Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace | Hacker News Reader

Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace

nytimes.com

708 pointsIBM424 comments

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.

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).

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).

This is a great point. I worked at such a company in a satellite office. A favorite activity was to get drunk and bitch about corporate, etc. Everyone loved each other, but _hated_ the company.

There's a right way and a wrong way to do this. The military make boot camp/basic training tough in part to build camaraderie amongst new recruits, the experience binds them to everyone who has been through the same ordeal. But that is in service of some higher ideal than "shareholder value".

It doesn't end after boot camp, though. We frequently referred to the Green Weenie, which was the omnipresent malevolent force that made everyone miserable. It's the main reason why I got the hell out.

I've found that a lot of other companies seem to have Green Weenies, and I do my damndest to avoid them. Five years of getting fucked was enough for me. At least buy me dinner first.

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.

RSUs vesting at year 3 gives a good indication of what they expect the tenure of a drone to be.

Exactly.

Amazon discussed an offer with very backloaded RSUs. They must think engineers are idiots: if you offer 5/15/40/40 vesting (those may not be the exact numbers but they're not far off), it's a giant flashing sign with a klaxon on top that you expect the majority of your eng to churn inside of 2 years.

I replied anything but 25/25/25/25 wasn't even worth discussing and that was that.

>>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.

All three have offices in Seattle.

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.

curious to know how many years of experience do you have?

Damn, 260k and 300k?

Why are these so high? Do you and your friend have some valuable speciality?

When one bedroom apartments cost $5,000 per month, you need a minimum salary of $200,000 to even qualify at the low end, but then over half your take home pay goes towards rent. A safer salary is easily $250k to $300k. Those levels of salary get you above the line of working just to pay for your overpriced apartment.

I live in Seattle, as does the person who mentioned the salaries, and I would be hard pressed to even find a 1BR that cost $5,000/mo. I recently lived in a very large 2BR for $2200, full of amenities. Even if you want a really nice place in a great location I'd have no trouble finding a 1BR that was absolutely fantastic for $2000.

This ain't SF.

doh. It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs.

Perhaps Google should COL-adjust SF employees up to about $500k/year.

There's a weird life trap where you're making what most people would consider "a lot," but over half your take home pay is eaten by rent and food that costs 3x what it would somewhere else. So your "a lot" turns into "can't afford a car" or "can't save up enough to get out of the cycle" without moving to less desirable places.

Better to serve in hell (SF/NYC) than reign in flyover country?

> It didn't occur to me people would stay in Seattle after getting Google jobs.

It's actually pretty fantastic.

Food in SF is cheap. So are car costs. Actually everything except rent was considerably cheaper when I lived in SF vs Toronto.

Be glad you don't live in Vancouver, where the average house cost is the same as the bay area, but the average income is the same as reno nv. Rent although seems to be almost half the price of a house mortgage, so there is strange business going on in vancouver.

It might be that some companies offer near-SF salaries to make it a slam dunk for the new hire. From the point of view of a Valley giant, they probably churn higher-salaried people in SF/SV all the time, so one more located elsewhere is not a biggie. At 10% less it's still a win, and because of the differential from local prices, the new hire will be super excited to join and stick around, so why not? The more you push down towards average local salaries, the more you have to compete with local businesses and the more you risk getting average performance out of the hire, all for a relatively small cash saving.

It cost half that in most south bay cities. For $5k you can easily get a 2000 sq ft 4 bedroom independent home in most south bay towns (except palo alto, los altos etc)

Note that a $5k/mo mortgage means a $1.2m+ selling price, for ~2000sqft. That's still insane (and doesn't include property tax, maintenance, utilities, or any of the other homeowner costs). Imho, anyone is crazy who thinks spending half their take home on a mortgage is acceptable.

Total comp, I assume, includes presumed vested stock payout. Even as a FE developer (sr level) these numbers aren't unfathomable when they include stocks.

Why are FE devs paid lower? I'm not a FE dev but I don't see why they deserve any less..

That's nice of you to say, but I think a few things play into it:

1) I've found most FE devs are not classically trained software engineers (most don't have CS degrees)

2) There's still a stigma that all FE is is writing HTML, CSS and JS (when, in fact, there's now entire build management layers, and the frontend stack is as complicated and nuanced as that of any OS' SDK). This is a holdover idea that is starting to diminish.

3) Because of 1, the market likely has more FE developers available to it. I'd be curious to see what your typical self-taught Java, C#, Python, Ruby or DBA makes.

4) I've also noticed a trend of BE engineers showing interest in front-end work, given its new challenges and such, further saturating the market. This is completely anecdotal though.

Let's say you make $150K salary, plus 15% bonus and $75K per year of FB/Google/Apple RSUs.

That gets you to $247K.

At these very successful companies they almost always pay out your full annual bonus and the stocks are outright grants, not stock options.

This is not captured by salary surveys, which only ever talk about base salaries.

I think I probably should have done more negotiating.

Don't quote total comp. Everyone has a different formula for total comp, with recruiters and HR departments being the masters of padding that number, so it's useless. Just quote salary.

I normally agree with this, but I think it's ok to make an exception when bonuses are paid out in full each year and stock is grants, not options.

So what's your coaching strategy?

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.

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.

SDET?

Software Development Engineer in Testing, I think.

That's right.

Funny how Bezos has disdain for Microsoft, but then steals all their jobs titles. MS first coined the term SDET for that role.

As others said, Software Development Engineer in Test. She's a dev that writes test automation code.

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.

I think the article is really exaggerating on negative points. Get a handful of people who had really bad managers and extrapolate their stories to the rest of the company - I'm pretty sure one can do that for any large company.

