There is a delicate balance between the idealistic employer, and the employer than can actually survive in the universe. These people did used to work for what was probably your idea of "the better employer", and it did not survive sufficiently to pay them. Amazon is a reasonable compromise between say, a non profit, and Palantir. At least amazon works people hard to provide useful services so it can pay them,.

+N to that!

I don't think Amazon are the best but at least its not "we take your tax dollars and in exchange give police and government agencies information that would be illegal for them to collect themselves" Palantir.

HN seems to consider Facebook the worst and Amazon next worst, but some companies are so much worse.

If it is Facebook, and then Amazon, then where is Google? :D

setting quite a low bar there

Better AWS pays for Rust development than if noone would.

Also, some of the reason AWS has a bad rep is not giving back to the communities of the open source projects they use. Well, this would be them doing just that.

> Better AWS pays for Rust development than if noone would

Why?

There's a lot of stuff, even if all the humans are working for free, that's expensive about developing Rust. Our CI and CDN bills are massive, and someone has to pay them. Without it, we would not be able to support the platforms that we do, which is really important.

Because if people are paid to do something they can spend their workday doing it, which equates to more man hours put into the project.

> Better AWS pays for Rust development than if noone would.

That feels like a false choice, though. Rust is popular enough that surely another company (Fastly, for example?) would have good use for such a talent. But I doubt they can rival Amazon in pay. Such is the world.

If someone is working on a social good (the Rust compiler), is it not better that they are taking money from a large corporation rather than a smaller one that might put that money to better use?

Depends if that large corporation decides the direction of their work. Social good isn’t guaranteed in perpetuity.

> Social good isn’t guaranteed in perpetuity.

True, but employment isn't perpetual either. If they later decided that their work wasn't what they wanted to be working on then they would be free to leave at that point.

Well the problem comes when said corporation co-ops said good thing for their own gain, to the deficiet of the wider community.

Such criticism would have been more appropriate had the previous employer not literally been Mozilla, which recently laid off many Rust team members, or the role been not about working on the rust language.

What's wrong when amazon?

(This is my perception of how some feel, it's not how I feel, I've no dog in the fight)

They leech from open source without giving much back.

They have a fairly interesting approach to work rights, unionisation and there have been a a large number of worker complaints around the world (oth they employ a large number of workers so that might be expected).

Treatment of suppliers - they are ruthless (but that's a megacorp rule of thumb).

> They leech from open source without giving much back.

So, you’re saying an open source developer shouldn’t take a job contributing to open source because the company historically has a reputation of not contributing?

(In the language community, it is recognized that Amazon used to not contribute to Java at all and now is one of the major contributors. This probably hasn’t hurt in recruiting contributors for other languages.)

Amongst other things, they use their marketplace to collect data on which 3rd party resellers are making money, then they implement the product themselves and put the 3rd party out of business, resulting in an anti-competitive trend towards monopoly.

https://www.geekwire.com/2020/analysis-read-antitrust-case-a...

Also, a German retail chain LIDL recently opened its own cloud business so that they can stay away from AWS, for obvious reasons.

You are wrong to take a congressional judicial report as facts.

What's wrong with Amazon?