FmrAMZN_TA

<highly biased take coming>

Citation(s) needed. They specifically work (publicly and privately) to undermine local taxes, enforce non-competes/NDAs, capital gains, income taxes, etc. Then they do small investments like Mary's Place and point at it as being big community efforts. In fact, one can argue that it's Amazon's extensive work behind the scenes to that causes many contorted decisions that the city council and others make.

MSFT is investing $500M in Seattle (many through loans, but $25M is outright grants). Where's Amazon's similar commitment?

You are correct. They ABSOLUTELY monitor customer spend usage, without using one iota of personally identifiable information.

You can't (and they don't promise) encryption such that AWS can't see everything, if they were in fact malicious. This is true of every cloud.

That said, it's not illegal for them to see that xxx vendor increased their storage costs/bandwidth costs by $yyy every month, and that you could look into it - without using one piece of encrypted data.

Disclosure: Former AWS

So, then your answer is never deprecate?

Ever? What if they had a 10 year deprecation policy?

I think this is disingenuous. AWS keeps something running forever, that's true, but in what state?

https://forums.aws.amazon.com/thread.jspa?threadID=121711

(We were well aware of this thread, and others like it, internally)

Something that exists, but has absolutely no investment and unknown support is probably not a great thing. Given that EC2's recent outage was because they hadn't restarted their services in a long time[1], what problems exist here? I think that Google probably should have a SUPER long deprecation policy (24 months feels right), but a year isn't terrible - and I'd rather explicitly get a statement like this than the zombie services elsewhere.

Disclosure: I used to work at AMZN and am highly biased.

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/message/41926/

And a huge ad business they support. Oh, they didn't tell you about that?

Amazon makes $3B a year selling ads. You think they're just guessing about personal information? Please. They lay cookies everywhere (including off site) to target you properly.

It's funny you say the second paragraph - it feels like it directly contrasts the first (OK Google was first by a good margin).

I'm a highly biased former Amazonian.

I was expecting some real wisdom in this story, but I don't think this qualifies him as a technical leader in any way. I don't even think this needed the cargo-cult-y "leaving the room and coming back with a paper that changes everyone's mind." Couldn't he have just asked for a plan? And the ROI? That seems like management 101.

I have no love for him, but he is a genius. This story doesn't do him any justice (nor is the paper particularly compelling).

You get it.

You did not say roles were increasing at 50% per year as an example - that was your stated fact.

I'm saying unless they had 10 employees in 2000 (wrong) or only started the 50% hiring last year (so we have no longitudinal data to go on), there is no number where that level of exponential growth of employees wouldn't result in either a) a company that was bigger than Walmart in employees in just a few years or b) MASSIVE firings. Maybe that's what you're saying? They hire that many people and remove them from the company that fast? I know the removal from the company is certainly correct.

As far as the increase in costs of RSUs, there is a perfectly alternative solutions to your proposal: their stock has increased by 10x in 10 years. So in that way, they're EXACTLY keeping track (https://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=amzn+Interactive#{"range...), and not increasing people collecting RSUs at all. You'll note that you list amount of money required for the RSUs, not number of shares. (This is, by the way, another way that Amazon misleads their employees - your yearly cash bonus actually goes down when the value of the stock increases).

So by that logic, they have, in fact, not kept pace with the rise of their stock. New employees are receiving substantially less new grants than older ones (bordering on zero, which can't be true), or they're being removed before they vest.

Further, the 24k in Washington also include many thousands of non-tech roles (Amazon Fresh warehouse in Redmond, Customer Support in Bellingham, some portion of the more than 2500 sales people for AWS, etc etc), so your math does not add up for adding new 25k tech roles, even if we multiply by 40% as a reduction. Doing some approximations using LinkedIn (https://www.linkedin.com/vsearch/p?keywords=amazon&f_CC=1586...) they do appear to have ~24k employees in Washington, but only ~8k in engineering (they appear to add another 4k engineers in India).

Again, these are all public numbers, so they are inaccurate, but they should be good enough to substantially disprove your point. So, without question, your statement about increasing hiring by 50% y/y has no facts to back it up.

As far as active hiring, that is absolutely correct. They are extremely active in hiring - but they have to be because people leave so fast that unless they do, they'd be out of people.

Microsoft, Google (Seattle), Century Link, Group On, Moz, Redfin, Porch, Chef, White Pages... to name a few.

It's almost impossible to throw a dart at this list and not hit at least 5-10 - http://www.geekwire.com/geekwire-200/

To be clear (I realize it may have seemed worse than it was):

Day 1: 1000 employees Day 365: 500 employees Day 730: 200 employees.

> Your comment on "retention" is factually incorrect.

I disagree.

> First the number of Amazon hires in "tech roles" increases by ~50% per year. i.e., in year 1 there are 1,000 SDEs hired, year 2 is 1,500, year 3 is 2,250, year 4 is 3,375 and so on.

This could not possibly be true. If it was, they would be hiring ~1.5M technical people a year (since they've been in business since 1997). Perhaps you meant since 2005, but that would still represent 58k people per year hired. According to this article (http://www.geekwire.com/2015/huge-growth-amazon-reaches-2224...), they only have 24k in the state of Washington, where the vast number of people are. So nothing about this statement is true.