A co-worker's wife also works there as an SDET and her experience is the same as my wife's. A guy I went to college with works there as an SDE and he also says it's pretty much a 9-5 job. He doesn't work on a service though, so his team doesn't have pager duty and that contributes a lot to it not being a stressful job.

It's a 9-5 job if you check out or are on the way out. Many people are on the way out and don't even realize it.

Then everyone in my wife's team must be on their way out. We're talking about 10+ people here.

I think this is a very important point. While I have heard of very stressful orgs where SDEs are under high pressure, I think that the work environment for non Deve is vastly different.

My wife worked there in a non-tech role and from the stories she and her friends told me I have to say that the article just scratches the top of the iceberg.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A bad carpenter blames his tools.

When you can choose the tools you want to work with and still complain about them, then yes, you are at fault. But when you are forced to use a set of really bad tools and there's not much you can do about it, it's legit to complain about them.

It's one thing being able to choose to use e.g. Emacs, git, and a language of your choice vs. working on a project that requires you to use an outdated version control system, a clunky IDE and more of that sort.

What on earth are you even talking about? Most people at Amazon I know use IntelliJ or vim, its their choice. The languages teams use are also that teams choice. The whole company uses git. I don't think you ever worked there...

I've never said that I work or have worked there. I was not talking about their tools.

Oh right, having a shitty laptop that locks up when I have chrome and intellij open is my fault.

I'm curious - does this quote have a source?

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.

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 :)

I think you can specify the VPN server. I do it all the time and never let it auto-pick.

Keyboard and other minor equipment acquiring process is also fixed/streamlined now. Its much more self-service and does not require standing in queue or getting manager approval.

And on top of all, the one thing I really respect/revere at Amazon are the builder tools. They are probably the best I've seen so far! And yeah, this is probably today and I've heard it was bad a few years back.

But I can relate to working on weekends though. That still remains.

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?

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.

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.

Right, that's basically why I left. Amazon is bad to mediocre in my experience, but it's nothing like what this article describes.

It was more poor business decisions, boring projects, and laughably bad tools/environment compared to other famous "big league" software companies. I worked 40h weeks and got along with everyone. Only one time in two years did my manager ask me to work on a Saturday, to finish a project that had VP level visibility, and he felt extremely awkward and apologetic about it.

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

This sounds like something out of Mike Church's blog.

In the real world, I knew plenty of people who switched teams. Sure, there are pathologically bad managers and it may not be possible all the time. But it's definitely the rule, not the exception, for internal transfers to be possible.

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.

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?

Are you an at-will employee? I'll bet that you are one.

From:

http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employment-at-will-de...

"An at-will employee can be fired at any time, for any reason (except for a few illegal reasons, spelled out below). If the employer decides to let you go, that's the end of your job--and you have very limited legal rights to fight your termination."

Now after reading the above sentence, do you still feel weird about this?

There are still issues of regular human decency and courtesy.

How would you feel if a company interviewed you with absolutely no intention of hiring you, even if you did really well, and was just experimenting with their interview process or training interviewers?

a) You are not a company. The incentives and the amount of relative power each entity has in this relationship is skewed.

A job to you is life changing. To a large enough company, you're just a conversion or churn metric.

b) That happens all the time. For instance, in order to get an H1B, a company has to document that they can't fill a given position in the local market. Which you accomplish by putting out hyper specific job ads.

If you want to be nice about it, don't pull that game on small startups but that's about it.

I'd feel I had learned something important about that company and why I should never work for them. And then I'd move on in life rather than dwell on it.

with little intention of accepting the offer

Protip: please only waste interview time at large companies.

I've been on the receiving end of having people interview just to "test the waters" at a small company and it's a big drain. We didn't have a formal hiring process or interview pipeline, so your interview process would get a lot of attention from at least 8 different people in a 50 person company. When we send you an offer and you say "lol, nope, just wanted to show an offer so I can negotiate a raise where I already work," it's a big let down for the small team who invested time having 5 people interview you and discussing you and sending all the paperwork through the system.

Counter pro-tip: don't expect someone to leave their current gig unless it's in their best interest to do.

IMO unless someone is absolutely miserable, they shouldn't take a chance on a new and unfamiliar team unless the benefits (at least seemingly) outweigh the risks. Remember, you can fire them at any time, with or without cause.

Also most recruiters suck (all IMO of course). To which I'll add one final tip: don't ask me my current compensation and don't ask me what it will take to make me move. Instead, just tell me the salary range of the position during the initial phone screen. Problem solved, no?

Remember, you can fire them at any time, with or without cause.

People keep saying that around here. It's technically true (the best kind of true?) but it's not exactly how the real world works.

In the real world (meaning: actual companies, not startups with 2 weeks runway), to fire an individual (mass layoffs are different), you first put them On Notice (a Personal Improvement Plan saying "we, the company, believe you are not a good employee. you have X amount of time to improve"). Next, you wait 6 months. Then you review their progress against their "plan," you find any excuse for them not meeting their plan (plans can be subjective), then you say "Sorry, you're fired, here's a severance package."

So, firing an individual involves interdepartmental paperwork, getting legal potentially involved, and a (hopefully not trivial) payout.

Mass layoffs are essentially the same except you don't give 3-6 months notice and just immediately unload lots of people at a company, but hopefully still give them a payout.

In either case, I think why people throw around "at any time" is they want to convey you should have zero-loyalty towards any employer since they can unilaterally act against you. That is quite true. Never trust your employer to be benevolent towards you and always lookout for yourself before sacrificing things for the benefit of only the company.

I think we see eye to eye here? I personally believe a lot of my engineer friends do not realize that they need to manage their career as much as they manage their technical skills. And that's why I suggested getting an outside opinion about one's market value annually (and if turns out to be a compelling valuation, take it).

