Here's a key thing that people miss about amazon-- it is NOT a tech company. It should not be mentioned along with Google, Apple & Facebook.
Amazon is a retailer, most of the employees are retailers and the whole management structure is retail guys. Not engineers. Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business.
They're running 20 year old code that 10 years ago was crashing regularly-- eg Amazon.com going down so you can't b uy cell phones or whatever.
I've worked for a lot of startups and a lot of big tech companies, like Apple, Microsoft etc. Amazon is not a tech company.
If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types. My bosses training was to be a prison guard! He could barely handle excel but was criticizing our code. His boss was no better- a DMV reject. (literally), and all the way up to Bezos who is not an engineer either.
My boss, by the way was dealing weed in the PacMed garage to other employees. The entire team left because he was such an asshole-- and he got promoted as a result!
Company is pretty much a joke.
I know on HN you're not allowed(?) to say negative things about big "tech" companies. I may be shadowbanned for ti, but Amazon was a terrible, TERRIBLE place to work. Microsoft had too much bureaucracy and was too "corporate" for me, but you can understand why they were the way they were-- amazon on the other hand was absolutely terrible. It's run by people who are extremely arrogant and have no regard for anybody -not investors, not suppliers, and least of all employees. It is the most employee hostile place I ever worked. All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back. Terrible company. (I've had a lot of jobs, worked for disorganized startups-- but the key difference is whether management gives a damn about employees or not. Amazon they don't, they're hostile, everywhere else has not been that way- even bad management is usually just incompetent, not hostile.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Bezos#Early_and_personal_l...
I guess that's not engineering though.
Etc.
Amazon is way more than a tech company, and the tech side of it is indeed just a portion of the overall organization, but your use of quotes on "tech company" is just derogatory and unnecessary. I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid or what I work on, they are there to support the business and are accountants, financial managers, etc.
> It is a negative because Amazon doesn't have that many resources or talent. They are short on engineers.
Who isn't? Most companies are short on talented engineers.
> Outside of AWS there's very little engineering resources at all given what they need to do, just to maintain the core business.
Shows how little you know about the company. Instant Video is huge, Website is huge, other/restricted projects are huge, and there are a lot of engineers on all those teams. Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.
> If you're an engineer you should never go work there-- the management is all non-engineer types.
As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.
> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back
The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).
The other points you make are either subjective or anecdotes, but overall I think you just hate the company for some reason and are spilling every negative interaction you ever had.
I truly hope talented people don't buy on your negativity. Amazon is definitely not a terrible place to work at, even though it does have some problems (what company doesn't?).
https://www.scribd.com/embeds/245561031/content?start_page=1...
and you being so defensive about a simple comment are NOT a good sign about a company's culture and image.
Personally, I have no trouble buying a lot of what he's selling, not least because I've seen his posts around here for a good while and he seems like a decent sort, but it also dovetails with my own experience. YMMV, but I'm not calling you a liar.
I'm somewhat doubting that MCRed is lying, because he has some credibility to me through a history of good and productive posting, but it's possible.
But I also saw stuff that, like that letter, I consider to be wrong. The latter refers to criminal actions-- I am not a lawyer so I can't say whether what the company did was illegal or not, but I certainly thought it was wrong.
One thing about that letter that rang true in my experience was that the company does not follow its own internal policies or handbook.
Amazon HR was dishonest to me, deceptive and engaged in what I consider to be fraud.
But you also won't get promoted just because of seniority, most of what people say about being hard to get promoted is true. However, there are only 3 SDE levels if you don't count Principal, so SDE II has a very large range of pay rates, and you don't need to get promoted to get a higher pay. Higher levels are all about being a better leader and influencing more people. There are people who spend 10 years as SDE II and are happy with it, because they don't care about leading others, they just care about doing their job, and this is fine.
However I suppose that it stands to reason that perhaps that phenomena is due to the fact that greener managers may have greener engineers working under them who are perhaps more prone to mistakes or may not be a good fit.
But here's the real kicker that makes the company so stupid- if you're on the lower half of the rank, you're blocked from moving to another team.
Even though the HR policy is that your manager can't block you from an internal transfer, that's not reality. Which means when you're wrongly assigned to a team with a bad manager or a bad fit, you better bounce quick, or you're stuck there until you leave the company.
This is not strictly true. I was at Amazon for 4 years (2004 - 2008 in Supply Chain and Retail), I had 3 managers. Only 1 of them was a former SDE.
And do I know if what is true 100% of the time? Asking coding questions in a SDM loop? I have no idea. While I was there, I was only on TPM and SDE loops.
