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Comment by reacharavindh | Hacker News Reader

All these show what kind of candidates Amazon is looking for. A bunch of desperate people who'd do anything for [money|Amazon brand value|Whatever else Amazon has]. I wouldn't want to work at a place that resembles an irrational hell with such people as coworkers anyway. If someone is really that desperate for a job && believe they are smart to work on things Amazon scale, why wouldn't they find other jobs or heck start a company themselves solving a genuine problem? I do know starting a company is not for everyone to be able to do, but other jobs?

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As someone who works as an SDE at Amazon, I find comments like this pretty funny. My favorite part of the job, and the reason I stick around, is the people I work with. Amazon AWS internally is a pretty minimal-bullshit work environment. "Irrational hell" is certainly not how I'd describe it. There are a lot of frustrations working with under-maintained/legacy systems, but that's fine.

Don't get me wrong, I have complaints, but at the end of the day I show up to work to solve hard problems with smart people, and that's very satisfying. I build tools other people build businesses on, and that's a really good feeling. I get paid what I consider to be too much, but that's what it took to get me to relocate from the Midwest (and no one I work with takes the current demand for devs for granted).

And yes, I appreciate the money, the pedigree, and the other opportunities it has opened up for me.

The reality is at BigCo there's always that one part or another part of the company that's fine to work at. There are a whole lot of other parts that are not. The trick is to find out what the good parts are and avoid the bad ones.

Maybe you just got lucky.

I 100% agree with you. It's a gigantic company. As far as I can tell (finger to the wind), my team is in the 90th+ percentile in terms of experience and maturity. I feel very lucky to work with the people I do, I've learned a lot from them.

When we start talking about the distribution of experiences of hundreds of thousands of people over a decade, we should expect a very long positive and negative tail. I expect that if I were rehired, my experience would regress to a mean worse than what I currently have.

Because not everyone [lives in the US | has a North American passport | can afford to not care about money].

I fit the exact combination you were excluding. [lives in the US with a work VISA| does not have an American passport | can NOT afford to not care about money]

I'd much rather apply to the plenty other companies that has opportunities. Seriously, IMO, this country has so much opportunities for the person that is working hard and willing to try.

Work is a place we spend the majority of our living life in the most active age of our life. It has to be at the least "NOT hell". Don't you think?

This is exactly why Amazon's behavior are so unacceptable. They abuse the fact that most people do not have those luxuries to create an unhealthy and exploitative work environment.

Hell to companies who treat their employees like assets!

To this day, i thank my dad who told me to go study in Canada rather in US since he knew how crazy immigration laws in states are. Graduating from a Canadian uni gives me options to work for any company/start up i like without having visa restrictions.

Good for you. Your dad is wise. I have a few friends who are in/approaching/just past the Green Card process, and hearing their stories makes me feel shame. These are people who have been here for years after getting their master's degrees. It's incredible.

Just curious. Can someone who graduates from Canadian university work for any startup/company in the US just like that? Never heard of this before..

Nope not in US, but i can work anywhere in Canada for 3 years which is enough time for me to get my PR.

Same in the US with post-completion OPT letting you stay and work freely for three years (including the STEM extension)

Well, 3 years (at best) to find an employer who will sponsor you for an H-1B visa application. And then you have win the once-a-year lottery to get the actual H-1B visa (~1/3 chance this year). And then you hope that your employer will agree to apply for a Green Card on your behalf right away (which they don't have to; they can keep you on the short leash of H-1B for another six years). The processing of the Green Card application can also take a few years. And if you change jobs while your Green Card application is in process, it's voided -- you have to have your new employer re-apply from scratch. And if, at any point during all of these, your current status (OPT or H-1B) expires, you have to pack up and GTFO of the country.

So no, not nearly the same in the US.

If i know correctly, the difference is you can't get your green card in those 3 years, where as here in Canada you can get your PR in those 3 years.

A non-zero amount of people never get the chance to obtain an immigrant or dual-intent visa during those years and subsequently get kicked out of the country.

In Canada you can pretty easily get a work permit to stay longer and PR without jumping through 70 hoops and waiting years.

The US immigration system is much shittier.

Yikes. That's a pretty heady classification of myself and my coworkers. The funniest part about your response, though, is that you said we'd "do anything for whatever else Amazon has". Looking past your assertion that we're in some way desperate, I'd say yeah, the whatever else Amazon has is pretty nice. I'm by no means a kool-aid drinker, but working with really smart coworkers, having accomplished mentors throughout the company, and working on genuinely interesting problems are nice perks to have. Amazon has its warts no doubt, but that's true of any company this size.

You can have your beefs with the company, that's fine. But I'd avoid the wholesale characterization of over 200k people -- it's not a good look.

I saw an IT Manager job description for Amazon's offices near Chicago. It had items like "Must be able to stand 10 hours a day." What? A managerial position where you're standing all day? Where you have direct reports and meetings and such? No offices or cubes for management? Oh, ok.

Also nice way of saying, "50 hour weeks are the norm."

It's because not everyone gets so emotionally carried away by what the media love to make of Amazon. The company employs 230,000 people. But for every one of them, it's just a day job after all. The scrutiny is justified given the scale and impact of the company, but what you're doing amounts to nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander with little sense of what it's really like.

Playing such behavior down like "So many thousands work there so it's alright" is a very negligent attitude IMO. Companies that treat their potential employees like this need to be called out and shamed.

I'm not saying Amazon shouldn't scrutinize who they recruit. Please read the post with an open mind and think for yourself whether they have crossed lines of sensibility or not.

"nothing more than misguided condescension from a bystander" - No one is judging Amazon for its x thousand employees. Only its hiring practices. Which is creepy and stupid. I don't need to know everything about the company or its 230K employees to judge their hiring practice.

You misunderstand my point; by "scrutiny," I mean the media coverage on + testimony of things that amazon is doing wrong. I am all for bigCos being subject to watchful eyes. My qualm is that you somehow see this very specific problem we've gathered here to discuss as an excuse to hold moral high ground over the thousands of people who works for the company in a wake-up-sheeple style rant.

Init sure why you think this has anything to do with the people who are already working for the company. My comment was only about their hiring practice and potential candidates.

I do not hold moral high ground over the folks that made Amazon this attractive a tech place to work in the first place.

Still, just calling out their "current" hiring practice as evident from recent experience posts as creepy, stupid and something to be ashamed of.

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