throw8881

From your other post that I read here:

>I just waited until my next stock vesting, then took a severance package and left that rancid shithole. We were working on some retarded dead-end boondoggle of a device, and I'm sure everyone in the org got a frowny face on their report card when it was eventually canceled.

I've never met anyone who was happy with their previous employer after getting let go. I don't know the specifics of your situation, but I'm entitled to my perspective. Your personal attacks towards me are just that – personal attacks.

I hope you found an employer where you're happier. :)

I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company.

Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon.

I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce.

Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them.

All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%.

Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with.

I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here.

Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic.

Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles where they're unhappy.

Amazon can't certainly do better in how it scales its business, but alot of the posts here that give the appearance that everyone at Amazon is unhappy are exaggerated. Alot of people don't like Amazon, period, and think the company should be broken up. While I think we can do alot of things better, I also believe there's a particular agenda pushed because Amazon is perceived as a threat across many industries, not just retail sales or cloud services.

>I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic?

Current Amazon engineer here. People have been complaining working at Amazon for a long while.

At least in my organization, leadership pays close attention to whether folks are happy or unhappy in their roles. I posted this earlier, but we have a massive workforce of engineers at Amazon, across many countries. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5-10% of those unhappy folks are willing to say something about it online, you're going to see plenty of news sites picking up those articles and representing Amazon in a negative light.

There's plenty of bad publicity around Amazon, and I think that's due to the insane growth of this company. Regardless of your view, Amazon has been insanely successful. With that success comes suspicion, and you can quickly go from being very trusted to everyone questioning every practice – from quality of AWS documentation to Prime shipment speed to hiring/promotion practices, etc. Alot of people have skin in this game because they're competing directly with Amazon.

I'm not saying Amazon can't do better. We absolutely need to. But alot of the things being represented as systemic issues at Amazon are simply not so, but they certainly push a specific narrative. shrug

Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits.

Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people aren't comparing commit counts to stack employees. The simplest reason is – it's much more expensive to let go someone and re-hire and train another engineer. You won't hear about that on any of these news stories because it's not so attention grabbing or interesting.

Amazon for sure can do better in many areas. No denying that.

But keep in mind we have a massive workforce of engineers. If 1% of them are unhappy, and even 5% of those unhappy people are willing to post about it on Reddit, Hacker News, Leetcode, or where ever, you're going to feel like every person at Amazon basically hates their job.

And the other thing is the people who do respond with positive experiences don't get the "upvotes" and get their experiences pushed to the top of the discussion. They often get down ranked and personally attacked.

Lastly – No one is counting lines of code. This is actually a pretty absurd claim, and I can't say it's NEVER happened, but anyone doing that is a wrong hire. Less code is generally better. There are no brownie points for more code or more complexity. Amazon's leadership principals encourage frugality and invent and simplify.