AWS Ruins Own Attempt at Sabotage
lastweekinaws.com
lastweekinaws.com
> A new law passed by Washington state last year put restrictions on non-compete agreements, with a series of exceptions, including a provision that allows such agreements to be enforced in cases when an employee earns more than $100,000 a year. Hall earned “well in excess” of that amount in 2019, and was projected to surpass that in his 2020 compensation, as well, Amazon says in its suit.
> The suit shows that the legislation “has done nothing to stop this abusive labor practice by the state’s most influential employers,” said angel investor Chris DeVore, managing partner of Founders’ Co-op and the former managing director of Techstars Seattle, who has been outspoken against non-compete clauses.
Amazon lobbied heavily for that carve-out specifically because it wants to hang non-competes over its employees’ heads.
(The law was passed in response to some fast food franchisees hanging non-competes on their hourly employees but, in its original form, would have barred almost all of them. Obviously Amazon could not stand for that so bought itself an exemption.)
Everyone I know pins their lifestyle to base and saves near 100% of equity. Some don’t sell at all. I’m guessing that would change with a hard cap on base.
That’s a different kind of exposure, not just to long term performance, but day to day volatility, and specifically during open trading windows.
Employees at this level tend to have a pretty high level of financial management services to manage scenarios like this. I have two associates, not close enough to call them friends but close enough to have some insights, on the edges of this world. What they do:
- Other investments provide so-called passive income and that cash flow plus base salary is used for minimum expenses.
- Spending on larger-ticket items and services is budgeted out and is drawn from a variety of lines of credit secured against things like stock or the underlying holdings of those earlier investments.
- Most spending is planned in advance, either annually or quarterly, based on past income and future expected income. How much is added on the "future" side is financed by (often very inexpensive) leveraged debt and is calculated based on the risk tolerance of the individual.
Securing the debt with assets makes that debt screamingly inexpensive. Paying a handful of percent on debt that will only be borrowed for a few months at a time is, of course, seen as a reasonable cost to smooth out cash flow and leave the other money invested at a much higher return.
One other person I know who is not a higher-level employee but structures his spend very rigidly goes one step further and prepays all of his non-housing bills out of his annual bonus and one of the stock awards during the year. His annual salary and any other stock awards pay for housing, food, and savings.
It's not just that. They also get to avoid paying capital gains taxes on their shares. So they can borrow against those shares to buy income generating assets that more than cover the interest costs and they can do so while avoiding having to pay the taxes on those gains (especially important when those gains are still short term capital gains where they would be taxed as income).
I think you're seriously overestimating how sophisticated the financial management is of your typical software engineer, who could very well be spending beyond the cap with none of those things you mentioned.
In my experience, most Amazon employees just put everything on a credit card, and then they sell stock to cover the credit card payments if their salary doesn't cut it.
That's pretty much the extent of their financial planning.
As a case in point, we had to spend a lot of time educating people at Netflix how stock compensation worked, including a lot of VPs. They just didn't care, it was of no interest to them.
Money goes into bank, money comes out. ETrade account has a big number, yay! That was about it.
Of course some of them were much better than that, but just because they are engineering executives doesn't make them good with money.
I see from your profile that you work there. Curious if you agree with me or not.
I assume my colleagues are capable of managing their finances wisely. I could be wrong.
In any event, I'm not sure a tax strategy discussion is enough to make an overarching conclusion from about someone's financial competency (or, for that matter, an entire group of people's). You can suck at tax optimization strategies without being a reckless overspender.
We discuss salaries and total compensation too, so we are better prepared for our own negotiations.
And also, spending on the credit card and then selling stock to pay it off isn’t necessarily reckless or overspending. Imagine if it were all cash. Would you say they’re overspending because they pay out half their paycheck each month saving the other half? Given that for many amazonians their stock is more than half their compensation, selling some stock isn’t really overspending.
I don't intend to sell my stock except to diversify my portfolio. I intend to live long beyond retirement, and I'll need it.
The median home in the US is 2,300 sq ft. To get that in the Bay Area in a good school district will run you about $2.3M. Assuming you put 20% down, you'll need to mortgage $1.84M. At today's rates, that's about $7,360/mo in mortgage, and about $2,100 in property tax.
So we're already at $113,520 a year just for housing.
