Hacker News Reader

Comment by silverquiet | Hacker News Reader

The HN bias isn't against Amazon's hourly workers; it's about recognizing that they exist in the first place. When I say "Amazon Employee", what does that typically mean here? Because I bet that it's 10 people stacking boxes or driving a truck to every 1 person who sits behind a desk at home.

View on HN

It's a frequent sentiment on HN that "Amazon is a bad place to work" and I think they are talking about blue collars. I've me many white collar Amazonians (say AWS envangelist Jeff Barr, and a robotics engineer I know, and a relative who works as an accountant) who would probably say AMZN is the best place they've ever worked.

I think the HN audience is more diverse than people think. The average HNer is not in Silicon Valley for instance.

I've never even been to California, but have worked an entire professional career in tech. I certainly know people who have done white-collar stints at Amazon and it was universally a bad experience (among the people I knew I mean). It's an enormous company even if you do ignore the other 90%, so it's certainly possible that there are cushy places within it.

Come to Seattle, meet the white collar employees they burn through at an alarming rate. The way Amazon operates is a meat grinder, even for most of their white collar workforce the churn is significantly higher than other tech companies in the region.

Microsoft, Google, Nintendo, Facebook, F5 and other local firms don't quite have the Hired to Fired pipeline that occurs within 12 to 24 months for the average Amazonian. At each stage it seems Amazon is lighting money on fire...

A while back I remember AMZN recruiters seemed to call anybody who was rumoured to be able to code more than once a month. I'd see Ask HN's were somebody asked "How come I can't get any interviews from FAANG?" and I'd ask "You mean you haven't talked to an AZMN recruiter" and sure enough they'd talked to AMZN recruiters.

The people I've mentioned above who seem happy at AMZN have the common denominator that the AMZN job was a definite step up from what they were doing before.

Not like I know a ton of Amazonian white collars, but it still seems like a worse place than average. My wife's team had a guy leave a few years ago and almost immediately come back because it wasn't worth it. They seem to have a hiring problem that probably leads to all the stack ranking and mandatory attrition because they can't assure the people they hire are qualified. I interviewed with AWS once, but didn't accept, and the experience was frankly just bizarre. I was thrown back and forth between people with roles in all manner of completely unrelated disciplines. One woman accidentally hot mic'd herself when she didn't realize I hadn't signed off yet and complained that she had no idea what I was talking about because she hadn't had a technical role in 20 years. They gave me the option to talk one on one with a developer who would have no input into hiring and she told me, as the chosen spokesperson for AWS, that she didn't like working there and probably wasn't going to stick around, but it was her first real job after college so there she was.

Ironically, on the other hand, when I was first leaving the Army 15 years ago, the enlisted guys leaving at the same time were overwhelmingly all looking to work either as roughnecks or in Amazon distribution centers because they paid so much better than anything else you could expect to get hired for with no qualifications other than willingness to get beat up and tired.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com