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Comment by posguy | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is a turn and burn employer at its heart. I've watched dozens of friends and acquaintances work there, rarely making it past 2 years, only to leave for less caustic organization thereafter.

Unless your willing to put up with a huge ration of shit on a regular basis, or you make it into management, your time is limited by the up and out mentality of the organization as a whole.

Amazon has created the perfect scenario to spend shitloads of money getting talent up to speed, only to part ways with them shortly thereafter.

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I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because

* working in infrastructure means doing a lot not quite so exciting things. most people aren't actually excited by ops, and a lot of your dev work will be on ops. its also the case that ops was historically not as well rewarded, though thats been fixed

* every service needs to be held to the highest tier of operational excellence, and so you can't just chabuduo when things aren't working as well as they should. in the worst case, this means throwing bodies to the ops meatgrinder.

* delivery speed is slowwwww. some of this in endemic to the space, but aws at the end of 2021 (when i left :) ) was a lot slower than than when i joined due to so much risk aversion and bureaucracy

* comp wasn't as good compared many tech peers, and comp could very easily not keep pace if you weren't tippy top every year. this is imo the most self-defeating part of amazon culture as a whole because it incentivizes people rated between ~p10-p20 and p50 to leave.

> I can't really speak to amazon retail, but in my 7 odd years in aws I found most people left because

I've worked at Amazon for over 4 years. During this period, I saw around 80% of all team members being promoted to customer, perhaps half of them voluntarily. Amazon provided psychological service to those who felt they needed it, and a couple who quit confided in me they used the service. One guy overtly burned out and never showed up again.

Long work hours were the norm. Plenty of CRs were posted after 10PM. Even SDE3s frequently posted CRs on Sundays. The senior manager was hell bent on proving leadership he could deliver projects in impossible deadlines and not rarely did he warned SDEs that failing to deliver on those promises were firable offenses. This in turn fostered a work environment that led to some backstabbing and less than ethical stunts from team members prone to those and desperate to make a good impression.

It's true that Amazon's salary structure is designed to push out people. It is designed to impose a hefty pay cut after the second year or so. Nevertheless this is not the problem. The problem is the awful corporate culture that's designed to hold SDEs responsible for not delivering things even in impossible scenarios, and the backstabbing culture it sprouts by design.

But I'm sure some people might have a good time working there.

not discounting your experience but

> The senior manager was hell bent on proving leadership he could deliver projects in impossible deadlines and not rarely did he warned SDEs that failing to deliver on those promises were firable offenses. This in turn fostered a work environment that led to some backstabbing and less than ethical stunts from team members prone to those and desperate to make a good impression.

is an extreme situation and one I never saw across ~3 orgs between amazon and aws.

> was a lot slower than than when i joined due to so much risk aversion and bureaucracy

I feel like this is true for every single large company I’ve ever worked for. Things always feel like they’re regressing from a high point. I have no idea why it it.

All of them had free coffee when I joined, and they’ve slowly removed the vending machines and just never replaced them.

The team working on developing integrations for Amazon Payments certainly didn't have diddly squat in their break room when I visited a few years back. Not revenue generating = Get treated terribly at Amazon was a sight to behold in action.

It's weird how it's always the people that talk about friends that worked there but don't actually work there themselves that are usually the only ones to have negative things to tell.

I've been there 5 years, haven't worked more than 40 hours a week ever, and a lot of the people that started at the same time as me are in the same situation. And of those that aren't, they left because they wanted new experiences, not because they didn't like Amazon.

I never had to put up with any "shit", whatever that could mean.

We had a colleague moving to AWS, but he came running back within a year :P

It can’t be all bad, but it’s clearly not all good either.

It kind of makes sense that the people still there wouldn’t have bad stories to tell. What do you think is the worst part about working for Amazon?

If your prior employer kept you for half a decade before you departed for Amazon, and the employer after Amazon keeps you for years, yet your stint at Amazon lasts under 2 years, that failure reflects on Amazon.

Spending the money to recruit the employee, then pay them for a year or two, only to lose this talent is a great way to light cash on fire. That ain't cheap when your talking about hiring software developers!

A lot of the people I've seen leave within a year or two that didn't go work for better companies were actually fired.

It's relatively common that people don't make the cut during their probation period for example. Amazon (and other FAANGs) clearly isn't for everyone.

So I would question anyone that takes the easiest job they can find (their old job) after leaving Amazon in less that a year or two.

Sorry dude, you don't have credibility based on "Unless your willing to put up with a huge ration of shit on a regular basis, or you make it into management,"

Management at AWS arguably puts up with much more shit on a regular basis.

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