You don't need to interview with a bunch of other teams to find out what your market value is, though. You can research average salaries for the job in a given region. The reason tech people interview without intention of taking the offer is to negotiate a raise with their present company (I agree that's not a good idea, and anyway, it's better to leave and get a new job if you want a raise).

Nice job generalizing, you wouldn't work in HR, would you?

IMO the answer to whether you leave or not is "it depends."

I've taken the counter once for a 25% raise as I was in the middle of a project and I cared about finishing it, but I usually leave if I find out I'm significantly (20% or more) underpaid (twice).

Glassdoor and meetups do not give personalized information about one's value. They only give average compensation data. The only way to get what you personally are worth is for you personally to get offers. Feel free to disagree.

That sounds great, but most of the time I haven't seen it that way. I work for a large, mutual insurance company. We just fired a "manager" without doing a PIP etc. Just told him his job was gone in 30 days, do your best to transition responsibilities and you'll get a decent severance (9 months IIRC).

This was someone who IMHO should have been canned 5 years ago, but until 6 months ago had a powerful ally shielding him. Now that the ally has moved on to greener pastures, the ax has fallen.

Two years ago, we fired a VP in IT basically for not filling out his TPS reports. Someone who had worked for the company for over 30 years. Fired him for "cause," meaning he'd lose out on his pension. That lasted for about 45 minutes until his lawyer made it clear that he wasn't going to go quietly into the night without a pension valued at over $5M.

So sometimes the niceties of HR policies are enforced, but if they want to fire you, you're gone.

Prior to this I worked at a small startup that had been around for 2 years. Got cancer, was told that I'd be employed til my treatment was completed. I worked every day, made a point of not being a burden to my team members, and was fired the week of Christmas (with 4 months of chemo to go). The company was being acquired, and didn't want any dead weight on the payroll. (Get it?)

Didn't get severance, but luckily I didn't need COBRA due to my wife's coverage. Screw them. Look out for yourself or you'll find out how loyal they really are to employees.

> Prior to this I worked at a small startup that had been around for 2 years. Got cancer, was told that I'd be employed til my treatment was completed. I worked every day, made a point of not being a burden to my team members, and was fired the week of Christmas (with 4 months of chemo to go). The company was being acquired, and didn't want any dead weight on the payroll. (Get it?)

Jesus Christ. Do you mind sharing who they are?

I suspect most of this is about unemployment insurance and being able to deny a fired employee insured benefits.

You're giving them a chance. There's nothing wrong with saying up front you want a pay boost and/or a better position. If you tell them this and they proceed, then they're inherently saying such a thing is on offer (or why are they wasting their time?) And if they can't close the deal, that's on them. I think a big chunk of "engineering shortage" (note: no such shortage exists) is companies pissy that they may actually have to exert a tiny bit of effort to hire rather than tossing out a job posting with a long list of desiderata and having qualified engineers flock to them.

Companies frequently put out job postings with no intention of hiring anyone. Is that wrong?

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.

I can't understand why your comment would be downvoted. User group meetings, conferences, dev get-togethers are all ideal for talking to people about what OP suggests: "estimate your market value". Please job interviewing just sucks the life out of anyone - it is absolutely no fun for all parties. Why make 1-2 days of your life suck per year just to "estimate your market value" when there are more fun ways to do it?

For me, it's only "no fun" when HR sends an absolute fool with the right keywords on their resume to me (which is what they usually do). It's a lot like dating unfortunately.

In an age where variants of "FizzBuzz" are too hard for most interviewees to answer, it's an absolute joy to meet someone competent and make them an offer. YMMV.

Neither conferences nor meetups have ever worked that way for me. They're great for getting intel on the competition and catching up with friends, but we don't talk compensation much.

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.

Perhaps I should abandon AWS.

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.

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.

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.

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.

So, let's see...

1. You check your email aggressively during your time off.

2. You think that 50 hours a week is normal.

3. You think 1/8 weeks of _unpaid_ on-call is reasonable.

How many sev-2s and sev-3s do you get during your one week on-call? If more than 10/week, can you think about how many are outside of business hours?

1) I do that regardless of where I work - that's part of my personality - I did that at less intense jobs - I've done that since college - my boss actually threatened to lock me out of my email if I didn't stop

2) I think 40-50 is acceptable, I would ask you to find anywhere salaried that 40 is the true upper limit - I'm telling you I can't remember a week I spent more than 50 - 40 is definitely the norm though.

3) I get paid for my time in the office, work outside of the office is highly unusual for my on-call rotation - it happens maybe once or twice a year as I noted.

Far less than ten - almost none outside business hours. Last time I was paged outside of business hours it was because someone messed up who they paged :)

I appreciate your reply, and it's certainly true that not all teams or managers are bad at Amazon.

I'd suggest that you're on a lucky on-call rotation, and seem to have a good manager!

If I were still there, I'd say get on VPN, head over to tt.amazon.com and see the stats of other teams' on-call rotations, and estimate how many of their pages are outside business hours ;)

Thanks! And sure, I appreciate other teams have different on-call situations, I had a friend in an AWS team that was decidedly more busy on weekends than I was...

For 3, that is really how it should be. Pages should be unusual and happen for real and immediate production issues.

But instead you get services built where dozens of pages a week is the norm.

I am also a current amazon employee (SDE-II) and on-call is certainly paid.

Aside from the on-call bit, this seems pretty standard for a dev. job, and seems to echo some of the other devs who have posted here.

I wonder whether the people quoted in the article where mostly working non-dev roles?

I can't speak to non-dev roles, but it's personally possible. As far as developer goes, it varies a lot by team I think, but overall it has been a pleasant experience for me - no one here wants me to fail, everyone around me wants me to succeed it seems like. One of the best jobs I've had, actually.

I'm not sure why you use going to the doctor as an example of a chill environment; that seems like a pretty minimal standard of decency to meet.

