Amazon is a sweatshop. The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours.
All this is doing is giving people more freedom to burn themselves out at home, while further blurring the lines between work and life and throwing in a 25% pay cut as the cherry on top.
It's like the opposite of Google campus life, but with the same goal.
I now work at a much better place where I feel more valued and my work life balance is simply amazing in comparison.
I wouldn't agree with this broad generalization. I work in Alexa and the work environment on my team is pretty awesome. Lots of freedom to try new things, good work life balance, and generally a high level of respect for engineers. I turned down Google to come here and I have no regrets (though not to imply that Google isn't equally awesome).
I don't think it's very relevant to what this thread was about, programmer working conditions.
When startups ask a lot of their employees its showered in praise. When Elon Musk demands 100 work weeks, people are in awe of how great he is. When Nest does the same people squint because Google bought them.
I know a lot of Googlers, most put in ~50-60 hour weeks but get free lunch so its ok I guess? Same with Apple.
Also I know a lot of Googlers as well (hard not to living in Mountain View), and they work roughly 40 hour weeks in general. It is night and day between Amazon and Google based on the stories that are coming out from current & former employees. I've heard issues about Apple as well, but nothing on the level of the stories coming out of Amazon.
There's zero buffer to slack off, a less productive day is followed by a longer one.
I like working at Amazon. I like the challenge, the projects, the people I work with are fun and smart, but it is not a place where you can easily balance your life for a long period of time. I've never met someone past the 5 year mark that does not define his life as an Amazon employee first, everything second.
You can try to keep yourself at 40h, but eventually it will hurt you, it'll show in your review, it'll hold back your promotion, and if you're unlucky enough to have a management switch at a time where the team is expected to perform, you might even lose your job. I've seen it happen.
Now, maybe in some teams things are different, but in my 2 years, it's been my impression that this is the culture here. You either like it, as I do, I enjoy the rush and the busyness, makes my days fly by. Or you don't and you leave.
I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse.
I work 40 hours per week on average. For the 20 years I have been in the industry.
I solved some problems in the shower, but I also slack away on my desk sometimes.
So my basic response to that is "it depends". I have previously been in a different team at Amazon and that team definitely had much less room for slack. If you didn't push yourself hard, you probably couldn't get promoted there. But then again, they also had issues with attrition.
The culture in teams can vary quite a bit at Amazon. I think it mostly comes down to the leadership. More than any other "big company" I've seen, Amazon emphasizes ownership. As a VP (and even as a manager, though to a much lesser extent), you get nearly full freedom to define your team's culture and set the direction of your product. So yeah, I don't think every team has a great culture within Amazon; a lot of it depends on the culture defined by your leadership team.
In regards to your last point: > "I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse."
Most weeks I probably put in a bit more than 40 hours. Maybe closer to 45 or 50 hours. That's the average. Have I put in more occasionally? Of course. Do I sometimes check emails on a weekends or evenings? Yep, of course. But there have also been times when I've come to work at noon or left by 2pm if I needed to do something else. And, 90% of the time, I don't respond to emails outside of work hours. That doesn't feel very much like a "sweatshop" to me.
I've worked at other companies besides Amazon and I have plenty of friends who work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. My friends at Microsoft will often put in 50 to 60 hours during a live site outage or near a product release. I have friends at Google who check their email on evenings and weekends. One of my best friends is at Facebook and does the same. I know less about Apple, but I've heard their culture is pretty intense. So, in that sense, I don't feel my team's work culture is any worse.
Overall, I like my team and I think that credit goes upwards through my management chain. Good managers make a huge difference. Perhaps Amazon needs to do a better job in ensuring teams are more consistent in creating a good culture across the company.
While I would not like such workplace, it sort of makes sense. It's similar to what Elon Musk said once - if you work more then everyone else, over time it becomes noticeable. Perhaps Musk shops reward you better?
I am not US based and I've always wondered about this. In virtually every other western country, it doesn't matter if you're "salaried" or not - your employer is legally prohibited from not paying overtime. If your employment contract says you work 9-5, then anything outside those hours must be compensated, often at a higher rate (1.2x-1.5x is not uncommon in many European countries).
In the context of the US labor law, does being "salaried" functionally equal "being required to work unlimited overtime"?
Here's a list of exemptions: https://webapps.dol.gov/elaws/whd/flsa/screen75.asp
To be exempt you have to be paid on a salary basis, you have to make over a certain wage (which, until a few months ago, was a comically low $23,600/yr), and have certain job duties.
These job duties that are required are defined in the FLSA. There's executive employees, administrative employees, professional employees, computer employees, and outside sales employees. The text is here: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title29...
In general, most salaried employees do not regularly work unpaid overtime in the US. For example, the one time I ever worked overtime in my software engineering career it was paid overtime (paid at my normal salary). I had a friend who was an (I think?) accountant and she had to work on her vacation otherwise she'd fall behind. Some workplaces are abusive and the law allows it for some classes of employees but it's not the norm outside of the bay area software industry.