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Comment by arberx | Hacker News Reader

It's impossible for me to have a positive view of Amazon (the company) at this point. There's way too much evidence pointing to the contrary.

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I wonder when the change happened. It seems like there's a fairly broad consensus now, but different people seem to cite different time periods for when things took a bad turn.

I had consistently great experiences ~3-8 years ago, but I remember needing to be careful about 3rd party sellers towards the end of that time period.

Thing is, I stopped ordering online about a year before the pandemic started. When I returned to Amazon 18 months ago, it felt like the balance had shifted towards the majority of listings being fraud/low quality/unexpectedly comingled/etc.

Personally, I blame a shift in perspective. It feels like their retail teams' views on who "The Customer" was shifted from the person placing the order, to the 3rd-party sellers.

When do y'all think that happened? 2015? 2017? 2019?

For me I can restore it in my blog. At the beginning of 2019 a first article about how Amazon might not be the best option to buy everything anymore, citing the bad quality of user reviews, the potential problem with fakes and the subpar experience with the website (specifically: The search evidently being skewed towards sponsored and not towards good offers, and missing filters to find products by their properties). Then summer 2019 a report on a disastrous support experience (in a case that included a received obvious fake) and the decision to not buy there anymore.

That was very fast, in retrospective. I liked Amazon quite a bit before that, the early 2019 articles even clearly reads like that. No criticism before that. Instead a few positive support experiences.

But that's just me, and not necessarily a US perspective. The fake problem for example I thought to be more prominent outside of Europe. On the other hand, that amazon seemed to fight against unions had been reported here before, to boycott the site because of that was a fairly common position.

Also, I wonder how it would have been if I had been more invested into the ecosystem - there is no Kindle in my home, no Echo, and I started to buy there relatively late. Though a site of mine used their affiliate marketing program even back in 2011...

It’s not just views on Amazon as a company to do business with. Attitudes around these parts have soured on Amazon as a company to work for too.

I find it weird that this attitude change might be recent. As early as 2015 people were writing about what a pressure cooker Amazon's white-collar workplace is[1]. I also had acquaintances who worked there and reported that it's a pretty punishing environment as early as 2008. I guess it takes 10+ years for this kind of perception to permeate?

[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/mgbzbx/at-amazon-employees-t...

I’ve personally only noticed (and thought) of Amazon as a bad place to work as an engineer in the past 2-3 years, but perhaps I missed a trend.

Amazon can restore good will with me by fixing their shitty vesting schedule. But it’s probably shitty because even highly compensated engineers figure out that working there is too shitty to tolerate so they had to lock them in with backloaded vesting.

If you're so concerned about it you can just buy the stock with the 2 year signing bonus that makes up for the stock vesting.

I hardly think "owning stock" is the goal, rather than "receiving compensation". Vesting schedules that backload compensation to discourage quitting early are hostile to employees, and makes them feel unfairly "locked in" because they lose a disproportionate amount of their unvested compensation relative to the percentage of the vesting period that they have spent working.

By comparison, Facebook vesting is evenly spread across four years, with refreshers granted every year, so that people can expect to receive relatively stable compensation for as long as they stay at the company. There's no "bad" time to leave when it comes to your vesting schedule, so you don't feel "locked in" for anything beyond the total value that you'll always be leaving on the table, regardless of when you leave. Refreshers don't even have a vesting cliff anymore, so you don't even feel the need to stick around for a particularly good batch if you don't want to.

You're receiving an equivalent amount of cash. If you want to invest it, you can. If not, you're still getting a consistent amount of money for four years (or more if stock goes up).

Velocity of money is more important than the amount.

"Give some of the money we pay you back to the company" vs. "here's some valuable securities which you can sell at some point in the near future when they are worth more than what you'd have paid for them".

Or you can join one of the other companies that gives you a sign on bonus and a normal, even distribution beating schedule.

If you’re getting the same amount of money or more does it matter? A lot of companies don’t offer bonuses at all.

> It seems like there's a fairly broad consensus now

Opinion polling shows Amazon has a 72% approval rating, higher than almost any other institution in America. https://reason.com/2021/07/06/poll-people-like-amazon-more-t...

The headline is tricky there. It's only higher than almost any of the institutions that they are asking about in that poll, which only includes three private companies (Amazon, Facebook, Twitter) and a bunch of government organizations or civil movements. I would guess a lot of private companies and most of big tech rate higher than Amazon, specially if they are thrown in with a bunch of things like ANTIFA, BLM and Israel or Palestina when they ask the question.

Here's the poll, page 15: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1OgPzcB75uxXiFmTjUUb-ITIr7BF...

> It's only higher than almost any of the institutions that they are asking about in that poll [...] I would guess

This is pure speculation. 72%, at a minimum, undermines the notion that there is "fairly broad consensus now" about viewing Amazon unfavorably. The fact that they poll higher than many government organizations seems especially relevant on an article about the NRLB.