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.

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.

All companies are 'evil' in that they extract value for themselves at the expense of others. Amazon is probably less evil than Walmart though, since they are doing much more to reduce labor costs to distribute goods. Not that Walmart is necessarily evil either. Usually entirely a matter of perspective since large businesses have a huge effect on the ecosystem and have internal ecosystems there will always be many that see them positively and negatively.

Would you say Amazon is more Berkshire Hathaway or more Carnegie Steel, at a time intensely innovative with extreme work expectations?

"Reducing labor costs" is what is making them evil, in part

Thanks for bringing this up. I want Amazon to take better care of employees precisely because I have money invested in them; because I believe in a knowledge economy, the greatest asset a company has is its people, and in the long-term this will matter. Amazon can be a lot more valuable, if employees can build long-term careers there and are better cared for.

I am rational. I want my money to work hard for my family. If I believe, I can provide a secure future for my family by investing in AMZN then I will do that. Through all the mutual/index funds, I am probably invested in a lot of companies whose practices I disagree with. Examples: Avoiding taxes (double irish with a dutch sandwich), super low minimum wages and expecting public to pay for their care (walmart and food stamps use of their employees), abysmal working conditions (foxconn deaths/suicides), shipping manufacturing jobs to China/Malaysia/Philippines and exploiting low-wage workers there, advertising and selling unhealthy/processed and getting kids hooked to high-{sugar,salt,bad fat} diet. We have practically proved that the best engine to create wealth is capitalism. The dichotomy you have provided is a false one. I love all the good properties of capitalism but I am also aware of its acute shortcomings, if there is no government or regulation. This doesn't mean that I will stop being a rational economic actor.

Things I mentioned are what I heard from current/ex Amazon employees. What I wrote about benefits are facts (else people would have refuted them right away). Only exaggeration was about Execs laughing their asses off; I was just making a point.

You really should look at the PE and grwoth of Amazon vs BH.

Amazon is a shell game, it is not really growing. It's a boring retailer... yet it is using PR to pump up its stock.

No way to know how long it can do this, except to know it can't do it forever.

Meanwhile Berkshire is a well managed company that actually turns an operating profit.

This seems like a common misconception. Amazon's PE (and earnings in general) are terrible because they don't care about earnings at this point in their life; they are growing far too quickly in far too big a market to stop to take earnings. Slides 45-47 from this A16Z presentation illustrate this pretty well: http://www.slideshare.net/a16z/mew-a16z

Also, your assertion that Amazon is 'not really growing' doesn't really make sense or fit with any publicly-available data I can think of.

Considering the expectations implied by Amazon's stock price, are you sure it's a common misconception? Surely if the misconception was common, the valuation metrics would be much lower?

Amazon will never have the same impact on our lives like Walmart did. Simply because retail won't grow as much anymore as it did when walmart became big. We're moving into a digital economy (ironically to a small extent thanks to amazon and their elastic cloud) and there simply isn't as much revenue in a digital economy as there was in the traditional (physical) consumer goods economy. people earn less nowadays and consume less. walmart rode the heydays of consumerism in the US and I doubt retail spending will ever return to those heights: http://wallstreetexaminer.com/wp-content/gallery/economic-ch... amazon seems to me like the emerging, dominant player in a shrinking market. furthermore - looking at the digital consumer goods market - we see that in this market amazon is again playing second fiddle. this market is dominated by Google and Apple (which have much better offerings with respect to apps, music, etc.) and maybe EA and Valve for games (origin and steam respectively).

>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.

As long as the evil is easy to ignore and the profit large enough, I would dare say this is common among most people. Especially if you don't have to admit it (and thus take the hit to social reputation).

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

Disagree. Merchant Tech used to do it, too (circa. 2010)

All teams do it, it's part of the stack ranking, my-team-vs-other-teams culture.

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."

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

When you try to transfer, your boss puts in a report to HR about how you're such a bad employee (clearly the bosses are incentivized to do this, to keep employees from internally transferring.)

Once that happens you're on the clock- you're going to get fired, and they are just building a case against you.

Your boss and HR will become increasingly hostile (while HR pretends to be there to "help" and "mediate" but actually is working against you filling your file with bullshit that comes from your boss)

HR will start actively gas lighting you. The negative reports that are suddenly appearing in your file (eg: a previous boss who gave you a good review suddenly has criticized you in the file that only HR can see... why would he lie to you?)

They want you to think you're at fault for anting to work for a non-abusive boss.

Eventually they fire you and give you a meager severance check which is attached to a contract you sign where you promise to never sue them.

I think it's only a matter of time.

But it is a hostile work environment, my rights were violated regularly, and as far as I'm concerned, the company should be shut down.

No engineer with self esteem should work there. But people seem to think that it's glamerous because of the name and they don't know that it is better elsewhere.

I think their hiring process is tuned to find people who will fall for their mantras.

The culture is VERY cult like. Much more than Microsoft or Apple in this regard.

This is absolutely right and I have first hand experience with this.

I came back from my country after a 3 week vacation and during my 1:1 with my manager, she started criticizing things which she hardly ever mentioned. And then, a few weeks later, she and her manager pulled me aside and put me in a program where I would have to do much more difficult work (PIP) to save my job.

The PIP document was this scandalous piece of paper. Things which were a complete non-issue a few months back were made a huge deal. I had a seizure attack a few months before all this and my manager was well aware of my mental situation. Inspite of all this, she instrumented all this. I wouldn't blame here. She did this to save her own ass I guess. You've got to eat someone else's career to move yours ahead.

Bottom line is I wasn't able to cope up with the PIP work. I was made to resign and being an H-1B worker, I had to find a job to save my status. My health issues made me spiral into a depression and today I'm in a substandard job.

