Some other pictures are here: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-01-26/inside-am...

From reading answers on Quora I came to the conclusion that Amazon employees aren't given expensive perks (i.e. computers and work place furniture). Are things changing at Amazon?

10 year Amazonian here. I think we have one of the most expensive perks of all: an active, expansive, downtown campus. That's not cheap, those towers cost billions, and there's a reason many big technology competitors are in more suburban locations (Redmond, Mountain View, Kirkland, etc ...). But it really is something to be able to get to and from work relatively quickly via public transport, to be in the middle of a cool city with great restaurants and food trucks, and to be so easily able to socialize with colleagues and friends.

But it's true that we don't have free cafeterias, free sodas, gyms (though we do have free on-campus workouts and yoga classes) and so on. We do have some other unusual perks though: our mailrooms get the "Amazon" shipping rates from USPS/DHL/FedEx, and since Amazon is one of their biggest customers, it's really really cheap to ship personal packages. We have a dog park with awesome puppies that's 17 stories up, with a crazy view of the Puget Sound and Downtown Seattle.

There's lots of less tangible things like that, but in general, people aren't here for the perks.

I have never thought of location and a building as a perk. It is easy for even a moderately funded company to have an office in the downtown of any major city.

A perk is not a perk because of the ease of providing it or its cost. It's a perk because it's a benefit not part of core compensation. And it is true, none of the other tech giants have downtown HQs (although plenty of Google satellite offices are in urban centers, at least).

There is a formal definition, but not everyone will agree building and location are perks.

> get to and from work relatively quickly via public transport

I have to lol a little at this, given that it's faster to walk up Denny than take the 8 bus during rush hour.

Doesn't get more "public transport" than using a public sidewalk via free manual transport. ;)

(The fact that you can feasibly walk to work is an even bigger benefit.)

Food trucks and restaurants aplenty. Being in an urban campus is one of my favorite things about being here (also for 10 years)

so, being able to buy lunch from a food truck is a benefit of working at Amazon?

Having access to the significant diversity of food choices that downtown Seattle offers, that non-urban campuses do not, is the obvious perk.

Finding free perks outside of work is the perk.

Personally, my perk is Gold Club in downtown SF.

I've worked at some of the FANGs, including Amazon. As far as their standard workspace equipment goes (e.g. computers, desk, monitors, etc...), they seemed to be more or less at parity with the other companies. The workspaces used to be on the drab side, but they've taken to modernizing them with bright colors and lounge furniture in common areas that looks trendy but is damned uncomfortable. They don't really have any perks like high-quality micro-kitchens (except at subsidiaries and sites where those sorts of perks are standard locally), cafes, gyms, etc...

EDIT: I should mention that I'm pretty easy when it comes to things like computer hardware and desks. I just need a terminal, chair to sit in, plain old desk, and I'll be happy. I might not notice any differentiating factors other people find important...

Amazon are probably the only large monopolistic tech company that make employees pay for their own lunch.

EDIT: I am mollycoddled and wrong (see below).

Which is great for the city. Amazon's big perk is that they're in the city and since they don't feed the staff there are tons of restaurants to walk to.

There are also thousands of other companies in the city as well.

None nearly as large as Amazon... Amazon has 19% of all prime office space in the whole city [1] and they're concentrated over a fairly small number of blocks. They're bigger than the next 40 largest employers combined.

[1] https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/thanks-to-amazo...

Out of the FAANG's neither Apple nor Amazon provide free lunch (although Apple's on-site cafes are very good. You pay $5-10 for an entree, depending on what you get).

Going by Glassdoor, Netflix doesn't universally provide free food at all its offices either.

My employer provides free meals, and it's amazing how much of an outsized effect it has on my affection for them, relative to the actual cost to them of the perk. I know there's plenty of other perks that they spend more money on than the free food (office in good location, 401k match, and healthcare for starters), but the free food really sticks out as something I'm appreciative of. I'd definitely miss it once I no longer had it.

> My employer provides free meals

Do you mean most big tech employers in the US?

I've never heard of an Australian company providing food for employees. Is it common in the US, or just amongst the big tech companies?

Well Atlassian's Australian and provides food to employees, as does Seek (also Australian). It isn't full-catered hot food everyday but it's still great.

I haven't heard of a non-tech Australian company that does though, and would certainly say it's a 'big tech company' thing

It's common in the US, not just at big tech companies, but at any "Silicon-Valley-style" tech company of any size. Companies that aren't big enough to have their own cafeteria might have a daily Seamless order, for example.

It's common at some startups because the startup wants to keep the employee at work. Ordering dinner at 6 so it arrives at 7 and employees stay until 8:PM. It happens.

I think it’s just a google-and-people-poaching-googlers thing? (Facebook, Linkedin are the only other two I know of). We did not get free lunch at Apple.

So does Microsoft.

Amazon doesn't have free soda though

How are computers are a perk? They're required to do your job. And yes, Amazon does provide them. I haven't ever heard of a developer job where you're expected to buy a work computer with your own money, and I've worked at places that had fewer perks than Amazon. I'd flat out refuse to buy my own. Requiring that might even be illegal.

Err, I think OP just meant the computers were not the best, you might not get 2 monitors, or something like that. Not that you don't get a computer at all.

You get a 34” curved monitor or 2 * 27” ones these days. Not uncommon to see engineers with 3 monitors either.

I keep going back and forth on multiple monitors. I'm using one big one right now, which felt better than my previous setup of two displays at first, but now I'm thinking I might want another smaller one off to the side to monitor running terminal output ... ugh.

