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Comment by Weryj | Hacker News Reader

As a recently departed employee. This section was a complete joke. “Investing in Employees and Our Workplace“.

“These mental health benefits enhance existing benefits, which include 24/7 access to free, one-on-one counseling sessions, suicide prevention resources, and customized support.” And by that they mean those terrible app based counselling services.

The best thing they did do was a free Headspace subscription, but they cancelled it after 2 months.

Edit: I just wanted to add one more thing, since I was working in Canada my salary was half that of an American, but baselined against the same people in Seattle. If I’m working at your high American bar, I want your salary. Salt in the wound.

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It's bad enough that they felt the need to insert a mental health line item in the filing. To them it seems "we're so nice, let's boast about it" kind of a thing. To me it reads like a warning: "you'll need that mental health help if you work here".

Amazon is a large company. Experiences are going to vary widely.

I work maybe 2 hours a day. Oncall is pretty light when I do have it. Fulfilling team and projects with great career opportunities. I have no meetings Wed-Fri. I have under 3 years of experience and my compensation this year after reviews went from:

164K base -> 218K base Total compensation: 220K for 2021 calendar year -> 305K for 2022 calendar year -> 378K for 2023 calendar year

I'm pretty happy as an employee personally though I realize not everyone is.

Edit: Some commentators seem to be implying that I'm chasing money and bringing down the culture of Amazon by not working more - that seems ironic to me given Amazon has historically been criticized for its sweatshop reputation.

To clarify, I work 2 hours a week because that's all I need to work to deliver my projects on time and I was rated TT this year - so why would I work more?

This is a sentiment and self indulgent bragpost straight out of the Blind app. To others on the outside looking in: while there are corners of Amazon where it's possible to coast, a huge amount of people are grinded to pieces and operate at such a level of anxiety that they feel it's necessary to commit code and manage tickets during nights and weekends to keep pace.

I am happy to hear the other side of it. It feels like only the people who have an axe to grind are allowed to vent on HN about their anecdotal experiences, and it's considered taboo to share successes.

Won't be surprised if it's satire.

This unusually rosy anecdote (claiming to work 2 hours per week???) is from an anonymous account created a few hours ago just to comment on this story.

Let’s not take it more seriously than we have to.

Perhaps those people just aren't performing at the level that the posters like GP are at. If you feel the need to work nights and weekends to keep pace then unless your entire division is working that pace, you're the problem. And clearly we have anecdotes that this isn't true universally.

Wow congrats on making $300K doing nothing!

I realized this is very much the culture in Amazon now. Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture.

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture.

Are you suggesting that because the pay is high the culture of Amazon is bad ?

Why is working for money a bad thing ? Everyone is selling their time in exchange for money.

The primary reason for Amazon's bad culture is the management, and their insistance on firing 6% of workers each year[1]. This creates a culture where the people who understand this system well will actively sabotage newbies and naive devs to avoid getting canned.

A lucky few with good VPs and directors may have a good experience overall, but at some point the Amazon culture catches up to everyone, except the executives who don't face the same pressures.

[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-performance-review-6-...

No that’s not my point at all. If you’re in that category of engineers who basically chase money and work as little as you can instead of chasing projects that align with your passion, well, Amazon is probably where you will go. Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it completely sours the culture and it becomes an irreversible black hole.

Life's much more complicated than the binary lens of chasing money vs chasing projects.

People change over time, someone might have a family, they might encounter a medical situation, they may have student loan debt. There are millions of scenarios which could cause a person to choose working for a pay bump.

My point is none of these reasons will sour the culture as much as management putting employees through a zero sum, hunger games like scenario.

At the end of the day all of this stems Bezos's belief that employees are all inherently lazy, this trickles down to all the executives.

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...

It's entirely possible to chase both of those things. :)

And of course you can but usually the money just follows along. And I've not met a single person in my life who works two hours a day on his/her passion. None.

Edit: correction it was two hours per WEEK.

Yeah, because most people spend 0 hours a day working on their passion, instead exchanging hard time doing an activity they hate for too little money.

Working 2 hours a day for a fat paycheck sounds like a better way to enable yourself to spend time on your passions than deluding yourself into the belief that the capitalist entity extracting multiples of your TC as value for itself is enabling you to "follow your passion" while you work

What I have observed is that in Silicon Valley culture, when compensation becomes your defining identity, you can’t ever be satisfied with yourself if someone else with similar accomplishments makes more money than you.

