiness at my (non-Amazon) workplace about "going postal".

At a large enough scale, you will get people who lack the coping skills deal with that kind of nasty environment. I suppose an employee going beserk and harming others would be the ultimate expression of "organizational Darwinism".

tobbyb• 11 years ago

What a depressing read. Jeff Bezos needs to tell us why he is treating our fellow human beings so badly. I am willing to wait another day for my gadgets from amazon, or not even have gadgets. I didn't ask for this, no customer asked for this. I don't want people to be treated like this,

Some of the reports about the sick and unlucky being penalized is grotesque and Bezos needs to stand up and defend himself or be dismissed as a psychopath.

Efficiency, performance and wealth should not be a ruse for businesses to drag us a sterile world stripped of humanity in pursuit of profits. No one signed that social contract.

Ultimately the only reasons sociopaths thrive and succeed is there are too many people willing to do their bidding, every single time, to dehumanize themselves and others.

blueside2• 11 years ago

Agreed, unfortunately the two terms you mentioned "psychopath" and "sociopath" are character traits that get rewarded in our current system. Very sad.

ledriveby• 11 years ago

I wonder if ex-Amazon employees will seed Seattle's startup scenes with "the Amazon way". Maybe they'll do the exact opposite, since they've seen how unhappy life can be when they're treated as grist for the mill.

I try to take my dollars elsewhere because I think Amazon is detrimental to local economies or their employees in warehouses and HQ. Kind of like how I feel about Wal*Mart.

plonh4• 11 years ago

A few ex-Amazon startups have exported Amazon culture and failed in industry . Pelago, for example.

seattle_spring• 11 years ago

I recently left a mid-sized tech company in Seattle largely because of a few bad apples toxifying the culture. Interestingly enough, all 3 of them were ex-Amazon employees.

curiousjorge3• 11 years ago

A business engine always breaks with the very people that make up the engine. If people aren't happy, the product sucks, managers go into panic and begins pushing people more and the downward spiral continues.

My speculation here but I think Amazon has reached peak. It got what it wanted, the largest retailer in America. Jeff Bezo got his feature on magazine and tv shows. Stock leaps one more fold. Amazon has consistently led on investors that future profits is everything while undercutting everyone else in a razor thin margin operations. Now that it's reached the title it wanted it finds the very people that got them there miserable and jumping ship. That's very hard to fix especially when you piss off the work force and give the impression that it's a hell hole.

Reminds me of a startup that grew super quick while maintaing crazy turnovers until they couldn't hire anymore directly because their reputation has gotten so bad. They never recovered. I think we are seeing something like that to a certain degree but in much larger magnitude.

I think Walmart would be very much poised to begin eating at Amazon's margins. These days I find myself comparing prices with walmart.com before ordering on Amazon.

sidcool• 11 years ago

So basically it's true. Bezos is a tyrant hellbent on fame. But we won't stop buying from them. There was another story where an honest employee was trampled by the bosses..

oneshot9088• 11 years ago

Something to keep in mind here is that while history is written by the victors, hit pieces like this are primarily sourced from the sad tales of the losers. While there is truth in this article, it exhibits the same sort of inaccuracies as _The Everything Store_. It's nowhere near as bad it sounds from this article, but there are real problems - just like anywhere else. One's ability to prosper at Amazon is a function of one's personality - just like anywhere else. People who need strong guidance will do poorly. People who can survive criticism and thrive in chaos will prosper.

As for me, I worked at Amazon for several years as an engineer. The frugality is what eventually made me leave because too often it gets implemented as dirt cheapness. But in their defense, I had opportunities to do things there none of the other big 4 would have granted. And I got the chance to do them by being confrontational and confident. The downside is that if one interviews at other companies with one's Amazon personality, one will frequently come off as a total a$$hole.

Amazon will change you. Some of those changes are great, but you really have to keep your Amazon ego in check outside of the place.

throwaway6541233• 11 years ago

Yes. The frugality here is ridiculous. I work on device hardware/software. We need a lot of devices for testing. We have to buy them from the retail website.