Sorry to hear about your experiences there. But I think it's good that you've realized that it wasn't your fault and you have a good perspective on the whole experience.

"Hostile Work Environment" != Miserable working conditions.

From blm.gov,

"A hostile work environment is actionable in the EEO process when it is based on allegations of discrimination; e.g., race, color, sex, national origin, religion, age, disability or sexual orientation1, or reprisal."

So if a manager only shouts insults at women, it is illegal; if he shouts insults at everyone, it is completely legal?

Not a lawyer, but that seems pretty spot on.

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".)

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?

>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.

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"

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...

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).

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.

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

In NYC, that salary would probably earn "decent but not great", if that, depending on your social circle (read: social class).

My base at the time was in that ballpark, but not that high.

My total compensation from the job I was leaving was within spitting distance, and I knew that number was under what my friends working at Amazon were making in their total package.

I live in a major metro, so it's surprising sometimes how far that doesn't go.

It worked out in the end though, that money was also tied to an incredible workload and ultra-high stress. I ended up someplace much less stressful for a few years, and now have taken a position and paycut in exchange for a much improved work/life balance at a non-profit.

My stuff is not as fancy, but I live much better, though I wonder what would have happened if I had switched coasts, moved to Seattle and settled there instead.

It also turns out all the people I knew at Amazon have all left for other places as well.

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

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?

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?

> 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.

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

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

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.

A close friend of mine was recently -- as in a week or two ago -- recruited by Amazon. The process did not get as far as an offer, because the hiring manager told my friend that the expected hours would be around 80 per week on average. This was a non-starter for my friend, so the process concluded. (At least the hiring manager was honest up-front, and understanding when my friend said this would not be possible.)

Based on this, I think we can conclude two things. First, a lot of current Amazonians are unaware of other teams working insane hours, and second, those other teams are apparently doing so anyway.

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.

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-...

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.

Do you know of any distribution warehouses that have air conditioning?

No, the no-AC thing is old news, from when they were still mostly selling books. Books don't really mind the heat, so Amazon didn't give a shit.

Now that their warehouses have a bunch of other shit in them too, to my knowledge, they all have AC.

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.

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.

Hey! Just a heads up - you seem to have been shadow banned. I'm not sure why - possibly posting a link to an article about the HN rules?

>>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.

I'm curious what you think about a piece I published a couple days ago on the topic: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/alanjohnson/were-hiring-engine...

I'm not a great expert or anything, but it's basically my thoughts on engineering a better interviewing system than we had before.

"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.

Most jobs "right out of college" are grunt work jobs. My first job out of college was for a big consulting services company. At this time their clients were still all mainframe shops; there was no internet at least not that the general public was aware of, and certainly no web dev jobs yet.

So I worked 60 - 70 hours a week writing COBOL code. It was crap work but the salary was good and having that employer on my resume was worth it.

I knew in less than a year that I wouldn't be there long-term, and their business model actually counted on it.

Amazon is doing nothing new or unusual here.

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.

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

And at least for Google, their salaries, except for the top tier maybe cannot be considered as 'pays well'

Really? Whenever I see people talking about Google they always say "pays really really well." Care to elaborate why you are saying that?

Evidently they pay well enough to hire the talent they need.

They have 4,500 open positions in Seattle alone.

I don't know. When I made the decision to leave Amazon, my offers at Facebook and Apple were less than what I was making at Amazon. Google was only slightly more.

I encourage you to learn to negotiate better. Just like hen companies go from round A to round B, their share price should jump up. ;)

I followed your interviewing guide. It is very useful.

But seriously, 50 to 100k more? That sounds like a huge differential. That means going from 100k to 150-200k.

amazon pays even their college grads more than 100

This is very true, it's something that I've never done well, and have always been really uncomfortable doing. When being a hiring manager, I always expect the candidate to make significant counter offers, but it's not something that I've ever been able to do effectively on my own behalf.

check out 3 and 4. read all of the links.

http://kelukelu.me/interview/notes.html

hope they help!

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.

>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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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? :)

> 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.

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.

You should not be doing regular development on a laptop the trade offs are to great when compared to a proper i7/i5 desk top with 2 or 3 screens.

And that's not counting the H&S aspect RSI is not fun

I have 2 monitors that connect to the laptop so I have 3 screens.

I have a standing desk.

What am I missing?

A full fat processor instead of a mobile, less ram,a real keyboard and mouse your also not making best use of the company's capital - for the relative performance mac books are over priced

Just in general: I've always found it easier to work on my laptop.

I can walk around, go to meetings, sit on different floors, sit on couches, work from home and still be developing the same as I would at my desk.

All I'm trying to say is: Slightly faster builds on a powerful machine, or flexibility and consistency on a laptop. This might just be a matter of preference, and ideally companies should accommodate either preference.

Fuck, I also have an extrenal keyboard and mouse - of course I do! That goes without saying! (all company-paid)

The reason why I use a mac is because everything I build is deployed on Linux. Coding on a WIndows laptop means I wouldn't be able to compile anything, and coding on an Ubuntu laptop...well...I still like having a first world OS experience.

So why are you developing on OSX if your deploying on Linux - why don't you have a duplicate development and test server to work with

On windows Just use an X server or run Hyperv and run VM's

Why are you telling me how to do my job?

OSX is a fantastic development machine. Most developers use it. It completely fits all my needs and is provided for me by employer so that I can be happy and productive and effective. Which, as you remember, was the original criticism. That Amazon DOESN'T do that.

so..... why does cpan not mange to install standard packages like the MySQL DBD on my mac mini at work?

Also I spent a good deal of time building carrier grade software for major telco's (using map reduce I might add).

Serious developers develop on Identical hardware to the live system and I mean identical as in came of the line in the same batch.