But when I say they couldn't code, I mean that literally-- for one example degree in criminal justice, no knowledge of software practices, etc. This isn't another way of saying they were "bad programmers". No bad programmers can make great managers.
I think Amazon is not an easy company to work at, mostly because engineers are squeezed like lemons but they don't benefit much from it. However, this can also happen at "cool" startups, or other large companies such as Apple.
Also, a couple of things are lies (but every company has its own set of lies); AWS was never based on Amazon's extra capacity, but that's something that came out and stayed there for years. And also, the "large volume, low margins" is not true in the case of AWS.
Other than that, I think that I will forever be grateful for the opportunity to have worked there; I've learned a ton and thanks to that I got a job I couldn't dream of ten years ago.
Politics was a huge factor. If a team worked really hard during the quarter and got a lot done, but hadn't shipped their feature yet, they risked all bering in the "underperforming" category, simply to allow a peer team to have more "over performers" to reward them-- for actually delivering or for sufficiently sucking off the appropriate boss (or not getting knives in your back.)
There were a lot of (metaphorical) blowjobs and knives in the back in that organization.
Which is what you have to have when ALL of the management is non-technical.
You can't have a meritocracy when the people assigning ratings are incapable of judging merit.
>Thinking AWS holds most of the engineers really shows how uninformed you are.
Telling a lie about me to attempt to impeach my point is what's known as ad hominem.
>As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE.
FALSE. During my time there I had multiple managers (due to re-orgs.) and NOT ONE of them was a former SDE.
Not one of them was competent enough to manage programmers. None of them knew what a service oriented architecture was, or how version control worked (they thought of it as a backup), or how to write a simple program in ANY language. And this was true all the way between me and Bezos.
>The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon
FALSE. It is exactly the same, with managers having to lobby, and whole teams of people who are "out of favor" with an upper manager getting lower salary because of the higher level stack.
>I have very little contact with "business" people, and they in no way determine how much I get paid
You impeach yourself by admitting that Amazon uses stack ranking which directly contradicts this claim.
Amazon is a terrible place to work at-- in an extensive career, it was, by far, the worst job.
Not only because of the problems, but because the management doesn't give a damn, and is actually hostile to employees-- that's what makes it really bad.
All companies have problems. Amazon has fundamental disrespect for engineers.
> As an engineer, your manager WILL BE a former SDE. If you are a manager, however, then maybe your manager may not have been an engineer.
Totally untrue. I spent many years at Amazon, with most of my managers being managers by trade and half of them being openly non-technical.
>> All advancement is political and because of stack ranking its really easy to stab people in the back
> The type of "stack ranking" people refer to as being evil is not the same that's practiced at Amazon (it's barely stack ranking at all). And you saying that advancement is political, just shows that you're disgruntled with the company, this is just not true (for engineers at least).
If you are not a manager, you do not have direct visibility into this process and cannot make this claim. If you are a manager, then you're aware that every department is run very differently and should also be aware that some of them are very political.
I'm curious on what you think separates Amazon's interpretation of stack ranking from the "bad" versions, or how it is "barely" stack ranking at all.
I despise this meme. You are allowed to say negative things about big "tech" companies, especially here on HN. What you aren't allowed to do is act childish about it. Which is exactly what you do when you say things like this. And I tend to down vote when I see commentary like this, because regardless of what else you have to say, this type of commentary is what hurts conversation. Clearly, you are wrong about the culture of HN.
I've been on this site since 2006 or 2007. I've earned 5,000+ karma on most of my previous accounts. Everyone of them was shadowbanned at one point or another.
In one case I linked to a scientific paper about global warming that does not agree with global warming hysterics. That was the only post in several months at the time and the only commentary I added was "these guys disagree!"..... shadowbanned. For linking to a peer reviewed paper!
Another time, the last comment was talking about how I had met Grace Hopper. Nothing negative in it, Nothing "childish". Just relating how she gave me a "nanosecond". Shadowbanned.
I stopped putting effort into this site for several years because of that-- why try to discuss things with an extremely ideological and narrow minded group (which HN really is) if you're going to get banned for disagreeing?
I only created this account because I don't care. I do expect to get shadowboxed because the moderators of this site, in my experience, are unethical.
But of course, those who believe in rigid narrow minded censorship are incentivized to believe that all those who were shadowbanned were being "childish".
Because of course you want to believe you're broad minded and that criticizing Amazon is allowed, and the like. (Hey maybe it is, so far I've been allowed to.... but that's the thing about arbitrary shadow bans, you can't know what's verboten and what's allowed.)
If the views are so absurd, why not allow them to stand and be downvoted? Why the need to flag and ban?
For example, regarding the Pao issue, numerous reaction articles from differing viewpoints were instantly flagkilled.
