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Comment by mkolodny | Hacker News Reader

For anyone who hasn't seen it yet, there's an article on the second page of HN right now (458 votes last I checked) by Google's former Head of International Relations about why he left the company. I think it's very worth reading. There's some extremely interesting (and damning) stories about his experience at Google since 2008.

Here's the article: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21935446

While this might (and almost certainly should) hurt Google's brand, I think this issue applies to any big for-profit company. I doubt that Amazon or Apple are much different.

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I was thinking along the same lines. Any sizable company is going to have thousands of people quitting each year, and it would be exceedingly unlikely that none of these left on unfriendly terms.

"Why I left [FAANG of choice] / stopped using their products" is a staple of HN article titles.

But of course, none of this anecdotal evidence is proof that everything is FINE with these companies, either. Many of these complaints may be entirely justified.

To be clear, I don't think the issue is that people leave Google on unfriendly terms. I think there are a few other issues:

- Once a for-profit company gets to a certain scale, you're going to have people who care more about profit than any original noble intentions (ex. "Make knowledge universally accessible"/"Don't be evil")

- At a certain size, no one person knows everything that's going on at the company. That makes it extremely difficult to make sure everyone is on the same page. It also makes it very hard to police everything that's happening

Strangely I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Amazon one, save for Dan Vassalo which was more of a fatFIRE/entrepreneurial (folks, follow him on Twitter) article than just a stream of elitist, first world complaints.

I think I read one from Facebook that blamed the OP quitting on how parking worked (??)

There's literally entire websites and hundreds of articles written by ex-employees and journalists about how badly Amazon treats its employees. I've never worked there so I can't say for certain, but "don't work for Amazon" it's pretty much a meme at this point.

Oh? Then why do thousands of engineers do then?

Are you trying to imply something about them or am I reading too much into this?

> Then why do thousands of engineers do then?

Ignorance of Amazon culture and practices, greed, visa issues, many don't believe it's as bad as it is until they experience it. Many use Amazon as a stepping stone because it looks good on your resume and will guarantee you an interview at most places. For the fulfillment centers folks and blue collar ops; desperation.

Retention for engineers is really low, some say as low as 12 months. So thousands work there, but many do not stay. Also the reason why their compensation is mostly in stock. They know you won't last.

This is all gleaned from friends who work there or have worked there. It's a place you want to be seen working, but doesn't work out for many.

Plus it's not thaaat bad. (Eg. any big enterprise where IT is just a cost-center will be much worse.) Simply other FAANG places are more feely-goody.

Tenure at Amazon is like a battle scar that proves you are tough.

> 'Oh? Then why do thousands of engineers do then?'

Because they offered me more money than anybody else, and because I liked the mentor I had when I was an intern there. Not having to re-interview for a fulltime job after my internship was nice too. As to why I took the internship... because the money was good and I like ebooks. Not very good reasons, but those were my reasons.

(I've since quit, after readjusting my priorities in life.)

Where'd you go after that then?

The gist of the articles I've read about Amazon is:

The Amazon department responsible for AWS is awesome to work in. Amazon, the online store, is terrible.

I get this sort of advice from all sorts of career posts. Try to avoid working at a place where IT is a cost-center, a thing grudgingly needed to support the actual business.

"The Amazon department responsible for AWS is awesome to work in. Amazon, the online store, is terrible."

This isn't true. People jump between both, including me. There is variance in the culture throughout the company but the culture Amazon is known for comes from the top and is similar in both orgs.

>Then why do thousands of engineers do then?

Just because something is a meme doesn't mean it's true or true all the time.

Did Amazon put nets on the building after that one guy jumped off?

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-employees-share-thoug...

No but they did promote his manager the next promo cycle. Just normal Amazon things.

That's terrifying.

https://hckrnews.com and it’s on the Top10 of the day.

What is this site?

Aggregation from HN

Thanks for the link. I refresh the HN front-page quite frequently (too frequent, I would say) but somehow I had missed that entry.

Try the hckrnews client which is kinda of better for ranking

You can always look at the /active tab, I think it sorts by how many comments stories got the past 24 hours:

https://news.ycombinator.com/active

You can use hntoplinks.com

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