I will say that two monitors has the significant drawback that there isn't a single central display, so you're always either tilted to the left or to the right relative to your desk. That's not good ergonomics.

If you get good hardware it's a perk. If you get a hard disk and 8 gigs of ram you won't be as productive.

That's not how I think about it. The fundamental tools required to do your job aren't a perk, they are a necessity. If an employer skimps on the tools in a way that makes their employees less productive, then that is simply penny-wise/pound-foolish thinking from them. I'll use what I'm given at work; I'm certainly not going to spend my own money to buy a better work computer.

It's also true that I'm likely to leave a job that is so cheap they can't provide good computers to their employees, as if they're so short-sighted in that area they're likely bad in other areas as well.

Thinking about it again I agree with you.

I would rather give a developer a $2K signing bonus and tell them to go buy whatever laptop they want... and they own it. That way, if/when their employment ends, we don't have to go through the awkward process of taking the equipment back.

Last I checked they don't even get free Prime accounts, the Amazon discount is capped ridiculously low, and the stock vesting schedule is terrible, especially considering how short the tenure is likely to be given how they treat employees. The vibe I get is that you're supposed to think working there is the perk. But you can do so much better elsewhere.

This looks infinitely better than the Facebook industrial-esque spaces, but then this is for a tiny portion of the company's employees.

The workspaces in Amazon buildings are pretty standard (open plans subsectioned off for specific teams, etc) and look pretty similar to the Facebook buildings I've been to at the HQ.

They're like tree houses for office workers --neat. Remind me a bit of the tropical Sphere inside the California Academy of Sciences.

Looks like a mall for me. From hanging there as teenagers to working there... That and similar Google plans show what is coming next after open floor - a multilevel panopticon.

a multilevel treehouse panopticon!

> The Spheres are kept at 72 degrees and 60 percent humidity during the day, and 55 degrees with 85 percent humidity at night.

Working late is going to be an adventure.

This is fascinating. It's almost a forcing function to prevent overwork and burnout.

Imagine if the lights were on and it was 72 degrees, 60% humidity, 24/7 — the plants wouldn't thrive.

This is awesome and will be a boon for the workers' health. I wonder how they'll deal with fungi and other plant pathogens? Fungicides? I've installed small living walls and have had issues with that.

Is that headline supposed to intentionally sound like the setup to a sci-fi horror movie?

It really sounds ominous if, like me, you've never heard about "Amazon's Spheres". Brings to mind stories of alien objects appearing at several key locations on Earth, surrounded by the military and scientists, when suddenly they show signs of activity.

"Starbucks To Begin Sinister 'Phase Two' Of Operation" https://www.theonion.com/starbucks-to-begin-sinister-phase-t...

I hadn't heard about them, and it read like a sci-fi thought experiment describing the kind of mega-corporate excess that might come along in the future.

I guess that future is now.

Looks nice but a stark contrast from what their warehouse workers are afforded.

Of course. What do you expect?

I guess my work experience over the last 30 years has been different. None of the companies had this extravagant facilities but those that had substantial operations or manufacturing capabilities were fairly uniform in the offering of facilities among the white collar and blue collar employees. Both had the same snack rooms with free food and far as I could tell nearly all had their own cubicles.

The fig tree in the diagram is enormous. Is it really that big? And what will they do with all the figs? (Pick your own, perhaps, from whatever the cafeterias can't sell.)

There's a fig tree in Balboa Park in San Diego that dwarfs the one in the diagram, and that's only the third biggest in California. But I imagine it's hard to convince people to sell trees that big / transport them into buildings much larger than the one in the diagram.

https://www.balboapark.org/attractions/moreton-bay-fig-tree

Moreton Bay Figs are amazing. They’re everywhere in Brisbane, AU and there is even a children’s playground that weaves through a huge one.

https://encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcRnXjXB...

it would be cool if big tech companies invested in creating public spaces rather than biospheres for insulating their employees from the world

It would be cool if voters were willing to pay for public spaces, real public spaces, rather than waiting on the charity of companies through moral expectation, charity which could be retracted at any time, or diverted for any whim.

Taxpayers dont want additional burdens. Parks are already free and accessible. These treehouses are nothing more than a hollow gesture considering Amazon's toxic middle-managers and poor processes like performance reviews based on the cult-like "leadership principles."

(Note: I worked at Amazon as a front end / full stack dev around the SLU Seattle campus recently and left _voluntarily_ due to the environment.)

Parks are not free - they're supported by taxpayers.

Biodomes that aren’t called biodomes because of Pauly Shore.

nag-free link for the lazy: https://archive.fo/ftB17

Kind of has a Blue Origin feel to it.

The foliage is a nice reminder of what offices are: zoos for humans.

Huh? Who's doing the gawking? This analogy between a zoo and an office doesn't make straight-forward sense.

Anyway, foliage is nice, and appreciated by people on a deep innate level. Would you rather not have foliage in your office? I don't like a sterile workplace myself.

Do people pay to come watch you work?

Maybe bcoughlan is a streaming video performer?

The spheres are an ok corporate showpiece but at the end of the day they are just that: a showpiece. They don't integrate well with the neighborhood or contribute much to the broader public environment—and Amazon must be just thrilled that there is literally a gentlemen's club across the street from them—nor do the spheres aesthetically make up for all warehouse style offices Amazon has put up all over South Lake Union.

All the coverage celebrating this private public space also concerns me