I find that HN is a group of clever people who conform an extremely narrow ideology.
What absurd nonsense. If we are having a rational discussion we only care about what he has to say, not how he says it.
Leave the doublethink and doublespeak for the politicians, it doesn't belong here.
Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors.
Also, people make similar generalizations all the time around small towns and neighborhoods (with often dubious accuracy, sure), but the only difference is one's structure develops bottom-up, and the other top-down.
One of the things that has since become a red flag for me is that Amazon is very cult like.
Which is what I did.
This is also not one persons perspective, but a common perspective in Seattle, so common that I knew about it in 1996, repeatedly heard horror sorries for the next 10 years ,and still went to work there after hearing horror stories from other ex-employees. Yeah, they caught me at point where I was a bit desperate.
In seattle, the horribleness of working there is pretty widely known.
Not sure why its so shocking and unbelievable here on Hacker News.
I do think it's unfortunate that Software Engineers are held in such low regard.
Calling me "bitter" is just blaming the victim.
I'm here so that other engineers can be forewarned about a bad actor in our midst.
I think that's a good use of my time because I hate how engineers are disrespected, and increasingly so.
His experiences there mirror mine. I've warned people away from going there for exactly the same reason. Amazon treats their employees like shit.
I think you need to reevaluate your outlook on giving advice. You seem to have a preference for more tech oriented companies which is perfectly fine, but their are a lot of other people on HN that aren't as techie as you. Don't trash a company and shout advice to everyone based on your own personal preferences for work.
Please respond to negativity on HN with less of it, not more. Otherwise the threads spiral into toxicity.
I was foolish (and a little desperate) when I applied at Amazon. Because I had been told.
This has nothing to do with them not being a tech company-- I just don't like tech people misclassifying them.
This is all about them disrespecting their employees. Not having competent managers for engineers is a form of disrespect. But all the sexist, obnoxious and rude things done to my friend who was non-technical are also disrespectful.
This isn't about me being "arrogant" at all.
This is me just warning you about a terrible experience I had!
- people do not know what to associate amazon with (it's just a bookstore, right?)
- when they kill off too many project, or too many projects fail, their brand value hurts.
There are other businesses that have many, many product lines, but the most succesful ones (Procter & Gamble, Unilever) almost never use their core brand name and just invent new brands. It makes it more difficult to start, but is better for your brands.
Amazon.com runs on a lot of 20 year old code because they've never been able to upgrade it, because there's so much cruft. Amazon menusand all that create cruft.
There are bugs I fixed in 2006 that came back in 2009 and are still there-- the team that I was on when I fixed them no longer exists because the people got pulled off for nonsense "products" like menus etc that eventually got canned.
It's not just that they are trying things, the things they are trying take engineers out of their key talent pool-- which is pretty shallow to begin with because Amazon is a very anti-engineering company. (Really they hate engineers at the executive level.)
Most of the site at this point is cruft while engineers run around chasing nonsense that will never be in production more than a year.
And I disagree with you about a discontinued product hurting their brand. No-one remembers Amazon menu, Amazon movie listings, Microsoft Courier, Google Catalogs, Wave, Google labs etc.
In my experience people couldn't care less about "brand identity" in general.
Nobody (outside our tech filter-bubble) cares what Amazon does or doesn't do beyond their shopping and book business.
Google is a good example, since their brand identity is strongly linked with web search. When people want to find something out, opening google.com is often an immediate reaction; they don't wonder if they should use a different search engine, or even look it up somewhere else. It's immediate and unconscious.
So true.
I disagree. I think most people know. Amazon was once a bookstore, then it changed; it's now the website where you buy things. If you're in IT it is also the major host for cloud computing.
There it is in a sentence (two for IT specialists). Does this leave out major things like video? Sure, but you asked about the brand, and that seems pretty clear: that website where you buy stuff.
Amazon is an online hypermarket, and I don't think that's even remotely a secret.
People understood the company mission of Sears, Roebuck, & Company, a hundred years ago, and they can certainly understand Amazon's today.
Amazon management is very adept and focosed on blowing smoke up the skirt of employees. "Today is day one!" Even the use of "door desks"-- that cost the company more money than actual desks would-- is done to perpetuate the "we're just a startup, rah rah rah" BS "Culture".
Its' gross manipulation but it also results in people who buy into it being REALLY dedicated to their beliefs-- because deep down people want to believe and Amazon gives them that (even though it then turns around and abuses them.)
They do this for a reason-- by having these mantras and these beliefs about the company, it makes people not believe the negatives or think the negatives don't represent the whole company.
or you just end up on a product that makes no sense, but gotta do it because someone wants it/promised it.