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Comment by JulianRaphael | Hacker News Reader

I've been working for AWS across different teams for some time now and can't confirm that. There are a LOT of folks with +5 years tenure. In the US, the average tenure of workers aged 25-34 is 2.8 years, so you'll obviously see some turnover and some teams might see more than others - but the attrition rate is not really high across the company. In my opinion, we're hiring mainly because we are still growing really fast!

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You might be on a solid team, but AWS is widely regarded as being a complete meat grinder. We've hired so many devs from AWS in the past 18 months (even pre covid) and they all have the same story. 12-14 hour days at a minimum, toxic leadership and managers, incredible pressure, tons of tech debt and mostly doing ops work.

I'd say the trend for AWS is leaning "do not join". Anecdotal? Of course, but with enough stories it becomes a statistic and not an anomaly.

Hm. I will obviously appear to be biased, but isn't the collection of anecdotes that you've gathered a manifestation of some kind of inverse survivorship bias? Within the total population of people who work or have worked at AWS, the largest group of people with a negative experience will be in the subset of the population that has left the company? I really believe that companies the size of Amazon will inevitably have a certain percentage of people who had negative experiences - just like the company has negative experiences with individuals.

Like I said in my other comment in this thread, I'm sure that there are some teams that don't have a good culture but it also comes down to the individual in many cases. I guess it comes down to individual preferences, some folks really don't want to work at Google, others dislike Facebook, some don't like AWS, etc.. But at the end of the day, all of these companies still attract a ton of incredibly talented people and I personally don't see that trend ending soon.

Few companies have entire websites dedicated to how poor their experience was at said company. Amazon is the only company I've ever heard of in tech where people have devoted their spare time and money building resources to warn others about how bad and toxic their experience was. Microsoft doesn't have this. Facebook or Google don't have this. It's actually mind blowing when you think about it.

Imo, Amazon is a special level of toxic and abusive and it shows by their reputation in the industry and how high their turnover is. That's what I mean by anomaly vs statistic. When thousands (tens of thousands?) of your former employees have horror stories, it starts to build a strong narrative than a few bad teams or a bad manager. Or you start to question if the ratio of bad teams is that high, what is wrong the the company as a whole?

Does it mean your experience at Amazon is wrong or incorrect? Absolutely not. But your experience isn't the norm.

Out of curiosity, I just did a few searches along the lines of "is MSFT/FB/GOOG bad place to work" and for each of them there were several results/websites about how each of these companies is the worst place to work. If you look at the largest publicly available data set, Glassdoor, AWS does quite well - better than Microsoft and as well as Google. I have not worked for Amazon outside of AWS, so I can't really comment on that. However, as Amazon has more than 1,000,000 employees (400,000 of which were hired in 2020), I'd argue that you get more negative stories simply because of the larger population? Comparing Amazon to MSFT (163,000), FB (50,000) or GOOG (135,000) without taking its ginormous scale into account seems to be comparing apples to oranges. In terms of scale and typology, it would probably be better to compare AWS to these companies and I believe that the publicly available data paints a different picture than what you describe.

I'm not trying to argue with you here, I've just had a quite few discussions in recent times with people who had very strong negative opinions about MSFT being a place for the lazy, Google being a place for the special snowflakes, Facebook being a place for the cultish, AWS being a place for those looking for a stepping stone in their career, etc....and I think that all of these companies actually are great places to work but there will always be a few percent who absolutely hated their time there.

Nothing like this exists for any other company in tech: https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/

Just filled with stories of people that felt extremely wronged. Are there stories of people that with terrible experiences at other companies? Of course. Are there people that have had good experiences at Amazon? Absolutely. Does anything like the above exist for any other company? Not that I can find.

That's crazy and really speaks to the difference. If you believe that Amazon is "just another tech company" in how they treat their employees, I'd probably say you're turning a bit of a blind eye.

Most of these stories are about Amazon and again, at the scale that Amazon operates I think that this would be expected? With 1,000,000 employees, if you assume a yearly turnover of just 1% that's 10,000 people leaving the company and I'm sure there are quite a few people in that group who had a bad experience - particularly as this includes the retail operation, which definitely had a bad reputation (most stories on the website that you linked are about retail teams). Post the NYT story in 2015 a LOT of things changed in retail, but I'm sure there are still issues.

Not trying to be pedantic here, but this thread was about AWS and not Amazon, so I will just reiterate that I can't personally comment on Amazon as a whole, I can only comment on AWS and I think most people would agree that AWS can be put into the same category as FB, MSFT, GOOG, etc. I have highlighted this distinction several times, but you seem to not want to engage in a conversation about AWS and rather discuss Amazon as a whole. That's fine, but as AWS and Amazon are really two different companies, you are then comparing apples to oranges and in that case you should compare Amazon to e.g. WalMart?

I don’t know if mentioning 1 million employees matters much without considering purely software engineering positions.

I can't figure out why you're putting so much stock into that site. It's a random Google Sites page that looks like it took about an hour to set up. In the past 1.5 months, it's gotten a total of 5 submissions. 5 submissions from a company of over a million employees. And of those 5 submissions, 2-3 are from people who do not even work at the company. One of the submissions literally starts with "I've never worked at the company", and one of the others is a NIMBY upset that Amazon is building a warehouse in their town.

If you're telling me that in 1.5 months, a company of 1+ million people only generated two complaints from employees, then that does not at all support the point you are making that Amazon is terrible to work for. That is an astonishingly low complaint rate.

>Does anything like the above exist for any other company? Not that I can find.

Have you never heard of glassdoor? Blind? There are plenty of sites that have literally hundreds of times more complaints against tech companies than what is shown in the site you linked.

Anecdotally I know a single ex-AWS engineer, and this person heavily dislikes their position at AWS.

That sounds like the warehouse experience I've heard about from some friends. Emphasis on the toxic leadership and managers.

That was my read of it as well. Amazon is dead serious about the fork.

Mm, but you're in management. All the Amazonians I've talked to have indicated that it's a very rough environment and they were glad to get out. Maybe you get a distorted view due to the power imbalance between you and your peers?

I'm an individual contributor in product management, so not in people management. Amazon / AWS is a challenging work environment, just like most other tech companies. In my opinion, that is also why so many people want to work for FAANG & Co, as you generally get to work on really interesting but also challenging things. I'd say that bursts of intense working periods are par for the course in FAANG & Co, but it also depends on your own ability to handle our self-service culture (which I find empowering). The culture is certainly peculiar but each large tech company has their own culture that works really well for some and doesn't jive with others. Just speaking for myself here, but I have learned a ton professionally and personally, work(ed) with inspiring people and had the best work-life balance of my career so far. Don't want to sound like a shill here - I'm certainly aware that in a company the size of Amazon there will be good and bad pockets, I just happened to work with good teams so far.

You unfortunately not only sound like a shill, but like a shill who has read Amazon's literature. I have a few questions that are worth reflecting on; I also asked them of myself when I worked at a FAANG:

* How many hours/week do you spend at your work machine?

* How often is a sprint crunched; how often does the sprint manager exhort sprinters to complete the board?

* How many incidents/quarter does your team have? How often does an incident route through you?

* How many hours/quarter are you oncall/onduty?

* How often do you have anxiety on Sunday night about going to work on Monday?

The answers should be at most 40, rarely, 12, 60, and rarely. Ideally, they would be 20, never, 3, 120, and never. Note that we don't require less oncall; we require less stressful oncall.

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