And yesterday they sent out an email asking for help testing FireTV device on TV with certain specs, with a snarky comment about how you cannot expense a TV. It's completely ridiculous. If they need to test with particular hardware they need to buy the hardware and not rely on using their employees personal TV.

That reminds me, they are always asking to use employees cars for bluetooth testing with device as well.

lordleft• 11 years ago

Is that...legal? I mean I feel like requiring employees to source hardware you need to do your job would violate some statute, somewhere.

serge2k11• 11 years ago

I keep hearing people talk about how inaccurate the everything store is.

In what ways is it wrong?

Keeping your ego in check? They

satyajeet232• 11 years ago

Some of us (like me) really look up to it, the Industry, the Culture and People. Things like this really depress me.

chrisra2• 11 years ago

In contrast, Walmart (where I worked as an intern this summer) is full of genuine kindness, bottom to top, as far as I could tell. I don't remember anyone saying a thing that was rude or harsh to me. Even higher ups seemed like cool people that you could talk to whenever you needed to.

If you're at Amazon and are looking for a kinder environment, Walmart was great to my family.

amazonthrowaway8• 11 years ago

Doesn't Walmart drug test everyone?

chrisra2• 11 years ago

They required me to for my internship at least.

chwahoo2• 11 years ago

Can people suggest companies that better balance the factors that I've seen mentioned in this thread:

- Provide good pay/benefits

- Provide a positive culture for employees

- Employees are encouraged to have a life outside work

- Are run in such a way that good decisions are made and the company seems headed for continued success

- Look good on your resume

z2a2• 11 years ago

No one refer the thread? http://redd.it/3ce0s8

anti-shill• 11 years ago

as the news about amazon and other similar IT/tech workplaces spreads among the populace, fewer americans will want to work there. So we need more H1b imports to help these wonderful companies continue the growth of their stock prices. This is the true american dream in action. And more immigration will help america grow.

iradik• 11 years ago

I started at Amazon in 2005 and I can definitely say it's an intense place-- I spent most of my 20s at Amazon. Amazon makes you battle-hardened, jaded engineer the longer you are there. There's just no avoiding it. That being said I worked there as long as I did because there were aspects that I did like. For example I think the opportunities there in terms of work / scale are a lot bigger than many other big companies. They are more willing to take risks on people. For example I had no college degree when they hired me. Also there are quite a lot of very smart people working there. So it's not all bad. But intense? Yes.

Aleman3604• 11 years ago

Work will set you free.

amznthrowaway212• 11 years ago

Amazonian here. My experience has been nothing like what was described in the article. A few quick hits:

-In three years, I have never once seen anyone cry at Amazon. I've never even heard of anyone crying at work.

-In re: secret feedback tool -- Note that it isn't anonymous. I know the article doesn't say it is, but "secret feedback" seems to imply it is, at least IMO. It's little more than a form for submitting an email to someone's boss. I've only ever heard of a sabotage attempt happening once, and it backfired as predictably as one would expect.

-I remember hearing the phrase "climb the wall" once during my first week at orientation. Reading it in this article was the first time I've heard it in the three years since then.

The company’s winners dream up innovations that they roll out to a quarter-billion customers and accrue small fortunes in soaring stock. Losers leave or are fired in annual cullings of the staff

Correct. Good employees do well. Bad employees are eventually weeded out. This was not invented at Amazon.

Some workers who suffered from cancer, miscarriages and other personal crises said they had been evaluated unfairly or edged out rather than given time to recover.

I legitimately laughed out loud when I read this. Cancer! Miscarriages! Literally the two worst things to ever happen to most people in their lives when they strike! And, of course, not a single shred of evidence to support the claim.

Well, unless you count "some workers" as a reliable source.

rdtsc11• 11 years ago

And, of course, not a single shred of evidence to support the claim.

What is your evidence for working as an Amazonian?

It is a bit hypocritical to critisize others for lack of "evidence" while posting from a throwaway account, donchathink?

amznthrowaway212• 11 years ago

Nope. Burden of proof falls on the party making the assertion. The NYT says X, based on no cited sources. When X is challenged, the burden falls to the NYT to prove X, not the person challenging the assertion.

