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Comment by nirvana | Hacker News Reader

You're absolutely right. It would have meant I lost my job. When Bezos is posting on a ticket, everyone knows it. All the pressure rolled downhill right onto me. This means that, even if I did tell them to fuck off, I wouldn't have been able to get back to sleep. On some level I would have felt I was shirking my duties, and after all, I'd lobbied hard to get it fixed, months before.

I think, ultimately, it is kind of like an abusive relationship. People stay in them because they are manipulated by the abuser. Amazon has a manipulative corporate culture. It's a little bit like a cult.

I'm actually a bit hesitant to talk about this, even years later, because I expect to be attacked for it. (But I'm still pissed off, years later. And I don't really hold grudges, normally.)

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> I think, ultimately, it is kind of like an abusive relationship.

That is exactly what it is. I hope that your posting here will get read by lots of people at amazon that are treated like you were (or worse?) and that it will open their eyes.

One problem of being in an abusive relationship is that you no longer see it as such.

I _hope_ I would I told my boss to check his email. Then I'd send him, cc: Bezos, a copy of the email from two months ago. I'd note that I'd done _my_ job, and that I wouldn't be _told_ to do someone else's, for free. If this meant I wasn't their kind of employee then they weren't my kind of employer.

I don't know that I'd actually have the stones for it. But that would be the right choice. I imagine you'd agree, better to get fired, then and there, than be pissed about it for years.

Any time you make your boss look like a chump, you lose.

Unless you do so by making yourself look good to his boss.

Nirvana, I'm very impressed by your latest answer which shows a lot of maturity and knowledge about yourself. It is so very easy to write "well, I would have told them to fuck off", but in my experience very few people do that in reality, regardless of what they say when not in that specific situation.

I agree that it is quite like an abusive relationship which is of course why you should get the hell out of there. Nothing you say or do will change the other part in the relationship (amazon in this case) and you should just learn your lessons and move on.

Although your employment at Amazon is not something that you look back on with fond feelings perhaps you can agree that it is something that has taught you a lot and in that regard was a good thing for you?

I wouldn't have told them to fuck off, but I'd have thought long and hard about the politics of the situation and what sort of edge I have (if my situation was as dire as yours was made to be). It seems like that could have been your moment.

You don't like politics, but it seems like at some point you have to come to terms with the necessity of politics to effect change in a situation, that is to say if it's worth it. You clearly have an opinion on how things should be done. Bottling that sort of stuff up is toxic.

Anyway, glad you are out of that mess.

I think in a healthy, functioning, company there is some politics. The thing about amazon is, it doesn't matter to anyone that I had pointed this out months ago. From my boss up to the person who reported to Bezos, every one of them would be embarrassed by it, but what could I do? Threaten to tell Jeff Bezos? He doesn't care. He was in the ticket and they were all pointing the finger at me. Me coming back and say "But, I pointed it out months ago"... would result in "therefore its your fault because you weren't persuasive enough!"

You can't make people take responsibility. Hell, Bezos would probably say I should have made the change anyway "You failed to take initiative". But if I had made the change, I would have been fired "You're not a team player".

Asscovering is the rule of the day and its very easy in that environment.

Making the code capable of the correct (but apparently not desired behavior), with a simple flag to turn it on is often the right solution (when you've received insurmountable push back, "Disagree and Commit!"). At that point, you document it in an oncall wiki and when someone finally decides it's actually a bug (or the people that said no 'go away'), it's sitting there with a good audit trail so you can tell your teams oncall one or two words and they can flip it over in a few minutes (after some QA). Note: I only learned this after surviving a really bad manager. I'm not saying you should have known to do it.

> ""But, I pointed it out months ago"... would result in "therefore its your fault because you weren't persuasive enough!""

And then this would get noted in your performance review.

Weakness: bias for action.

LOL at bias of action :) Reminds me of ex-manager's parrotry of Amazon's values

Absolutely. Hell, at one point, praise for me from a former manager in a performance review was twisted around and used against me.

If I never hear the phrase "Bias for action" again, I'll be happy. (Though I laughed when you used it.)

Wow. That last part "you failed to take initiative" or "You're not a team player" makes me sad. That's a fubared situation.

Having worked for companies like this, I know exactly what you mean. Even the anger, 3-4 years after leaving one of them, is still there. It's a bit crazy, but then, this is somewhere you spend 1/2 of your waking life....

> I'm actually a bit hesitant to talk about this, even years later, because I expect to be attacked for it.

A bit unfair, don't you think? There have been several HN threads about Amazon in the last few months where former employees chimed in, and nobody has been maligned for it.

Unfair to whom? It'd say it's more like PTSD.

I have mentioned this in the past, on HN, though much more briefly, and was attacked for it. (Though this was on a previous HN account.)

I don't consider HN to be a very receptive environment, especially if you're saying anything perceived as "negative" about certain companies, including Amazon, Google, Facebook etc. Though it varies widely, of course.

Saying "No" to my boss on a significant issue that got me fired was the most important thing I have ever done in my life.

Re: the abusive relationship, that's exactly how a lot of bad employment situations work. The parallels are pretty much perfect. This post really opened my eyes about how this kind of situation is set up: http://issendai.livejournal.com/572510.html

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