Leaving Amazon: What I learned over the last four years | Hacker News Reader

Leaving Amazon: What I learned over the last four years

iseff.com

97 pointsiseff24 comments

I am envious of someone talking so highly of a company they are leaving. I can't say I ever have. Good luck on your new adventure!

I agree completely with the point on "customer obsession". The last company I worked for didn't have much of a customer focus while my current company is truly obsessed with the value we deliver to the end customer.

Needless to say the earlier company has gone under while the current company has been going from strength to strength.

I'm not to clear on the point of "frugality" though. My current company does spend a lot on what could be considered trivial stuff to make us comfortable and it makes for a rewarding working environment. Does anyone have an opinion on "frugality"?

Frugality is probably relative to the industry you're in. Amazon is a retail company, where margins are low, and the overall health of the company can hinge a lot on managing all the seemingly small expenses that crop up in running a business.

If you're in a higher-margin business like software, maybe the Frugality trade-offs look different. Would Fog Creek be doing substantially better if it spent substantially less per developer? They might be doing a little better, but I doubt it would be enough to materially impact the business. And it may require that they put more of the company's resources into recruiting and hiring, to handle increased turnover.

I suspect that the author is heading to a startup as his next step, which may be why Frugality is standing out to him. If you're not cash-flow-positive yet in a business, then keeping your spend rate down by any means necessary can make the difference between success and failure.

My favorite line:

"But, I don’t think this is the only reason Frugality is a core value. Amazon’s focus on customer experience means that they are always trying to lower prices. If the company can do something more cheaply and pass those savings on to the customer, they will."

I still don't think that "doors for desks" is the right way to treat your employees, no matter how bargain-crazy your vision.

I don't think you understand -- doors make terrific desks!

The point of the door desk is more than just saving money on a desk. It serves as a constant reminder that you should not spend money on something that does not help your customers. You can argue that this is a bad way to treat your developers, but most people would agree that a desk is a lousy way to spend money instead of, say, having better technical equipment.

Developers are still people, and people do care about aesthetics.

Can you link me to this "doors for desks" thing? This argument's interesting, but I can't say I've ever heard of this before.

Doors are large, sturdy, finished pieces of flat tree-product. They are very cheap compared to material intended for counters, and are available used for free. They already have a hole (doorknob) for you to put your cables through.

For legs you can use some combination of: shelving, filing cabinets, sawhorses, brackets+lumber, and a-la-carte legs.

At my parent's software startup they used doors for desks for their whole 20-year run. Be careful though -- with great surface area comes great responsibility! Once my mom's desk clutter reached critical mass, it stayed that way for 15 years (18" deep in the back, 2" in the front).

Basically all desks and tables at Amazon are still door desks, based on the company's origins:

* http://glinden.blogspot.com/2006/01/early-amazon-door-desks....

* http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/85/bezos_2.html

It is questionable whether in the age of IKEA, the door desk is still truly frugal, but it is a very tangible reminder of the principle. Very tangible, very sturdy.

Other perspectives:

http://coderific.com/employers/7

http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.ht...

"This comes after three years of full-time work and a summer internship in 2005. Surprisingly (or not, if you know Amazon’s growth), that made me older than something like 80% of all Amazon employees in Seattle, the headquarters (and older than a much higher percentage of ALL Amazon employees)."

The next time that someone tries to tell me that software development isn't a young man's game, I'm going to point to this. Three years out of college, and he's older than eighty percent of the company's employees? Even for the software industry, that's incredibly suspicious.

I guess I should've been more clear: "older" did not mean age, "older" meant "at Amazon longer than others."

Ah. Still suspicious, but in an entirely different way...

I worked at Amazon from 2008 to 2009. There were a number of recent college graduates there, but the average age felt a bit older than that. I don't have any data to back this up, but Amazon most certainly does not hire an unusual proportion of "young" people.

Thanks for clearing that up!

Interesting, but I hoped author learned more than 2 things in 4 years.

Yeah, I expected he'd come up with a Top Ten(tm).

Damn, a fine post. Read somewhere a long time ago a common trait of long time successful companies is a clear and commonly applied mission statement. It doesn't have to be printed in the company brosure, but has to be a set of core values which describe the company.

What's really nice in this post, and _very_ rare today, is that he stopped the count at 2. It's such a simple thing, and yet so powerful. I have no idea who this guy is, but I think highly of him already.

Hey wait a minute! I totally know you. You went to the U(C)! Hah!

Also, I spotted a copy Founders at Work infiltrating your office: http://www.flickr.com/photos/iseff/434121419/in/photostream/

Do all devs at Amazon have offices with doors?

Since when is interrupting someone's life to shove an advert in their face considered "helping the customer", "making their life easier" or "making their experience with your company better"?

All advertising email is spam, "solicited" is just a weasel-word to sugar coat the fact that you are trying to pound your company name into someone's head harder than all your competitors are doing with their name, and keeping up the status quo that this is an acceptable thing to be doing.

Obviously, not all customers find this to be the greatest experience

Do any customers find receiving an advert in the middle of their daily workflow the greatest experience? A great experience of any kind?

[Edit: transactional email, though, sure - make that more pleasant]

I get worthwhile notice of new albums by my favorite bands once in a while. Marketing isn't necessarily about self-promotion, it's also about making the connection between what you have and what somebody else already wanted. In good (Soviet) marketing, product searches for you.

> All advertising email is spam, "solicited" is just a weasel-word to sugar coat...

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. Everyone is not entitled to their own facts (in this case, definition).

Even the hyper-vigilant about as far as you can be in that direction SpamHaus, disagrees with you and accepts the common definition that solicited email is, by definition, not spam.

You may consider all advertising email to be spam, just as you may consider all four legged mammals to be dogs. Doesn't make it so.

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