Also, many of people actually like their jobs. But a lot of developer jobs especially at big companies are fundamentally boring hence the unstoppable chase of higher TC and the desperate need for hobbies.

> What I have observed is that in Silicon Valley culture, when compensation becomes your defining identity, you can’t ever be satisfied with yourself if someone else with similar accomplishments makes more money than you.

Sure, sometimes people lose the plot, what does it have to do with passion?

> many of people actually like their jobs

This is blatantly false. Many people have jobs that are occasionally interesting, I would accept this, but no one "likes" working. In what world is giving all your energy to corporate interests to enrich the top of the corporation something to like?

> But a lot of developer jobs especially at big companies are fundamentally boring hence the unstoppable chase of higher TC and the desperate need for hobbies.

Jesus christ, "the desperate need for hobbies", what is wrong with you? You pan people who don't like working, and criticize them for wanting to have hobbies instead of spending all their time doing activities that are only a value-add to their boss's boss? No wonder you are jealous of people who get paid well and have fun in their free time, you have the worst case of Capitalist Stockholm Syndrome I've ever seen

“Once you hit a critical mass of these people, it completely sours the culture and it becomes an irreversible black hole.”

By all accounts, it already has.

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more

Thats most (big) tech companies

Amazon is going to rot from the inside by the MBAs they hired to run the company instead of engineers.

having worked there for shy of a year (not in AWS, by random placement), i think your verb tense is true but misses the fact it long has been rotting.

but they exact a huge "tax" on items sold on the site, so they can survive incompetence for quite some time.

> doing nothing

Every person I know who earns well "working" for 2 to ten hours a week spends a good fraction of their "free" time doing things that make those hours hyper productive.

It could be as direct as a developer working on software side projects. More often, it's tangential. Working on demanding problems. Comfort with the unfamiliar. Mind you, none of this is done for that purpose. But when you watch someone who couldn't keep their office plants alive for ten minutes noodle, for a week, through designing and building a smart irrigation and remote soil chemistry monitoring system for a backyard pot farm, it makes sense why, when they look at a problem in a domain they're experts in, decades of parameter space can be searched and resolved in seconds.

> Because they’re the top paying tech company it attracts people who work for money and nothing more. That creates…a certain culture.

Do you think this is less prevalent at lower labor prices?

People who pan individuals in a capitalist society for taking high-paying jobs make no sense to me. You assume people that like to have financial security have what culture about them exactly? Pragmatism? Realism?

I would bet, for most of the people, money is what they work for. To keep a roof on their head and be able to afford food.

In a company in which abuses (e.g., forcing warehouse workers to remain on site during an active tornado watch (funnel sighted), resulting in multiple deaths), it is precisely this FYIGM attitude which is the problem.

It's why we don't judge companies, or organisations, or individuals, no their best, but on their worst. It's why we look for groups that look out for each other, which are concerned with how the least among them --- least powerful, least privileged, least protected --- are treated.

Your situation may be a windfall for you. It only further illustrate's what's wrong with Amazon, and rotten to the core.

I have never worked in a place that sent people home during tornadoes. Shelter-in-place is literally the best advice for tornadoes.

I can remember sitting in central hallways while working in various factories back in the day whenever tornado warnings / watches were issued.

Sounds as if you worked at places similar in philosophy to Amazon.

The Edwardsville, IL, facilty lacked safe rooms.

Amazon workers were prohibited from carrying personal phones on them through which they might have received warnings or summoned help.

Amazon workers requesting permission to leave, or questining whether they should work shifts after the tornado warnings were announced were told that they could not leave or must work under penalty of losing their jobs.

Many workers, all of whom requested anonymity to protect their jobs, said they had never had a tornado or even a fire drill over the course of their careers at Amazon, dating back up to six years. Several expressed that they would be unsure of what to do in an emergency. In one case, an Amazon contractor, fearing Hurricane Ida, asked to go home early but was told that leaving would adversely affect their performance quota.

...

Amazon has not responded to The Intercept’s requests for comment about why employees were not instructed to stay home amid the tornado warnings. The company took an additional step yesterday by encrypting internal help ticket messages about the Illinois facility, making them inaccessible to most workers, according to an employee who provided screenshots before and after the messages were encrypted. Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on why the records had been encrypted.

https://theintercept.com/2021/12/13/amazon-illinois-tornado-...

Felton said most of the 46 people in the warehouse known as a “delivery station” headed to a shelter on the north side, which ended up “nearly undamaged” and a smaller group to the harder-hit south end. The company said those are not separate safe rooms, but generally places away from windows considered safer than other parts of the plant.

