Hacker News Reader

I think Tim just doesn't realize how privileged he his just by the fact of being Tim Bray.

Yeah, I'm totally astounded an internet personality who is well known to have a very loud voice and is financially secure enough not to be easily controllable isn't treated poorly...

He did list the reasons why he might have little idea about the realities of Amazon as he works in a remote office on a niche product. After reading his disclosures, I'd say that yeah, he may not quite realize that he doesn't know what it is like for the mean Amazon employee.

Excuse me… SQS, Route53, Auto Scaling, and Simple Workflow are “niche”?

Excuse me, compared to Hollywood produced multi-media presentations, consumer goods, and literature?

Yeah.

Edit: Someone better throw up a definition of 'niche' that explains the downmods.

> That said, there's a bunch of hard data that supports many of the assertions in the New York Times article

What is the hard data? I only read about half the NYTimes piece, and skimmed the rest, so I very well might have missed it.

> it's not a particularly interesting data point that "Amazon works for me."

Tim described his observations about a large number of co-workers, not just his own situation, and found them roughly in line with industry norms. He acknowledged the limitations of his observations, unlike the Times piece which lavishly illustrated shocking anecdotes in order give the reader the impression some behaviors were widespread. For instance, a reader of the Times piece would be forgiven for thinking that crying at your desk is the norm at Amazon, but I have now heard four Amazon employees say they have never seen that, and one that gestured vaguely like they maybe had.

If you're going to argue this, and especially if you are going to ask that other people provide "hard data", have the courtesy to read the entire article.

This is a silly requirement (and seems equivalent to unfortunate perception that asking for tl;dr summaries is always bad, when in academics they are called "abstracts" and are considered essential). If someone obliquely cites one part of a long reference, it's not unreasonable to ask them to specify which part.

And as you can see from his reply, it would not have been useful to read the article.

What I meant was: "The assertions made by the New York Times piece are corroborated elsewhere." That is, to those who know AWS, it wasn't a terribly surprising article (Tim's shock notwithstanding).

Fair enough.

Everyone I know who works in AWS (several engineers, either closely or as acquaintances) say their experience was nothing like what the article described. My evidence is anecdotal, but so is NYT's.

I'm not saying who's right here, but I don't think you can say an assertion is considered corroborated because you can find anecdotes supporting it..

I think many forget that talking about a particular division or team doesn't reflect on the company as a whole. This applies to both this and NYT article. Tim might be looking at this from his perspective and the people you interacted with might be looking from theirs. While we would like everyone working at a particular company to have consistent, that certainly is not the case. I personally know people from Audible, who have great things to say about Amazon as well as people from e-commerce side, that too non-customer facing ones, describing it as a nightmare.