Its all about removing risk

On the other hand, laptop is a 2011 model and I'm not allowed to upgrade until next year. My desktop has a "huge" 1 TB drive in it that I had to get my manager to approve, because Amazon apparently doesn't work with large datasets, and the desktop is just barely creaking along.

And I know what you're thinking. "Well your stuff is old, so you could obviously go in and get an upgrade!" Nope, went in the other day, literally, and was told I had to wait another year.

Frugality is absolutely widely misapplied at Amazon. Nearly every developer I've met that has been at Amazon for more than a year is dissatisfied with the hardware policy.

"Manager approval" is no big deal. It's a rubber stamp. It's not like you have to write a report justifying why you need it. A good SDM should rubber stamp it, at which point everything is clear.

My first director at AMZN explained this to me early. Don't ask if you can have something. Establish that you need it, confirm with your manager that you need it, then go to people and say "I need this. I have manager approval." Don't ask, tell.

Nice try Amazon tech recruiting team!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I think that would still be Microsoft.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

> you'd also want to make the candidate want to work for you too.

My interview experience with Amazon tells me they don't give two shits about whether you want to work there or not. I can only assume they have a line of candidates that goes around the block. To make a long story short, they made it feel like I was inconveniencing them by even being there. It worked out well, confirming that I did indeed not wish to work there.

They do have such a line. There are a couple of big recruiters I got contacts from which advertised nothing but Amazon positions. Those same recruiters were still calling me over a year after I took a job somewhere else. They were also totally useless so I can only assume they had piles and piles of candidates.

Wow. Yeah, I hate interviewers who treat the process as a one-way process. When on an interview, I am interviewing them as much as they're interviewing me.

surprisingly, I got 5 or 6 callbacks after that and I rejected every single one of them.

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.

I am curious on your choice to post this on a throwaway account. From the details - works in AWS, interviews a lot, teaches internal course for conducting interviews I would imagine that it would be easy for people within AWS to reasonably guess your identity.

I think you underestimate how many thousands of people work on AWS

Wow, didnt realise the division was that big.

Amazon has 150,000 employees. Granted most of those aren't in IT, but it's a pretty big place. Take a look at all the services they provide, and think about what it takes to deploy and support them. Their cloud computing As-A-Service effort offers load balancers, SQL clusters, VMs, archive/backup storage, DNS, network topologies, AV transcoding, Hadoop, machine learning, etc. Each of those paid offerings has a develop, test, deploy and maintain effort associated with it, as well as effort to maintain the authentication & authorization components, and provide consistent user interfaces across technology designed by a plethora of vendors.

When you factor in management overhead and unreleased products, it seems like a few thousand is reasonable.

Seems unlikely. Based on what he revealed, there are probably at least a few hundred possible candidates.

Plausible deniability is a beautiful thing.

this was few years ago and I still remember all the names. But no, I am not interested in sharing their names or mine.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

No, it's not illegal, as long as nothing in one's employment agreement prohibits it. What's more, many category of umreimbursed work expenses are tax-deductible for W-2 employees, for precisely the reason that they commonly arise.

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

In what ways is it wrong?

Keeping your ego in check? They

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."

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.

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.

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.

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?

Some systems reward sociopaths (and punish altruists), some don’t. War obviously does; so does capitalism. Some perceptive people I know keep telling me their boss is foolish for being cruel; yet the boss is clearly winning, making millions hand over fist.

(Obviously, there’s latitude; one can certainly lavish comforts on lieutenants and elite troops for example.)

Ugh, the term sociopath being applied to capitalists just dilutes its meaning. You really just mean narcissists. People with unreasonable amounts of self-esteem and confidence in their decisions. They frequently fail to consider other people's feelings, but it doesn't mean they are incapable.

He said capitalism rewards sociopaths, not that capitalists are sociopaths. Simply competing without empathy for other people has been shown be rewarding in many cases. Look at the "robber barons" of an earlier era or "vulture capitalists" who break up companies to sell off the pieces at the expense of the workers who are left jobless.

The amount this is true depending on what one means by "capitalism" or "war". Ditto "politics", where there are also plenty of examples of sociopaths succeeding. All of those are systems we build, not mysterious natural things beyond our control.

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.

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.

I wonder if you counted out how many levels are above you.

I did.

If you really meant there are 6 persons between you and Larry, that is a lot of layers in a tech company.

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.

> "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.

> I'd even consider avoiding services that used AWS.

AWS customer support already did that for me.

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

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.]

Did you see people crying while in work?

i did.

Never.

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

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.

Never

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

Not over anything work related.

Never.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Oh okay, well scratch that then, that's interesting.

Yes I'm all for being "pushed to limits", but I don't think making employees feel like shit is the right way to do that.

I can't find it now, but what struck me most in the article was a quote about being pushed and pushed, finally achieving something great, but then it being nothing - like the best performance you can hope for is "acceptable".

Over-working for a crazy deadline is I think motivating, and an enjoyable sense of achievement for people that are in a position to do it (without dependents, etc.) - but that achievement at the end of the sprinted-marathon needs to be celebrated, and there needs to be a break before another. Otherwise it does just sound like a sweatshop.

> being openly reamed out by managers in front of their peers.

that's pretty unprofessional, does that happen a lot?

Not every day - but it happens often enough that it's no longer surprising or shocking to see it.

> I've worked many jobs since and by a wide margin Amazon still has the highest engineering churn rate I've ever seen.

This is probably because it's much easier to find a well paid engineering job elsewhere than for a non-tech role.

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.

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.

> but I don't think they are treated as gospel

Sorry, untrue. Literally several examples of offers turned down because of this even when apart from this 'raise the bar' person everyone were strongly in favor of hiring. This happens all the time and employed engineers are none to happy about this. BTW from the number of your posts here, would that be an unofficial job requirement ?

raises hand

What's a behavioural question?