People mistake their own feelings (and the feelings of their social groups) for the consensus view. Polling can clarify when our perceptions of consensus are incorrect.

> Here's the poll, page 15

It's also screenshotted in the article.

72% is a C in most schools. I wonder how they'd do against Comcast or Bank of America.

>72% is a C in most schools

Applying school grading criteria to organizational approval ratings doesn't make any sense. The current sitting president has an approval rating of 51%. That translates to a "F". Does that mean he's failing at his job?

Amazon's historically had pretty good favorability ratings, especially compared to the rest of tech.

Last year, before the pandemic upended everything, it was at 91% according to the annual Verge Tech survey (no, I don't think they've posted the 2021 iteration).

https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/2/21144680/verge-tech-survey...

Axios-Harris (Dec '20 - Feb '21) polled Amazon at #10 with a composite score of 80%, six ranks above Apple (and far above others like Facebook and Twitter, which ranked in the bottom ten slots). But even Twitter's composite score was 63%, which means people can't hate it _that_ much.

https://theharrispoll.com/axios-harrispoll-100/

Oh this is interesting thanks! There's little signal within the top 5/10. I have the feeling after this year Amazon will go down but of course I'm really biased by how they treat their engineers as mostly everyone I know in tech in the Bay Area is.

I think there's a lot of (very much warranted!) bias against tech within the industry, whether it's Google's treatment of its AI ethics researchers (Gebru, Mitchell), Amazon's fake review problem, or Elon Musk marketing Tesla vaporware (full self-driving by 2018, anyone?).

Meanwhile, non-tech people see a workplace with legendary perks and benefits, cheap products with fast delivery, and luxury cars that double as a form of virtue signaling.

Remember when Consumerist ran their Worst Company in America series, and it was always Wal*Mart, Comcast, Verizon, Bank of America, or AT&T/Time-Warner in the final four? Makes me wonder where Amazon would end up today if they still ran the poll.

I feel that people shouldn't be surprised by this. Amazon delivers you stuff extremely conveniently and cheaply enough that you don't really need to think about it. That is about the extent to which most people are engaging with them.

When'd they become a shady flea market putting laughably little effort into policing the wares sold thereon, while still showing "amazon" branding all over the page and generally not making it clear enough that they weren't taking direct responsibility for the listing, and then keeping that up year after year because it made them a whole fucking bunch of money and no-one made them stop, despite knowing that lots of their income was a result of fraud, borderline-scams, and unsafe or unfit-for-use-but-too-cheap-to-bother-returning products?

I'm pretty sure that was way before 2015. That's when they became indefensibly-bad actors, IMO.

In 2007 I was considering a move to the Bay Area and I focused my job research first on Amazon. You can find negative anecdotes about any large company. But still, without even remembering the details, I remember that research resulting in a strong takeaway that I wanted to have nothing to do with the company.

So then it was sometime around the early 2010s that the first wave of bad press came out about the way they treat workers, and I remember being unsurprised.

Thing is, at this point Amazon has mastered the art of getting away with employee-hostile practices.

Take, as a separate example, their PIP culture. The bar to get into amazon is fairly low (compared to peer companies) and so they tend to use PIP to maintain a high turnover and filter out unproductive employees. There's no shortage of engineers wanting to apply to Amazon (increasingly from overseas) and this churn seems to be OK because they have very good systems in place to onboard employees fast. For an engineer early in their career having AMZN on their resume can be worth the pain. At least among my peers in senior and staff/principal levels there's very little desire to jump ship to amazon though.

Similarly, they can treat warehouse workers like crap because there are others willing to line up to take their place. Regardless of the conditions.

What it boils down to is that many of amazon's employees simply don't have a better choice. And I'm not sure what can really help with that.

I spent a year working at a very large company that's well known in my part of the country, not because I wanted to work there, but because it was nice to have on my resume. But at least their compensation wasn't back-loaded.

>I'm not sure what can really help with that.

A basic social safety net. If companies are forced to compete with minimum living standards that are guaranteed to all people, it prevents their worst excesses.

Is it possible to have a positive view of any large company? They are all doing a lot of good things and a few bad things. Beyond that it depends on how good their PR department is.

Would like to know if there are any large companies that actually defy this general rule. Costco is a common counter-example, but even they’re imperfect:

https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/11/business/costco-5-dollar-chic...

Few people expect perfection.

Hmm maybe "positive view" is the wrong approach. I think "impossible to not have a negative view" is better wording.

Indiffernce is generally how I feel about a lot of companies.

My perspective on Amazon is negative.

Cox Cable fought for their customers. What did it get them? A billion dollar fine.

Your comment is a broad generalization, yet provides no examples of evidence.

The link they are commenting on is part of the evidence, which I assume is why they commented on it

This is the comments section on that very evidence.

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