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Comment by davidrupp | Hacker News Reader

[Everything that follows is my personal opinion. I do not speak for my company.]

Seven years and counting for me, and likewise proud. I have found it a good experience, on balance. I have witnessed -- and been subjected to -- behavior by individuals that people would reasonably consider "toxic", and I've been fortunate to have avoided long-term impact. I do what I can to fight it where I find it.

To the point of remote work, I've been primarily remote the whole time, and it's worked out well. If enforced RTO ever does happen (I don't expect it to), I'll have a decision to make, is all.

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Do both of you just “not see” all the bad things your company does ?

Your proud of what ? Worker exploitation ? The people in fulfilment centres are also employed by Amazon. They’re your peers. If I worked for a company where my peers are treated like dirt, I wouldn’t be proud of it. I’d quit.

Certainly not speaking for the folks above.

While I am critical of many things Amazon does, what I see in the media about AWS is usually laughably false. We aren't all in broken marriages due to on-call duty.

The stories I read about drivers urinating in their pants because they have too many deliveries scheduled simply does not reflect the behavior I've seen from drivers in my area (I ride a bike everywhere, Amazon drivers are noticeably bike friendly in a way that makes me think they aren't under pants-urinating pressure).

So when I see stories about the FCs, I assume the same. I guess I am biased towards thinking the media focuses on the negative and totally ignores anything good. So... yea I guess I "don't see" all the bad things. Still pro union... but treated like dirt is probably a little far.

[edit, have worked for aws for about 5.5 years]

You riding your bike around waving at drivers disproves nothing. I often read warehouse workers are treated badly, threatening to strike, discouraged from unionizing and paid terribly.Are you telling me the news just makes this up?

You're obviously seeing what you want to see, and that's OK, just don't try push it onto others.

The context I made my comment was in regards to people saying "Amazon is awesome, I've worked there for 14 years.". I don't really see why warehouse workers shouldn't feel awesome too. If it's really a great company, they should feel pretty awesome.

tl;dr I don't believe Amazon is an awesome company based on how I see it treat lower skill workers, people who think it's awesome probably only feel like that because they're needed, as soon as you can be replaced by someone cheaper, you will be.

Do you think the blue collar workers who work at your company or probably outsource somewhere feel just as “awesome” as you do?

News alert: I bet your company would replace you with someone cheaper also.

I run my own company so I don't need to be / work for assholes. I won't be firing myself anytime soon.

Do you have outside investors? If so, founders get pushed out all of the time.

It's a cliche at this point - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I would say compared to Bezos (or any oligarch with penis rocket money) we're all peers in the sense that we work for a living, but I doubt most Amazon devs would say that about the soldiers working the warehouses or driving the trucks.

Does your company employ anyone outside of tech? Do they outsource manufacturing to a developing nation?

No and No. We don't employ anyone outside the US including support.

Do you know how any large company like Amazon operates? This isn’t meant to be a demeaning comment. I spent 24 years bumping around at mostly small companies you’ve never heard of before 2020.

> Do you know how any large company like Amazon operates?

Does anyone really know how a large company like Amazon operates?

I've certainly worked for multinational companies before. One of our C levels even palled around with Jeffery Epstein.

And nowhere in that company’s supply chain are that not workers who aren’t treated like the “elite” software developers?

How many people toil away in factories “working” for Apple creating iPhones or “working” for Google creating their servers and phones. Or is it morally better since they are outsourced?

I'm not sure what you're going for here. I'm sure that capitalism makes us all complicit somehow or another and of course I can't trace the supply chain for everything (or probably any) I use. But the small places I've worked have been much more human and egalitarian than the multinationals without exception.

That’s true. Before coming to AWS I worked as a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king) for a 60 person company where we had 5 weeks vacation and free family healthcare. I could basically get anything I wanted pushed through and the CTO trusted my judgement implicitly.

When they got bought out for 10x revenue (I had already left), the founders gave each of the employees an extra bonus and they reached out to a former employee who had been there for years and gave him a bonus on top of the options he exercised - they had no legal obligation to do so.

But, they didn’t and couldn’t give me the 50% bump in compensation I make now and working remotely (permanently).

Indeed, I've found that money allows people to justify much.

So is your company feeding starving children in Africa. It kills me to see people clutching their pearls when it wouldn’t take much to find something bad about every company.

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