You'll also need to pay taxes on your total comp, including the RSUs that you vest in, whether you sell them or not. Assuming you make $250K a year in total comp, and let's say you have a ton of deductions to get a crazy low tax rate, you'll still pay about 30% in taxes between Federal and State. So that's 75,000 a year.
So just in housing and income taxes, we've already spent more than the Bay Area salary cap (you've spent $188K).
And we haven't even talked about insurance, cars, food, or daycare.
I can easily see a middle class family spending more than the base salary.
Obviously it depends on your circumstances. But I would not attempt to live like what you describe in the inner Bay Area. That sort of lavishness--which I know is not particularly lavish elsewhere by American standards--is reserved for the truly wealthy here, or someone who bought their home long ago (even 15 years would suffice; less if you bought in Oakland).
At the very least, some method exists to produce liquidity without actually losing equity, or the whole $1-salary but compensated purely by stock CEO model wouldn't make any sense (if they're just immediately selling what they get, then it might as well be a performance-based, or stock-based, bonus)
You should evaluate what your ideal investment mix is (keeping in mind that you already have a lot of exposure to the company where you work and have unvested equity) and always rebalance towards that. The source of income is immaterial.
Thought experiment. If you got paid the same amount in cash that the company gives you in stock - would you use the equivalent amount of money to buy the company’s stock?
Yes, we can tell sarcasm without listening to verbal inflection.
They give new employees a bonus in their first two years to make up the difference before they start vesting.
After that, yes, they need to sell stock if their expenses exceed the cap. Which is fine as long as Amazon stock keeps going up.
Another side effect of this is that if Amazon's revenue drops, they don't have to move to layoffs so quickly. Everyone's salary will naturally go down, since the shares they get each month are worth less, but it will feel better because "no layoffs and no pay cuts are necessary".
Leaving aside share buybacks, they're still paying the same salary and are still distributing shares from the same allocated pool.
On the other hand, if there is a big share price drop, a lot of your employees have suddenly taken a big compensation hit. (And they may have already paid taxes based on a higher share price at the time of vesting if they didn't immediately sell which is another argument not to hold onto a lot of RSU shares after vesting.)
As an aside, is this materially different than any other FAANG? All the offers I’ve seen when browsing tools like levels.fyi scale much faster in stock/bonus compensation than in salary.
And yes, there is a hard cap at 160K. The hard cap apparently changes based on geographic region, but that doesn't really matter for the people in Seattle (the majority of Amazon's employees) who are under a 160K salary cap.
Just as a point of comparison, an L4 at Google could have a 160K salary.
The point of the entire thread is that "Glassdoor says this person makes 170k" is misleading because Amazon is unique with these salary caps. Even executives do not make higher than 160k (or 185k in SF) salary, so looking at that number on Glassdoor or levels.fyi doesn't tell you much. If you are trying to determine an Amazonian's compensation (as this thread was trying to do) you need to be aware that the salary number alone is not an indicator of total compensation.
It is materially different from other FAANGs, because AFAIK other FAANGs may give high proportions of their pay in stock, but they do not have a hard cap for salary. At Google, when promoted to VP level you may still get a 10% salary bump along with your 50% stock increase. But at Amazon, after you reach $160k you will never get a salary bump again. This leads to confusion for people that aren't familiar with the stock grants because if they are comparing Google vs Amazon pay, they may go to Glassdoor see that a Senior Developer at Google makes $300k salary while an Amazon Senior Dev makes $160k, and not understand why there is such disparity.
I swear half the comments on this site are just nitpicking "nuh uh you are wrong about this tiny one word in your comment" while ignoring the actual point of the discussion.
Of course, because we're talking about money and people and relationships, there's inherently some corruption that seeps through, but most of the laws (and lobbying) is pretty boring stuff. Without lobbying most lawmakers would have no clue about some issues. How could they?
I guess they could spend all their time researching random problems, but lobbying helps vet important issues. They are representing a constituency, after all.
And, in reality, good politicians do do their own research, and many even write bills and promote policy that they genuinely believe in (even when it agrees with lobbyists).
Senators are people though and they have to eat, so maybe having a lunch meeting with the senator would be okay? Paying for a reasonably priced lunch for the senator? Say $50? Each? How about a $300 lunch? At the country club? with a round of golf after? Dinner? After dinner entertainment? And what if that entertainment "happens" to be strippers and cocaine?
The senator needs to get re-elected though. So in addition to political donations to their campaign directly, donations could be made to "totally definitely not coordinated" SuperPACs supporting them.
