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Comment by jorblumesea | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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