The fact that I'm an Amazonian has no bearing on any of that, and is actually little more than a red herring. The fact that I'm posting from a throwaway matters even less.

happywolf2• 11 years ago

It seems this person's post has been voted down. I may not fully agree with what he said, but I do feel he/she has provided another facet of Amazon, which adds value to the thread. I disagree voting this comment.

nickc181• 11 years ago

For those that want to know what Amazon is really like, please read my rebuttal: http://bit.ly/1DWkhgV. It's a long article, but it actually gives you facts and data

senderista3• 11 years ago

Yes, "facts" like denying that OLR actually targets a fixed proportion of employees to be managed out. Who do you think you're fooling? Not anyone who's worked at Amazon.

andyl• 11 years ago

It's so difficult to create a successful software product. Amazon has done it dozens of times. An exceptional record. Many great companies have been driven by intensity and competition. The old days of Microsoft and Intel come to mind. An intense workplace will not appeal to everyone. No surprise.

In the civil war, Grant was the first union general to consistently win battles. Politicians complained that Grant drank too much whiskey. Lincoln replied: “Tell me what brand of whiskey Grant drinks. I would like to send a barrel of it to my other generals.”

burlymonster• 11 years ago

I worked at Amazon as an intern for 3 months. Super intense work environment that seriously skewed my view of the normal workplace, as it was my first time working at a large company. Heard shouting during meetings behind closed doors. F-Bombs used regularly. Saw lots of 50+ year old engineers with kids working there until 3 am for a week at a time. Even as an intern I was working nights and weekends. A lot of the middle managers went home early at 4pm though. Lots of Indian contractors working their ass of so they don't lose their visas and get kicked out of the US. My mentor was getting so many text messages (thousands) being sent to his phone in the middle of the night while he was on call that he was fighting with Amazon to get them reimbursed.

amzn_thrwy_1585• 11 years ago

I am skeptical about this post. I work at Amazon and we don't have any 50+ year old engineers.

(I don't know what happened to them. I assume they either quit for greener pastures, or Jeff Bezos invited them to Day 1 North where he tore out their beating hearts while the S-Team danced wildly to the beat of hellish drums)

kome• 11 years ago

I work at Amazon and we don't have any 50+ year old engineers.
I don't know what happened to them.

That's creepy.

swehner• 11 years ago

Funny - the NYT talking about "big ideas" in the title of the article.

It's just an online shopping site ....

kindleguy2• 11 years ago

Since this is getting a lot of visibility, I would like to ask - How many of you like the e-book reading experience in the Kindle or with the Kindle reader apps on other devices?

To me, I hated the high quantity of low quality of work I was doing at Amazon. I worked for Kindle e-books division. Most of the times the product managers were giving random suggestions, and the managers mostly spent time impressing higher level management rather than delivering the best experience for the customer. I felt like being in the midst of a bunch of folks who weren't excited about the e-books space and that they were mostly there because they had a good pay and were able to dance the dance. Internal politics was a big thing and the more I licked my managers boots by answering his midnight calls/mails the more he liked me. Adding even a small feature to enhance the reading experience needed sign-offs from a gazillion teams who would sometimes not agree to just Quality Validate because there wasn't enough time for them. The environment was toxic and no team wanted the other teams to perform well.

parasubvert2• 11 years ago

I find the Kindle ebook layouts are "meh" and miss, so will tend to lean towards iBooks or Kobo when I can lately. PDF is best but tends to be slower to render. Though the vast majority of my e-library is on Kindle.

Device wise, I have an old 2nd generation Kindle for beach use but mostly use my iPad and Laptop. The Voyage and latest Paperwhite look interesting but I'd rather have a device that supported EPUB without me jumping through hoops.