I would define it as a question about how you handled a particular type of situation or how you would handle a particular situation.

I think it's primarily used in contrast to a coding question.

Typical interview questions often take the form of 'imagine the following hypothetical situation X. what would you do?' Candidates tell people what they want to hear, and all the question does is establish that the candidate knows what the interviewer wants to hear. Psychology research shows us that people assign themselves better positive traits than their behavior would indicate.

Behavioural interview questions have the interviewer ask a question of the form 'Tell me about a time when X happened, and what you did.' By asking for a personal anecdote, people are less likely to bring that positive trait assumption with them to the interview, and interviewers get a more honest appraisal of future behavior.

Of course, psychology also fundamental overattribution bias, which says we attribute behavior far too much to the person than the situation. For example, somewhere in this thread is an interview question asking about doing something for the customer that wasn't planned, and that the interviewee worked in hardware design, where unplanned features results in unplanned testing, unplanned Bill of Materials and ultimately an unplanned cost to your customer. When we learn that the candidate never did anything unplanned, we learn more about the situation -- customers bear all costs of design and production -- than the candidate.

> 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.

That sounds like standard affairs. I read your interview experience, it is almost funny. Amazon has a body-shop quality to it. Once someone told me he failed an interview, then changed his email address and phone number and got another interview and failed again, and on his third try he finally got an offer. I don't remember whether he accepted the job, probably did. He is a foreigner needing visa sponsorship, so he would be gone after a couple of years.

That's exactly how my own AWS interview loop went. The individuals were pleasant and professional but it was all about asking the canned questions to see if I parroted back the leadership principles correctly. A big yuck.

> "tell me about your worst failure".

What a fantastic way to trigger self-esteem issues in the middle of a high-pressure environment! It sure weeds out the people to weak to work there! /s

Yeah I was asked that question. I answered honestly and it wasn't a happy or pleasant memory, but I guess they wanted me to somehow integrate it into their "leadership principles" and show how I applied those principles learned something or "risen above" or other such bullshit.

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.

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.

That's why you ask for "Biggest /career/ failure"

It's formally called "Targeted Selection" and is a superset of behavioral interviewing, with some additional structure wrapping it. It works well and is much better than what most companies do.

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.)

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.

I interviewed with AWS and had a terrible experience. See my other top level reply.

Sounds like you just had one bad interview experience. Sorry - it happens!

Could be. I just shared my experience, hopefully it is interesting to someone. It was at least to 10 people who upvoted it so far. I understand Amazon is a huge company and others' experiences might vary.

> > 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 :)

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.

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.

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...

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.

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)

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Yes and no. It's 5% at the end of 1 year, another 15% at the end of 2, and then 20% every 6 months.

I would argue that the 15% is the first meaningful vest, making the parent comment correct.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

[from original article]

> A woman who had thyroid cancer was given a low performance rating after she returned from treatment. She says her manager explained that while she was out, her peers were accomplishing a great deal.

> Another employee who miscarried twins left for a business trip the day after she had surgery. “I’m sorry, the work is still going to need to get done,” she said her boss told her. “From where you are in life, trying to start a family, I don’t know if this is the right place for you.”

To reiterate, your criticism was "well they have no proof"?

Presumably you wanted to name these women, who one had cancer, and another had a miscarriage, and show a doctor's notice that those conditions happened. Then have a recording of their bosses telling them those things.

I imagine there are probably quite a few reasons why these women wouldn't want their full names published in NYT.

> The fact that I'm posting from a throwaway matters even less.

Well actually that was the main point of my argument you assume those people should post their names, but they didn't so no proof, so well they made that up. Fine then, post your full name and where you work at Amazon then. It is not NYT after all. Just a friendly fireside chat on HN.

...Oh, you might have a few reasons I imagine you don't want that posted... So that was my point.

Its ridiculous claims because both of them are easy, enormous lawsuits if true. The fact that these people never sued for these claims makes it more likely this is exaggerated like a lot of the rest of the article.

Employement in the US is usually on "at-will" basis. That is usually sold to employees as "hey you can quit anytime, isn't that great". In reality the employer usually just means "hey, I can let you go anytime".

Of course they can't fire for discriminatory stuff. They can't say "well this person is too old or not white enough or a woman". But they can say stuff like "for performance reasons", "restructuring", etc. even if they really mean the former reasons (race, color, gender, age...) as long as there is an official cover the law is on the employer's side.

So I still don't see enormous lawsuit potential here. One was fired for "performance" reasons (wink-wink) and another for "culture fit" (wink-wink again). There is some potential but only with a recording/email/some kind of evidence.

Both examples in the article would be discriminatory and are against the EEOC and as such would be lawsuit worthy. If they are unable to bring a suit then it likely means the facts are not really in their favor. One person claims to have emails about it, but never brought a case? Seems more likely employees who were on their way out anyways.

Most people do not have the means, time, money, connections, ability to go and sue even if they have been wronged or think they might have a clear case.

I certainly have not heard about the EEOC, I don't even know what that is.

Talking about their experience to a reporter is a lot easier. And I think saying "if they haven't sued, it means their story is false" is a bit extreme.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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

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

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)

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...

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."

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.

Doesn't Walmart drug test everyone?

They required me to for my internship at least.

I think there's a bit of a disconnect between genuinely caring about people and treating them like criminals. I can understand drug testing a truck driver, but drug testing developers makes no sense to me.

It happens in a lot of companies. From what I understand its an insurance thing. The place where I currently work does random tests every so often, but that's a government grant issue.

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

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)

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

You do realize that Business Insider is part owned by Jeff Bezos?

So, do you think Jeff Bezos himself coerced all of those quotes out of ex-Apple employees? You do realize that Business Insider also wrote an article entitled "Why Working At Apple Is A Dream Job"?