That's before getting into the fact that lobbyists have no obligation to present a fair and balanced picture of the situation. It's easy to sell a narrative that doesn't reflect reality if there's no one to challenge you; you can just leave out any and all inconvenient facts. Additionally, huge corporations are able to threaten layoffs of the senator's constituents.
To be clear, some of this stuff is highly regulated. Eg we couldn't bring doughnuts to a morning meeting with NASA because they're government officials and that could amount to bribery. Lobbying just has a very complex set of laws to skirt - and if you're a professional lobbyist, figuring out how to skirt those laws in order to buy influence is literally your job.
Were you a government employee? If so were you in a different agency? Can NASA employees bring doughnuts for other NASA employees?
Clearly in the US. I have the idea that in at least some European countries, it's less prevalent and definitely less public / blatant. Not entirely sure though, eg we Dutch like to think our country isn't very corrupt but somehow we just don't seem to notice when our ex ministers get cushy jobs at the bigcos they helped to deregulate.
I think the US is kind of unique in how obscenely public the corruption is. Elected judges who fund their campaings with money from companies they help win trials, super PACs, the list seems endless. No wonder y'all are libertarians.
I now believe that the best way to reduce government corruption is to reduce government. I also feel that government support for corporations should also be limited, and corporations should be carved out as a "non-living entity" class separate from personhood.
I'm more pragmatic that the more an-cap side of things, I feel that the government should at least orchestrate essential infrastructure, and that should include internet, telecom and roads/highways. Most of that PoV is rooted in domestic security.
However, it's a bit of a sticky, dividing part for a lot of libertarians - especially the more dedicated believers. You get the ones that are just so driven to "gub'mint don't tread on me!", and you get the ones that understand that any mindset or belief is not bulletproof in theory and/or in practice and need to build safeguards in place.
In an ideal, perfect world to a lot of libertarians (again, this is subjective) - there wouldn't be a need for any government ran programs. That will never, EVER happen in my opinion. There will always still be people who just are not educated, intelligent, lucky, skillful, advantageous (whatever qualifier anyone picks to use) enough to succeed or to be able to have an acceptable standard of living independently. We need to have some sort of safety net in place. What that net is, I'm not educated enough to offer an opinion or thoughts on specifically.
Rest assured that there's a LOT of libertarians that understand that "shit happens" and there should be systems in place to handle these edge cases.
As I've commented before, people regularly oversimplify this problem as socialized vs private healthcare without considering why American healthcare is so broken. If you look carefully at the problems, you see that they won't go away if the government replaces private insurance and expands Medicare for everyone. These problems include a tremendous shortage of doctors [0]. Even Canada and the UK have more doctors per capita, and they are known for extremely high wait times (the jokes of the socialized medicine countries, so to speak). There are a number of possible reasons for this, most notably the hassle of occupational licensing (12-14 years of expensive college + 'indentured servitude' residency in the US).
Nonetheless, American healthcare science is still ahead of the curve and subsidizes socialized countries -- ~60% of all new drugs between 2001-2010 were invented in the US, and foreign dignitaries of socialized medicine countries often still get important procedures done in the US [1]. It would be interesting to see how the R&D dynamic plays out if America loses its market incentive to innovate in the space, and no other developed countries have the financial incentive left.
[0] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.MED.PHYS.ZS?end=2018....
[1] https://xconomy.com/seattle/2014/09/02/which-countries-excel....
1. I would like to see the spending the government currently does regarding healthcare (govt employees, elected officials, medicare, medicaid, va, etc) rolled into a non-profit healthcare corporation. It's important to include the government officials and staffing here, as they get the same as everyone else to discourage tiered services.
2. From there, I would make it a requirement that Insurance Corporations act and negotiate as a fiduciary on behalf of their clients. One of the serious lapses in the Obamacare legislation that has let insurance companies largely not try to negotiate prices down in order to raise the oceans in terms of costs/profits.
3. I would seriously reform/eliminate extension patents. (competition)
4. I would make dual-sourcing a licensing requirement from the FDA. (security + competition)
5. I would make 50% US production for all medications a requirement for FDA approved use (security).
6. Any company can purchase coverage policies from the Non-profit insurance corp that covers govt employees and current welfare coverage programs.
