Hacker News Reader

Comment by goldenkey | Hacker News Reader

Even the best job? Because working for them was the worst work environment I ever experienced in 15 years of employment as a software development engineer.

Amazon may have some cheap prices and their customer service has the margins available to offer refunds/replacements quickly. But that all is easy guise. Amazon is rotten inside. Each product team does whatever it wants. So how long can the exterior hold a toxic spill?

Those AWS dashboard icons look really nice. Makes everything look so organized and contiguous. But each of those services is done in different languages, different frameworks, by different teams, with whatever crap will hold the leaks and terrible patchwork programming by their average employee who will on average, stay less than a year. The churn is real.

View on HN

Cheap prices for the customer equal low pay and bad working conditions for the producer. Same is true of Wal-Mart... look into all those Chinese mega-factories where all that stuff is produced.

It's one of the core paradoxes of economics. I want a cushy job with great pay, but when I go shopping I implicitly want everyone else to have a shitty job with low pay. There's a name for this paradox but I'm forgetting it right now.

It's very similar to the paradox of thrift: it's in my interest to save, but for me to save someone else must be spending. If everyone saves nobody can save.

Almost everything in economics is a paradox since there are two columns in accounting-- every transaction has a counter-party. It's bizarre for something not to be a paradox in economics.

This solution to this "core paradox" is the idea of gains from trade - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gains_from_trade

If everyone has the same capabilities and preferences, then the economy is a zero-sum game like you've described. In some fields, that's close to true, and those fields tend to be low-margin commodities.

Not sure what team you were on, but in my time at Amazon I never saw a company whose teams were more in-sync in terms of process, tools, frameworks, languages, etc. Say what you will about the work environment, but it's saying something that with the churn you mention (which is real), they are still able to deliver consistently. It's a well-oiled machine.

I worked for AWS. I wont say much more. The average employee churn stats speak for themselves. Amazon burns folks out. Uses them up. Not like the valley at all. Leadership principles [1] door desks, bezos cult.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/p/feature/p34qgjcv93n37yd

#SourGrapes

Why do 27k engineers (in Seattle alone) need to write in the same language to make a service successful? How many SAAS startups have you worked at? How does Amazon/AWS compare to this? I think you're out of touch and/or lacking context.

Nice hashtag. This isn't twitter though. Ive worked at exactly 17 startups. AWS was a steaming pile of sh!t with robotic middle managers, most on visas from the curry capitals of the world. Theres no necessity for the same exact language to be used. But when each team is just mavericking their own thing hoping it gets picked to be added to "the panel" you get a grab bag of absolute shit. If only you saw the code behind these services....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com