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Comment by vonklaus | Hacker News Reader

I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure; they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google. Also, according to the article 20k people work for them, although I am not sure if that was total or engineers.

I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.

Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.

Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.

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Remember that the most vocal are the most dissatisfied. Also remember that at a company that large there are going to be more dissatisfied than smaller companies. Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company. People like seeing big brand names fail and we as a society are a sucker for a negative drama.

They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news. There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.

> Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company.

People also don't particularly want to read a story from a happy engineer at a big company either.

Additionally, the unhappy person who has an axe to grind is likely to go out of his way to publicize it, talk to reporters about it or write comments on the Internet about it. Happy employees are less likely to go out of their way to comment on the experience, and what they have to say is less notable on average.

> Remember that the most vocal are the most dissatisfied. Also remember that at a company that large there are going to be more dissatisfied than smaller companies. Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company. People like seeing big brand names fail and we as a society are a sucker for a negative drama.

If that was the sum of it, you'd expect to hear just as much bad stuff about Microsoft, Google, Apple, and so forth. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

There are significantly more of these stories out there on Amazon than the other major tech companies it seems - I haven't heard of anywhere near as many stories coming from Google, Facebook, or Apple.

Negative stories that make it into the press are rare events and therefore it's difficult to compare if there is much more dissatisfaction in one company vs another. A better indicator is turnover rate.

Completely agree, I have only heard of a few stories so I don't think we can conclude about one company over another. Turnover rate does sound like a much better general indicator.

It is obvious just from having lived in Seattle for a good long while that something is up with Amazon. They are notorious for employee churn, and it's easy to see this in my circle of acquaintances, many if not most of whom work in software. People do quit Microsoft, Google, or Facebook from time to time, but it's generally a long-term engagement; Amazon is a place where even relatively senior people don't seem to stick around more than a couple of years.

It's not a scientific study but I don't need scientific accuracy in order to get a pretty clear idea where I would or would not want to work.

Your post sounds strangely onesided. Amazon turnover rate for engineers is the highest across the usual names. 50% of engineers leave before 2y.

Its not one sided, its a general statement that the people who love their job don't go jumping off buildings or having suicidal thoughts. They wake up, goto work and come home.

Also, where do you get a 50% of engineers leave before 2y?

As does yours. Any data to back up that number, or just anecdotal evidence?

The volume of stories coming out of Amazon far outstrips those from Google or Facebook for example.

"Far outstrips" feels like an exaggeration of the problem considering the publics lack of data.

Interviewed with Amazon, and they were offering less than my current salary in a market where housing isn't nearly as crazy as Seattle.

Did you try negotiating? Despite conventional wisdom, (at least with some offered salaries), you can negotiate a raise. I got a significant increase in salary when negotiating for my return internship offer.

The nightmare stories are often from years ago or non devs. There are some pretty awful oncalls though.

I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good (<=40) except around launches.

2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor.

When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I stayed because I liked the people and the work was fine. If my team culture changes and I don't like it, I'll look external and internal then leave.

I'd be interested to know what you think after 5 years there and a few more reorgs. You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.

Well, I'm >5 years, two orgs, one of which re-shuffled a few times while I was there, trying to find the right fit between software engineering and domain expertise.

I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.

I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.

In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.

It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!

I've been reorged quite a few times. More than most people who have spent 5 years here.

> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.

I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.

Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.

> But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.

This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.

The amazon way is not always friendly to normal humans. That's just the truth of it. My team has taken pains to not be that way.

The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes need to be changed before I'd call the culture here awesome.

> My team has taken pains to not be that way.

But that's the thing though. Your team is not being discussed, but the entire company is. And if it feels to you that it's your team that's swimming against the current, then maybe there's a lot of truth to the general perception of the whole company.

> No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago.

That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.

Maybe some are biased here but i think non-devs are humans too.

I have no insight into their world so I cannot speak in any way to the truth of their working conditions.

I only know that for most of the devs, it is fine. It's not perfect, I'm not even sure I'd tell people that it's great. But for people that have a good team? It's fine and the quality of people makes up for it. If I didn't like my team I would have left a long time ago.

I did a 3-month internship there and saw some of the ridiculous situations others are replaying here (my favorite of which was 8am-8pm work hours every day).

I decided to not go back, but in the end having Amazon on my resume (even as an internship, as I'm relatively young) was basically a free pass to interview anywhere else I wanted. I'd say it was a shitty experience while I was there, but net positive in the long run if only because of Amazon's klout.

> if only because of Amazon's klout

"clout" :)

Amazon headcount from mid-2015 said over 24k in Seattle: http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/07/ex...

Curious, why do you think they have more servers than google? A quick search didn't turn anything up.

I guess he was referring to AWS vs Google Cloud. AWS is clearly the market leader. However, including Google services it's likely that Google could've more servers. Don't think there are any numbers out there to check that.

I know not every part of every company is the same since your direct manager plays a big part in your experience but I have to wonder why people put up with the bad experiences. Maybe the pay for AWS consulting gigs is worth a couple years in that kind of environment.

Not so much the pay, as the wonders it works for your resume. Prior to Amazon, I tried applying to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Nothing. After Amazon, recruiters from those companies started contacting me.

I've had recruiters from 3 of the big 4 reach out over the past few years without having worked at one. It's hard to generalize across recruiters and the four companies, but I think they pay more attention to your number of years than where they were at in the early recruitment stage.

"Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure"

How do you know? Based on what they sell through AWS? This is not super evident - they might have duct taped bunch of shitty stuff and rely on people on-call 24x7 to keep system running.

I have heard whispers of this, and the mention of common on call hours seems to lend it some credibility

Yes, seriously legacy software (still a lot of Perl in their production web code, including ancient Perl template engines) and the on-calls are truly bad. AWS is more modern, but still not entirely awesome from what I've heard.

On the plus side, hiring people out of there after a year is usually pretty easy.

What are the typical on-calls?

You are paged most nights and often more than once a night during your rotation and you are on rotation a lot.

There's only so much duct-tape you can throw at a problem before it becomes unmanageable. The scale, complexity and reliability of AWS indicates that they are indeed running a tight (and tidy) ship.

It's a mix. The code is good enough to get things running, but it still needs full time oncall who actually are constantly putting out little fires.

> they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google

Citation needed.

It's team dependent. I joined (AWS) because it was a neat project, they pay high for my area, the Google office in my area didn't have interesting projects, and they offered to move me across the country. I will stay 2 years. Perhaps more.

Consider that to scale an organisation it is necessary that nearly everyone is just a small, easily replaceable cog in a big machine. Look at any other big org: the military, government bureaucrats, etc...

> I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure;

I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.

Amazon.com is a mighty broad statement to say "not run on AWS".

Perhaps it'd be more interesting to understand what parts of Amazon.com don't run on AWS [1].

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS

Almost all of Amazon.com has been migrated to AWS.

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