7. Require no more than a 20% pricing variance between customers in a 15 month window for a given procedure by a medical provider. (no dual-books for insurance covered and private pay)
While there are other steps that can be done... part of it is to merge and adjust spending directly based on current spending, but having a non-profit corp that also covers govt employees is a baseline. By breaking it off, you can allow for a stronger level of competition of services.
Reducing patent protections, and making dual sourcing and partial domestic production requirements you again encourage competition. The requirement for dual-sourcing is partly security and partly to ensure competition.
Now, this is emphatically not a Libertarian ideal, and would not cover everyone, but what it would do is expand competition and reduce incentives for poor behavior. It should have the side effect of lowered costs over time. From there, individual states could create their own expansions or services beyond this, as could specific cities.
Over time, I'd prefer to see the FDA shrunk and sane guidelines in their place... Allowing for input based on relatively trusted testing to allow/disallow certain medications and reduce the incentives to produce less-good drugs only to expand patent exclusivity.
It would take a groundswell of support for such actions.
I don't think that's necessarily an indication of corruption. Being a minister (or other high-level official) gives you a lot of fairly unique experience and knowledge that could be quite valuable to a corporation.
Of course it absolutely can be corruption, I just don't think that ministers moving to industry can be taken as evidence on its own.
The difference is money. Lobbying is effective for groups that have a lot to spend. So for almost any pro-business issue lobbying can have a strong effect. That might be ok, but there's no similarly effective mechanism to push issues that don't result in direct profits to the people that care about them.
There are countless issues that are very important and should be addressed, but that don't have any direct financial beneficiaries and so are often ignored in US politics.
(Disclaimer: I work for AWS but my opinion is my own and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.)
edit:
Since you make over 100k, you're also considered a white-colar employee...
Your boss has decided the work-week is now 60-hours a week, and you don't get paid extra for it.
Oh, and if you don't perform, you're fired.
And if you try to work for a competitor, you will be sued and a protective injunction against you being able to work for the new job will be given.
And that's all a-ok by you, because you make what most would consider to be a wealthy lifestyle.
That information is extremely valuable to a competitor that is trying to catch up to AWS'. This information can also be passed along verbally and be 99% as a effective as having an up to date detailed revenue breakout spreadsheet.
So in this case he is taking some "secret sauce", which can be disclosed without ever being able to prove that it was.
Imposing an 18 month window where that person can't work at a direct competitor is sufficient enough to make that information somewhat stale and no longer as effective.
I'm personally against non-competes, but I did want to point out that there is cause for concern here. Also, as the VP of product marketing, he could have gone on to any job he wanted in any other cloud provider that wasn't a direct competitor, such as say Slack, Twilio, Box, Dropbox, I mean the list is pretty long. So it's not like his hands were tied in the job market. And certainly he signed the agreement originally, and should have modified it before hand if he was concerned. So it is possible that his boss at AWS is a bit irritated that he did not live up to the agreement that was signed. And as a VP you can't really claim that you "didn't know" about the non-compete since you will be doing a lot of hiring and imposing that very same clause on all of your hires.
The key argument to that point is made later in the piece. The boss of the person who's now being sued also left Amazon for Google recently, also for a similar position. He also had all of that same knowledge. But he was based in California, so Amazon couldn't sue him. But if this is really such a critical factor worth suing over, why would Amazon allow someone in that position to be based in California at all?
Also, to say that Slack, Twilio, and Dropbox aren't direct competitors is absolutely wrong. The way the non-compete is written, Amazon could sue over him going to almost any other company, because Amazon competes with literally everyone these days.
In any case, given that his hiring boss told him it was not a big deal, and given that HR knew where he was going and didn't warn him off, your suggestions that he "should have known" ring hollow.
The Washington state legislature considered legislation blocking them. They got noncompetes removed for sandwich makers (companies literally made people making minimum wage sign non-competes!), I think the threshold was 100k or something. But amazon pushed very hard. Tell your wa state leg rep that you want to end noncompetes.
But to your point if it does that's just down right dangerous. Amazon competes with just about everyone either directly or indirectly.
Then Amazon should be suing for breach of NDA. In the article Corey points out that these are enforceable in all US states.
(I believe that NCs are net negative, but I'd imagine that it's hard to get evidence of an NDA breach in these circumstances.)
Put otherwise: they are using the non-compete to try and achieve the ends of an NDA, without the hassle of proof.
That way, the non-compete actually costs the company something, so they don't just apply them as a blanket, and the employee doesn't have the risk of not finding a job due to the non-compete.
