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Comment by overgard | Hacker News Reader

This might be a harsh thing to say, but I don't think the talent at Amazon is top notch because (from everything I've heard anyway) Amazon is such a nightmarishly dystopian place to work that, well, if you have a choice you probably avoid working there? I say that with the recognition that there are always diamonds in the rough, but I'm not sure this really comments on AI usage at a place that treats their employees well.

(That said I'm all for more dystopian stories so we can get past this AI-replacing-coders fad)

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Amazon pays really well. Amazon also has a number of interesting projects (e.g. a number of contributors to the rust compiler are employed by Amazon to work on rustc.) It also looks nice enough on a resume to give people a nice stepping stone towards even better opportunities.

> Amazon pays really well

maybe 10 years ago. HR is like a rabid dog, fighting for every dollar.

They, the HR and bean counters of the world, don't see the big picture. It's optimize optimize optimize, but then they don't consider what they're actually trying to achieve.

Typically if you squeeze every penny, you end up with shit. You can do it, but those costs don't just - poof - disappear. They might, and often do, become more difficult to measure. So if you're the measuring guy, it might look great to you.

Humans are fungible, typically -- or at least that's the thought process of management. Sometimes management are literally removing an unnecessary department or need to merge departments because of market conditions -- and they really don't have time to get into the nitty gritty about how that's going to affect your job.

But also humans are messy apparently, so rather than try to introspect about what went wrong to make themselves a better manager, or improve their hiring process, or figure out how to remove bad managers, they punt: "Humans are messy. Metrics are actionable. Humans aren't metrics. shrug."

Humans can be replaced, sure, but you can't replace a surgeon with a landscaper -- but that's not going to stop some managers from trying!

its hard to provide the best customer experience when i have to sell stock in order to pay rent in the GSA, and have to pay out the ass for prescriptions because our garbage health insurance doesnt cover anything.

I really like a lot about Amazon. Friendly and creative people, good projects with high ambiguity and autonomy. The bad parts are the penny-pinching, careless and unaccountable senior leaders who just wants to exploit everyone and everything. But really, aside from things like RTO, they aren’t too impactful on the day to day.

There are probably some spots with interesting engineering problems or projects. But overall I agree, I don't want to work for big tech.

As for developing becoming more factory-like. Not sure about that, you have the same leverage as a developer and you can just work for the other guy.

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