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Comment by rothbardrand | Hacker News Reader

This is exactly why Amazon is a horrific place to work for engineers and why they are such a complete failure with products.... for every success Amazon has about a hundred failures (Amazon catalogs online, amazon moving listings, A9, etc.) Amazon throws money at ideas and throws ideas against the wall to see what sticks.

AWS was launched as a fraud (using no amazon infrastructure at the time, they claimed it was built on the reliable services of Amazon.com) and became a success.... so long as you have unlimited investor money to burn you can eventually be successful this way.

But it is a terrible place to work, because outside of the AWS organization you end up working for idiots.

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Amazon engineer here! I love our culture of strong ownership and autonomy, and that we'll take risks, tolerate failures and give things around 7 years to mature and pay off. It's super rewarding to be able to own things and see them through, and to see things like AWS, Kindle and Alexa go big places. I've had my own projects work out and I've had things abandoned, and both experiences have been positive in the long run, if a little painful at the time.

As for the AWS thing ... I joined AWS pretty early in its history and even then we had amazon.com workloads and it was definitely the same infrastructure (data centers, network, operations, etc) as Amazon.com . My first two years I was writing code and building AWS services, while also supporting retail operations and dealing with the order pipeline - and I worked in Infrastructure; things were fairly integrated.

I agree with rothbardrand@ here, I recently moved from AWS. Amazon is very top-down where developers are heavily managed by their immediate managers (and thats why they need so many MBAs). Our team of 15 engineers had 4 managers, who would push engineers to the edge to meet deadlines. From what I observed, this leads to very high turnover rate, and teams with lot of junior engineers who are asked to assume roles of previous project leads. New hires are brainwashed about increase ownership and responsbility. But after some years, they all realize the game and move over to different company.

5 years at Amazon, almost all as an SDE. I don't really feel like what you've said is entirely accurate.

> for every success Amazon has about a hundred failures

This ratio is off, but even if it weren't it's still not a detracting statement. At Amazon, we're allowed to fail sometimes. Try something quickly, iterate, test, and let it die. Google used to be similar, though they've 'streamlined' a bit more lately.

> outside of the AWS organization you end up working for idiots

Never worked for AWS, can't speak for them. But in my org (Fulfillment) I've worked for incredible managers and a few not-so-great ones but never anyone I'd call an idiot. This isn't a place where smooth-talkin' MBAs thrive. If you bullshit and can't back it up with results, you won't last long.

Most of the MBAs I've met at Amazon were for the Operations world anyways. The Pathways program (https://www.amazon.jobs/en/teams/university-mba-graduate) puts new MBA grads into leadership positions at the fulfillment centers and sees what they're made of. Hard work, but if you do well you go really far very fast.

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