My standard response to this is "great, then you won't mind if I strike it from the contract".
EDIT: Reading on, I agree with the article: This "oh don't worry" is standard to get you to sign, so act like they will definitely enforce this in your case and plan accordingly.
This is so true, I hope if you take anything out of this its that during the initial negotiating stages is really the only time you have any authority to negotiate. It is expensive for a company to adjust contracts to you however it's also expensive for you to defend yourself against them so don't be shy and when negotiating and everything has a value. So, for example, you could say the non-compete clause is inconvenient and restrictive as a result, you want an extra $20,000/ year (i.e if you get 3-4 years that is 60k) to cover potentially being unemployable for 18 months. Apply a monetary value to all of these irritating inconveniences. You only live once no point being enslaved by a contract.
I ask "Before I accept a offer of employment, would it be possible to see any contracts, employee handbooks, etc I would have to sign on my first day?" and you would not believe the push back I get from that question. I often hear "We don't share our employee handbook" or things to that effect. I explain that it is impossible to evaluate a offer that has terms I can't see and often the interviewer shrugs their shoulders and tells me that's just how it is.
I guess it works to weed out the jobs with bad terms. However I have a hard time seeing how any of this is enforceable from a legal perspective.
Here in Germany you generally sign a contract. The contract for a full time job covers a lot of ground, I think mine is about 12 pages long. Some highlights of the top of my head: - my title - my salary - my location of employment (can‘t change that without a new contract/my consent) - IP assignment (I negotiated different terms) - non-compete during employment (I don‘t have a post contractual non-compete but it would have to be covered here as well) - vacation - my willingness to travel
What‘s not covered: - discretionary benefits - anti-herassment policy - the right to use my image (this is an optional thing I signed later)
First thing I did after I got the contract was the call up a lawyer focused on employment law and have him review it for me so I know what footguns to press back on. Fairly easy and no bad surprises.
> If you think I’ve gotten it wrong, okay: make your case on Twitter!
Absolutely NOT. Twitter is a cesspool where the Twitter mob will attack any well-meaning and well-intentioned argument and is the last place anyone should use for any meaningful discourse of any kind. Twitter has been around for how many years? What problems has it really solved other than giving morons a platform to announce their superiority.
Amazon is also involved in quite a few industries now via both AWS and their storefront, that I imagine the company wide NC would have _quite_ a bit of coverage.
No, that was never the initial intention of non-competes. There is only one situation where non-competes make any amount of sense at all. No one should ever sign a non-compete except for the following situation, you are selling a BUSINESS to someone else. That's it. There is no good reason outside of that to ever sign a non-compete. It is reasonable when buying a business to want some insurance that the seller won't turn around and open a competing business across town and steal all their old customers. It is NOT reasonable to say, "Hey, we want you to work for us. But if things turn south you aren't allowed to work anywhere else in your field."
Presumably, in the same vein that salespeople bring a “Rolodex” (i.e. a set of established personal relationships with clients) with them when they switch companies, wouldn’t a marketer bring along with them a Rolodex of channel partners, advertising-agency higher-ups, etc.?
"It’s only for 18 months! That’s a long time in cloud. GCP may well be deprecated before then!"
This was way more interesting & entertaining that I thought it would be!
I don't know Corey Quinn personally, but if you peruse the rest of the blog entries you'll see that all of his posts are entertaining. He has a flair for this particular style.
It focuses more on how a product is packaged, priced, how is it positioned to a customer, who is the customer even - this is actually quite hard, for a cloud product like AWS it could be CEO/CIO/ VPoE,VP-Ops, Head-R&D, Engg lead, DevOps/SREs, PMs, architects etc, depending on who all you target the material you need to generate is very different.
Targeting VP/CXO's could mean gartner type material, targeting actual developers could mean just accessible documentation, examples and easy to use self-service portal, for somewhere in-between perhaps make influencers like Corey from lastweekinaws who wrote this article to promote your product.
Product marketing is perhaps closer to product management than what traditionally what we think of marketing .
None of this excuses this practice.
They're suing Brian.
Particularly in areas in which AWS is already weak -- like, as mentioned in the article, marketing.
I would poach someone from say Apple than AWS for marketing purposes.
I've been at a company with bad marketing. Even though we were a unicorn with 10s of millions in revenue including almost of financial services, insurance, and publishing companies as clients, basically no one knew who we were or what we did. Our sales people would have to invest months and months of effort to sell. We struggled to gain any developer community support at all.
