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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

You can find anecdotes about how working at any company is a bad experience and others about how it's a good experience.

With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent across both the corporate and warehouse contexts. This reputation has persisted since at least 2007, the first time I considered working there and did some research on it.

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I've worked at Amazon for around 4 years now. I work 9-5 most days. The days I don't I'll work 10-6! I still work there because I get to work on interesting distributed systems. I've never really had any of the bad experiences that others have seem to had. I reasonably get along with my manager, his manager, and the VP of my organization. They are not the assholes that every complaint seems to mention.

Even in Seattle my pay definitely puts me in the upper middle class. I can afford Seattle property reasonably well ($600k range).

Interviewing at Amazon is kind of weird. They keep trying out new ideas to see how they work and includes things like: standard phone screen, coding test (don't know a better word for it), on site all day interviews, group interviews, etc... Chances are that if you had a weird interview process it was probably because you were trialing some different interview format.

I guess I don't really have a point in this post but I didn't see one positive post about Amazon and thought I'd share (at least anecdotally) that it's not all bad.

$600k real estate puts you well above "upper middle class" nationally. Maybe not in a limited geographic area, and certainly not SF/NY/DC, but that's well over 3x the median home value for the entire country.

Housing is cheaper in other places because salaries are lower. The same worker who is paid enough for a $600k house in a tech hub would be paid proportionally less in a place with cheaper housing. (Unless he was just underpaid in the tech hub, and could have gotten enough for a palatial house in the tech hub at a different employer).

People don't live in the national average, they live in limited geographic areas, and the salaries that make people try to characterize tech workers as rich tend to come in - you guessed it - SF, NY, and DC.

That's not quite right: you only get your whole surplus extracted as rent in a market with artificial restrictions on housing. Unfortunately for us programmers our top job market happens to be an awful housing market, but that seems to be an accident of history -- we could've ended up somewhere else with rents that are high but not ridiculous. That's how Bay Area rents seemed to me 15 years ago.

$600k is about 1500 sq ft, where I live, while median US home size is somewhere in the mid-2000's of square footage. Maybe when I'm house hunting, I should point out that I could get the same thing elsewhere for $200k.

I recently accepted a job offer with Amazon and had fun with it.

I got a random email saying they were coming to my hometown, so I did the "2hr" coding test everyone is complaining about... which was actually really easy and more like 1hr.

then the day of, I biked down the river for coffee and lunch, then spent the afternoon coding on paper/laptop, and talking about past tech things I've done and why/how I did them. It was mostly a half and half split between the discussion and problem solving, then me trying to code one of my solutions in the last 10min of each interview, and mostly running out of time:P

The next day they invited me to move to seattle, and out for beers that evening.

It's a first date, both sides are on their best behavior. The more turnover you have, the more people you need to hire. And the more effort you need to put into convincing people to join.

I've heard both good and bad (bad from the internet, good from some friends working there). I get about the same feeling from their interview process as I do from most other large corporations, but the news stories about their warehouse workers are definitely troubling.

Why are the reviews in Glassdoor about the industry average if it's so bad? Genuinely curious.

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