So I guess I'd say "it's adequate". Early Kindle days I was a brand loyalist, but not these days... probably a mix of quality issues and Amazon's overall monopoly position.

kindleguy2• 11 years ago

Actually nobody cared to ask a majority of users their opinions in what was wrong with Kindle.. Any survey would only be towards a subset of users who like the Kindle because they most likely got it for free from Amazon. This feeds into an ecosystem which gives them the impression that everything is right while in reality, they can do much much better.

I hope your comments on layout get enough visibility.

ranman• 11 years ago

One datapoint: I worked at AWS and truly enjoyed my job and my manager. I would definitely go back. I think there are some teams that are building very cool stuff with thoughtful managers. Other teams that are mis-managed and poorly co-ordinated (with a lot of redundant people).

nicegeek• 11 years ago

startup is new big fuss ... People making shit load of money from investors . without even making a viable product example: http://siftery.com

ex-Amazonian• 11 years ago

Worked in AWS DevOps in Dublin, Ireland for 8 months. Totally agree with the article.

- 12 - 16 hour days. Conf calls with the States in the middle of the night. Was expected to respond to emails/txt/calls even when not on-call.

- Low pay, cr*p health insurance, minimal pension contribution. Cheap PC, dirty, overcrowded office, expected to pay for parking outside of office.

- Colleagues never saw their young children. My friend's wife filed for divorce as he was always working.

- When my 2nd son was diagnosed with a lethal condition before birth, my boss showed zero tolerance to what i was going through and expected the same level of commitment as before. This was when i decided to leave.

Three years on if i have to summarize what AWS felt like i'd say "It's a mad scientist's experiment to find the limits of human beings until a more efficient replacement (drones, robots,etc.) is found."

xcs• 11 years ago

Shit, I have just being offered to start there on SDE position and I'm considering to reject the proposal after reading the article and many other related opinions on the net.

race2thebottom• 11 years ago

Stock goes up they can play this game, stock goes down everyone bails and the aftermath is hard to recover from since the culture is shit.

bricss• 11 years ago

Hell yes! React is silly

mwg66• 11 years ago

I'm interested what the data shows for workplace productivity and quality (not just quantity) in such an environment. Specifically in engineering, is there not evidence to suggest that longer hours and more pressure does not get more done? (e.g. Peopleware et al)

mycodebreaks• 11 years ago

How do Google, Facebook or Apple compare to Amazon work-culture and balance wise?

Apocryphon3• 11 years ago

This article, and its comments, are worth checking out: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9342994

twoquestions• 11 years ago

Given such brutal firing practices, it seems like there's a lot of ways this could go very, very badly. If you know you're competing against someone for a raise or to keep from getting fired, what's to stop you from paying some thugs to beat the hell out of your competition, slash their tires, or poison their food?

I'm morbidly curious when Amazon is going to start threatening promising candidates to work for them rather than paying well (or at all). Imagine the money Jeff could save if he could motivate people with their family's continued safety instead of money!

manish_gill• 11 years ago

I love how all the Amazon apologists came out to defend their company and criticise any argument against it. They want hard evidence yet completely ignore everything the article says. To counter it, they cite their own anecdotal experience as proof that Amazon's not a bad place to work at all!

z2a2• 11 years ago

check the update https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-am.... Quoted from Gizmodo: Gizmodo received the following email from an Amazon representative today:

    Hi Maddie, I saw that you covered the recent NYT story about Amazon. While we generally do not comment on individual news stories, we quickly saw current Amazon employees react. Here’s an example: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/amazonians-response-inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-nick-ciubotariu

    Could you please include that employee’s rebuttal in your coverage, either in full or in excerpts with a link to the full piece?

    Thanks,

    Ty

staticelf• 11 years ago

This is one of the several reasons I would probably never be able to work in the US or for an american company.

It is simply too much top-down management, too much stress and bad culture. This description is of course extreme but by my standards (I'm a swede) even what is considered normal i the US is unacceptable for me.

I don't know if I simply enjoy the prospects of a nation with a greater view on the work life but I seriously question all americans how you can tolare such an environment as many of you seem to have?

tribetally• 11 years ago

What is Amazon's culture? Find out and add your insight as well: http://www.tribetally.com/tribes/amazon/

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

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