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Comment by fweespeech | Hacker News Reader

Just out of curiosity...

It seems to me much of the "mess" in Amazon's culture is on the MWS/eCommerce side of the house + any physical products they sell [e.g. Kindle].

AWS seems to be far more relaxed environment wise.

Would you agree with that?

The reason I ask is the OP is AWS and I've only seen people on the AWS side post rebuttals to the various articles about Amazon's culture.

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I think there is something to that.

Product marketing is really hard. I heard about the culture at Proctor and Gamble and it being really hard as well - a lot of burn outs but also a lot of people saying that the challenging culture taught them a lot that was useful later on.

But AWS is a tech place and not really expose to the same type of pressures.

Thanks :)

AWS is for sure different; I would not call it more relaxed. (disclaimer: former AWS employee from 2008 to 2014).

I worked at AWS for a little while and would agree with that. My experience matches up with this article, but while working there I did hear plenty of horror stories, mostly coming from the retail side.

I think people, including Amazon employees, try to put things down to some difference between AWS and retail. With the amount of cross-pollination between those two giant sides of Amazon, I doubt there's any significant macro difference in culture.

I know people who have been dissatisfied on both sides.

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