Hacker News Reader

Comment by sssilver | Hacker News Reader

Following some of the discussion on this thread, I am constantly reminded of a priceless advice I got from a senior friend years ago.

When thinking about an employer, above a certain size threshold, never judge a company. Always judge a department. You don't work for a company. You work for a department. Above a certain (fairly small) size, the only thing you'll share with the employees in the other departments will be the domain name in your email. Everything else will be coincidental.

View on HN

You can still judge company-wide policies like vacations, 401k match, or health care.

I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in an Amazon warehouse doesn't have the same vacation options as the person coding the internals of Simple Queue Service.

I wouldn't be surprised if the person working in the warehouse doesn't actually work for Amazon. Contracting jobs that are easy to fill is a great way to insulate a company from moral responsibility, and you get to imply "success at any cost" to the contracting company.

It's a mix, same as any other warehouse.

Based on the (lack of) attention that SQS has received, I'm guessing that the person coding the internals of SQS has LOTS of vacation.

What more are you expecting from it?

Well, I am currently prohibited from using it where I work, for some good reasons and some bad ones. The good reasons include things like not having any isolation between users. I work in a regulated industry, and if an SQS task includes sensitive customer data, I cannot ensure it runs only on machines in my VPC, nor can I ensure that the data is encrypted on disk, so I am prohibited from using it. The not-so-good reasons are things like "Amazon hasn't provided a written statement about how long it may take for a task to appear on the queues, so we have to assume that it might take days and any task with an SLA less than 'days' may not use SQS." (What can I say... some of our policy people are irrational.)

A bad team at a good company -- quite possible.

A good team at a bad company -- unlikely.

> A good team at a bad company -- unlikely.

Can happen via acquisitions

Presumably if it does happen that way, it won't last very long, as the newly acquired employees will figure out "this place sucks" and leave...

Good teams can form within bad organizations, but it's a vulnerable position to be in as an employee. One reorg and suddenly it's all bad.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com