Nevermind those articles though - one need only to look at Apple's involvement in the recent high-tech employee anti-trust to see that they're a bad employer.

If you knew about that second business insider article, why did you reference the only the first unless to deliberately justify a biased point of view?

I didn't know about it before I posted the first one? However, I'm absolutely positive that the quotes from ex-Apple employees are not made up, so does it really matter who published them?

And I don't have a biased point of view because I don't work for any of these companies and I'd never want to. The positive-spin article is an opinion piece. But besides all that - the lawsuit speaks for itself, don't you think?

Plenty of other articles back me up on this, going back for ages (since the 90s). Here's another recent one - http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jordan-price/why-i-quit-my-job...

The lawsuit has nothing whatsoever to do with company culture so it speaks to nothing.

I didn't hear an argument in there, but obviously I disagree with your conclusion - it absolutely speaks volumes.

Steve Jobs is largely responsible for creating the culture at Apple, so please explain how it does not reflect on their culture when he is accused of scheming against employees?

Do you really want to work at a place that has a culture that includes scheming against employees?

'Scheming against employees' is a generalization that you have made up and is not part of the accusation. Generalizing in this way is a fallacy.

To show how absurd this fallacy is, let me apply your logic to Google:

"Some Googler's have been injured at work. Therefore Google is a place that injures employees. Do you really want to work at a place that has a culture that includes injuring employees?"

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

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

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.

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!

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

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

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.

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.

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.

> 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?

Honestly I can't remember that part - my impression was that you were off the hook if you were fired, but I can't be sure. My original contract has been lost in the mists of time :P

Strategically getting oneself fired might be a way to avoid the clawback, though it would probably have other consequences.

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

what the...well why would this get downvoted. im just saying money is totally relative.

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.

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".

How so? Unless they take it out of your salary (but you already left then it is not part of your salary since you are well... gone). So you get paid at new job, pay taxes on it, then turn around and write a check to Jeff.

I doubt IRS will kindly sympathize with you and say "ok plonh, let's make that check a deduction to help you out".

Not a tax guy, but I believe there is a procedure with the IRS for reducing the income on a prior tax return in the event of a clawed-back bonus.

I left a company within six months once and they sent me paperwork about that to forward to the IRS. Though I refused to pay back the bonus and left that paperwork in a drawer...

Several years later and I still get an annual nastygram demanding I pay them back.

> I believe there is a procedure with the IRS for reducing the income on a prior tax return in the event of a clawed-back bonus.

Pretty interesting. I had no idea this was a common enough thing for IRS to have a special exception for. I looked it up and there is thing called "Claim of Right" aka "Section 1341" in the IRS code. But involves the tax payer to not have an actual "right to" the income in the year the income happened. Which in this case it seems like they did have (in other words the bonus paid in that year wasn't an accounting mistake of some sort). But then maybe the employment contract applies retroactively and it turns out the employee now didn't have the right...

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.

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".

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.

this is very nice.

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?

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

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.

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.

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".

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

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?

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

I don't think it matters.

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?

Mind sharing what company it is?

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

Employees ratting on each other is straight out of 1984.

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.

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

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.

I left in 2006.

It seems to have actually gotten substantially worse there.

Wow...

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.

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.

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.

I'm not making excuses for them (see my other comments in this thread). But I think that one thing saving other companies from being like this is that they don't feel monetary pressure to do so.

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!

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..

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?

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

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.

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...

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

If you will take care of your people, it is your people who will take care of your customers and the business will take care of itself -- Sam Walton

Most businessmen will say nice stuff like this to create employee buy-in.

Most capitalists in reality think the following:

If you take care of labor, they'll over time feel entitled to be taken care of, and demand more & more.

If you make customer success metrics a KPI that determines performance-based pay, well, then they'll care of the customer.

Everything needs to be balanced, and the pendulum is too far towards the capitalists at the moment.

Counterpoint #1: Delighting customers is what makes a business successful. MBA's obsessed with extracting that last 5% of profit is what leads to diminishing returns. Mandatory conversion of 'C' corporations to 'B' corporations would be a good start towards resolving this issue.

Counterpoint #2: Labor doesn't demand more and more if the market is truly balanced. (If they can't quit and go elsewhere to make more money, they tend to stay put). Yes, the unions overreached as well before 1980.

I suspect that this balance of power will change by one of many different ways.

1. Pitchforks and torches. The capitalists will be run out of town on a rail (or worse).

2. Business leaders realizing they overreached, go back to the way things were prior to 1980 when there was more balance in the workplace.

3. Business leaders attempt overthrow the current government to keep the Opulent Minority running things as they are now. (This was attempted in the Great Depression see the "Business Plot" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot for details) and it causes a violent revolution. See #1 and the French revolution to see how that works out.

4. Universal income is adopted and those which are unemployable have their basic food and shelter requirements met. Those who have real skills will be able to augment their income. The rest will subsist on basic income.

By the way I 100% agree pendulum is too far towards capitalists. I just want to disabuse folks of the illusion that companies will willingly swing the pendulum / have the best interest of the employee in mind. It's like asking the wolf to shepherd the sheep. The sheep first need to realize the wolf is a wolf.

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.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

The root problem here is that people want nice things.

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?

I think bad working conditions are a symptom rather than the real problem. Nothing's really going to change until everyone starts realizing that stuff doesn't make you happy.

I agree with you.

> 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".

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.

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.”

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

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)

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

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

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

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

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.

Work will set you free.

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

Hell yes! React is silly

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

That is a shitty place to work period.

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.

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

Is Seattle the modern-day Detroit?

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.

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.”

Sounds like hell is filled with suckers.

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

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

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

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.

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?)

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