> "Attrition" represents the number of individuals who leave for any reason. This may be because the employee terminates employment or the company terminates employment. Attrition levels are comparable to the rest of the tech industry, ~15% of the current population per year.

Can you show me that data? about 15% per year? I've seen vastly different numbers internally, but would prefer not be sued in sharing them.

> "Tenure" is the length of employment. Because hiring greatly exceeds attrition you should expect a relatively low average and median retention. As I recall Amazon is approximately 12 months median tenure. This is comparable to Google at ~13 months, for example.

Correct, but these numbers are heavily obfuscated due to part time hires and vendors.

> Lastly the employees current tenure does not have a substantial impact on the probability of their attrition. Indeed the average tenure at exit is somewhere around 3 years.

Again, show me the data. I've seen the internal stuff. If you'd like not to believe me, feel free; I know I don't believe you.

We'll agree to disagree. Tension is good, when that's all it's used for. When it is specifically used to tear people down (either with a purpose, or just for vindictiveness), I think the original benefit is lost.

I admit, I lied in the previous comment.

In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years.

The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job.

I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.

I disagree. There are many leadership principles which are contradictory either in part or in whole (e.g. Dive Deep vs. Bias for Action; Insist on the Highest Standards vs. Invent and Simplify). You can squint and see how these would be the same, but often they're just used as arrows in a quiver to knock someone down and/or put someone on a PIP (performance improvement plan).

Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized):

A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action)

B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards)

Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it.

I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.

Absolutely, if you stayed, the numbers definitely add up to what you see here. However, because the attrition was so high, you were not likely to stick around to get a bonus to make up for it.

When I was there, managers were guided to PIP (performance improvement plan) to make these numbers. Whether that meant grinding people into the ground, natural attrition, or making up excuses to out people - I saw all of them happen.

I'm a former Amazonian. Since you asked my opinion, I'll give it.

It's a truly horrible place to work and I would never ask my worst enemy to go work there. Engenders the worst in humanity (people review, anyone?), terrible technical architecture, many systems based solely on tribal knowledge that leaves the door every day, comp structure that is nearly outright lying... I could go on.

Some people say that it was just the group I worked in but I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years). There's virtually no difference. I still have PTSD (or at least what feels like PTSD) about by 3.5 years there, and I'd give anything to get that time back.

BTW, I'm now at another 20k+ person company which is doing very well, and making 30% more than my total comp when I was there.

<Former Amazon> I won't go on about the work quality at Amazon, there are plenty of other places to read about that.

It _is_ important to note that the average retention at Amazon (even for excellent people) is ~50% for 1 year, and ~20% or lower for the 2nd year.

Therefore, these comparisons should really take that into account. Amazon MAY look higher than Microsoft (for example) but because you only see 20% of your total vest the first two years, and everyone in the company makes a max of $160k with anything else bringing you up to market rate being a yearly "bonus", you likely won't see the majority of your earnings. </Former Amazon>

I have an etiquette question. We're allowed to put positive comments on jobs listed here, why are we not allowed to critique jobs on here?

Disclaimer: I am a former Amazon employee. I worked there for exactly a year. I assume I was doing well, I was offered increase bonus and base after my initial year.

This response from Amazon continues to amaze me - first a post from Bezos that quoted an employee's anecdotal experiences and makes the (totally absurd) claim that Bezos doesn't know what life is like working there.

Then they have a post (http://recode.net/2015/09/25/why-i-work-for-amazon-a-respons...) from a Senior VP who doesn't have the same experience as someone who isn't a Senior VP.

Now they are digging up dirt on employees to paint them with a bad brush. First, the person with the killer quote should have been removed, no question. Huge bias.

But the second and third people? Nothing in the piece is wrong - they could have been strafed with aggressive language and/or they could have been berated in their reviews. Look at the wording:

  All three included positive feedback on strengths as well as thoughts on areas of improvement.
  Far from a “strafing,” even the areas for improvement written by her colleagues contained
  language like: “It has been a pleasure working with Elizabeth.” 

This is the best you can do? "Contained language like"? This is truly terrible spin. At Amazon, they teach managers to give the classic "shit sandwich" - good/bad/good. I saw many examples (I was a manager and reviewed many pieces of feedback in OLRs - Organizational Leadership Review) written EXACTLY as ham-handedly as this: "Overall, it has been a pleasure working with Elizabeth. However, the fact that she did not know the margins for a specific warehouse group when presenting to our VP shows a complete lack of diving deep, and makes me question whether or not she really wants to work at this level."

The third example is similarly vague/wrong: "Chris Brucia, who recalls how he was berated in his performance review before being promoted, also was given a written review... Mr. Brucia was given exceptionally high ratings and then promoted to a senior position." That doesn't mean he wasn't berated - it could have been overly aggressive/wrong (and you cannot dispute ANY claims written in the feedback, all you can do is complain to your manager), just because it ended on a good note doesn't make it less hurtful.

But what this really shows is that Amazon is as ruthless as ever. They WILL go after you, they will dig up dirt on you, and they will terrify you into never speaking out. If you are a former employee (as I am), you know the stories are very very true, and NEVER speak out publicly.

  When the story came out, we knew it misrepresented Amazon.

I'm sorry, Mr. Carney, the story was as accurate a representation of Amazon as I've ever seen in press.