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Comment by mataug | Hacker News Reader

> 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-...

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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.

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