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/dec/13/amazon-wa...

“If you decide to return with your packages, it will be viewed as you refusing your route, which will ultimately end with you not having a job come tomorrow morning,” the dispatcher said. “I’m literally stuck in this damn van without a safe place to go with a tornado on the ground,” the driver messaged back before being told to shelter in place.

https://www.engadget.com/amazon-dispatcher-screenshots-edwar...

OSHA report summary/ response:

https://www.theverge.com/2022/4/27/23043685/osha-safety-amaz...

Fair enough, the team I was on is falling apart and even mentors are suggesting members transfer away.

I tried to bring up the structural issues of the team, but it took someone from another team to set them straight. I had already left by then.

Yes, that's why we generally disregard anecdotes and look at data:

https://www.teamblind.com/company/Amazon/reviews

Amazon has terrible morale overall, with a 2.7 / 5 Work Life Balance rating while most comparable companies, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, etc. are averaging like 4 / 5.

I would want to see evidence to show blind is more than just a collection of anecdotes before calling it "data". In my (anecdotal, lol) experience the people who post on blind are a small subset that are way more likely to complain about things, sometimes unreasonably.

How is that "small subset" not normalized across all companies, making an equal comparison? You can make a reasonable case that Blind reviews across all companies are worse than the average inside the companies, but it wouldn't explain why some companies are so much worse than others.

Why can you assume it's normalized across all companies?

What feasible reason would cause you to believe two companies' internal morale are the same, even though only one of them has disproportionately negative reviews?

Feel free to only visit 2.5 star restaurants on Yelp because clearly that must just be disgruntled people disproportionately for no reason.

Off the top of my head, one reason could be that internally discussing grievances is more acceptable at one company, so there is less of a mental barrier to discussing it publicly. Or (and this is actually pretty likely, I think) maybe even just seeing people complain about Amazon online all day makes people more comfortable doing it themselves on Blind. I bet I could come up with more reasons if I thought a bit longer.

I'm not saying I think I'm right in this case but I also am not saying I think websites like blind/ratemyprofessor/etc accurately reflect how the general population actually feels

You’re grasping at straws.

Going by the Yelp restaurant review example, perhaps the people who rate a restaurant are either very satisfied or dissatisfied. In the case of Amazon ratings on Blind, it seems that no one is willing to advocate for the company.

Aside from that, the toxic work culture of Amazon and their high attrition rate has been well-known for years and years and famously reported in NYTimes etc.

> I would want to see evidence to show blind is more than just a collection of anecdotes before calling it "data".

Didn't Bezos say something like if anecdotes and data disagrees, its the anecdotes that are usually right?

"I work maybe 2 hours a day." "To clarify, I work 2 hours a week"

https://thoughtcatalog.com/rania-naim/2016/06/12-subtle-sign...

1. Stuttering & inconsistencies. When someone is lying, they usually have a hard time coming up with coherent answers and their lies will be full of contradictions

who does all of the actual work if you're only working 2 hours a day?

The parent commenter, probably :)

Jokes aside, ... it's not uncommon in (such) large organizations to be in the lucky team and that's it. With all these people leaving, managers know how much you actually work, but it's a win win. If the guy works 2 hours a day but he is not a troublemaker, keep him. Hiring someone better has become harder.

He/she is probably a 10x engineer which means they get 20 effective hours of work done per day.

Paying AWS customers?

Yeah, I wonder how the warehouse employees are faring.

Wow, can you say what team/area you're in? Legitimately would love to transfer over if i have the right skills -- I'm a sys dev engineer at Amazon, but am working long hours, getting burned out, and paid way less.

Not the poster but no way am I outing my self. This is a sacred team you do not talk about.

>I'm pretty lucky* as an employee personally though I realize not everyone is.

FTFY.

> sweatshop reputation

I always assumed those comments were talking about the warehouse/shipping/packing/etc employees @ amazon?

Hello, Amazon recruiter.

Which department is it?

Adding a counterpoint here. I work at Amazon and am very happy. It’s a big company. Team matters. Feel free to AMA if you are considering joining.

what's the team or product?

Music

It's like a company hanging suicide nets outside their buildings and patting themselves on the back for caring about employees.

Foxconn?

It’s amazing how many people I know avoid using Amazon because of how employees are treated, if it didn’t treat people so badly it would be much more popular. Maybe abusing workers is how it became so successful at the scale it is ?

There was a "leak" of internal HR documents etc about a year ago saying just that. It's on HN somewhere, but how to search for it I do not know.

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