On the other hand I've had AWS consultants tell me that they walk into meetings without having to sell at all. Their clients are already eager to leverage AWS in any way they can. Nor do they have the slightest fear of putting mission critical and sensitive data in the cloud.
If that isn't marketing I have no idea what is.
To be fair, it makes more sense for many companies to leverage AWS and other cloud providers, other than trying to do a job they do not understand and may not understand enough even to hire for it.
I find this post really funny.
On a more serious note: I often see people here not catching sarcasm. If this is you, be warned that this post is full of sarcasm and irony.
This seems fair
That said, non-competes without 100% garden pay during the term should be unenforceable. Also, trying to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-competes should have criminal penalties.
Also, attempting to enforce a blatantly unenforcable non-compete should result in criminal charges for whoever made the decision to push enforcement, disbarment for their legal team, and substantial civil liability. The bar for that should be very high, but the choice to enforce a non-compete should be one that's only made when the legal team is damn sure there's a compelling argument that the non-compete is legally enforceable. Too many people are handcuffed by definitely-garbage non-competes because they can't afford the legal fight.
With >100% garden pay terms, I would personally prefer limited/short term non-competes over infinite/long term NDAs, for example. I've explicitly made that choice in the past.
Would that make senses? Of course not.
Everything I've heard is that it's a toxic work environment, with below-average pay and draconian employee agreements. And that's not even getting into the ethical issues. What in the world makes someone take a job there instead of pretty much any other tech company?
When I started working, Amazon stock was at ~$750 a share. When I started working, Google stock was at about the same. Google would have granted 100-120K in stock, Amazon closer to 50K. Google gives annual refreshes of ~50K, while Amazon would not until the initial grant is mostly vested. So at the end of this year, when both vests would be coming to a close, a Googler who kept all their stock would have 160 shares from their initial grant, as well as 25-40 additional shares from their refresh grants.
So that's ~180K in AMZN at today's prices vs. 230K in GOOG, plus another 40-60K in refresh grants. And the Google employee has a better salary and bonus structure. Facebook is equivalent or superior to Google in pretty much every aspect of this comparison (base pay, bonus, equity grant, equity growth, equity refresh).
But for me personally, it’s simple.
Big Tech salary and working fully remotely for AWS in a low cost of living area.
"At Amazon, a Seattle operations engineer on an $840k salary had his/her renewal application denied in February."
"a level III program manager in Seattle earning a salary of $1.3m"
The article was mixing up compensation elements, but people are paid well above US average wage at Amazon.
https://news.efinancialcareers.com/us-en/3003798/highest-pay...
I worked for Amazon because they recruited from my University and it was my first after graduation job. I'd had some internships, but I didn't have a large network or a lot of options.
Dev managers at Amazon leave to be CTOs at startups. Senior engineers leave to be architects. It's one of the best possible resume items you could get, particularly if you're moving to another cloud company -- although, obviously, that in particular seems to be a bit of a dangerous move if you don't wanna get sued.
It's innovation from the business side of things more than the tech side of things.
This was shocking to me - I'd expect a VP to be making much more, but if they were, then you'd expect it to be included in the complaint. Is Amazon's comp really this low? Or is "VP of Product Marketing" similar to "VP" at an investment bank (lower rung of middle management, rather than an exec title)? Something else?
Not true in The Netherlands.
I do like AWS--a lot. I snark, but that's my personality. If I genuinely hated them, this level of focus on their business would be something pathological.
AWS hires amazing people, and build incredible things. I'm a customer, and a happy one. Actions like this demonstrate a base level of being unworthy of those amazing people that they've hired, and get my hackles up something fierce. It's one of the few ways in which AWS unequivocally Is Wrong, A Lot.
I guess I missed the subtlety in the article :)
Mind is I ask: are all large corps in this space the same or are Amazon particularly bad? It seems to me that get a bad wrap in retail more because they have no PR than because they do things more harshly than other retailers...
If I want the official AWS view on things I can consult their blog page, follow their guys on Twitter (which I do), and read their press releases.
I don't really want that, though, and neither do most people, because I want to know when I'm being led astray, when AWS is pushing my trust a little too far. If some service looks cheap or easy to implement but has a lot of gotchas, I want to know that. I want a friendly-but-independent perspective, and that's what he offers.