They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news. There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.
It's not a scientific study but I don't need scientific accuracy in order to get a pretty clear idea where I would or would not want to work.
If that was the sum of it, you'd expect to hear just as much bad stuff about Microsoft, Google, Apple, and so forth. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.
People also don't particularly want to read a story from a happy engineer at a big company either.
Additionally, the unhappy person who has an axe to grind is likely to go out of his way to publicize it, talk to reporters about it or write comments on the Internet about it. Happy employees are less likely to go out of their way to comment on the experience, and what they have to say is less notable on average.
Also, where do you get a 50% of engineers leave before 2y?
I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good (<=40) except around launches.
2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor.
When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I stayed because I liked the people and the work was fine. If my team culture changes and I don't like it, I'll look external and internal then leave.
I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.
I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.
In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.
It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!
> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.
I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.
Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.
This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.
The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes need to be changed before I'd call the culture here awesome.
But that's the thing though. Your team is not being discussed, but the entire company is. And if it feels to you that it's your team that's swimming against the current, then maybe there's a lot of truth to the general perception of the whole company.
That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.
I only know that for most of the devs, it is fine. It's not perfect, I'm not even sure I'd tell people that it's great. But for people that have a good team? It's fine and the quality of people makes up for it. If I didn't like my team I would have left a long time ago.
I decided to not go back, but in the end having Amazon on my resume (even as an internship, as I'm relatively young) was basically a free pass to interview anywhere else I wanted. I'd say it was a shitty experience while I was there, but net positive in the long run if only because of Amazon's klout.
"clout" :)
How do you know? Based on what they sell through AWS? This is not super evident - they might have duct taped bunch of shitty stuff and rely on people on-call 24x7 to keep system running.
On the plus side, hiring people out of there after a year is usually pretty easy.
Citation needed.
I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.
I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.
Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.
Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.