1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing.

2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.

In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.

I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.

Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.

True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.

If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.

If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.

I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is).

A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.

Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies.

So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.

I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.

Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.

Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?

If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.

But "random startups" that no one knows about? Probably preferable to have Amazon.

I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong.

The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.

You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.

- you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so

At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that.

Stay safe my friend.

I would say the bar is pretty much the same for all FANGs. If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple. I see people that apply to multiple FANGS tend to pass some of them. Once you put in the work to learn those exercises (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), failing them or passing them becomes a matter of luck (the right set of exercises, the right interviewer).

As to how this translates to intelligence - I personally don't care if a candidate is able to pass a FANG interview or not (I've seen plenty of bad employees who were FANGs or ex-FANGs and plenty of geniuses as well), but I definitely will think of them as being driven individuals who achieved what they set up to do.

Incidentally the best employees who made a difference in the companies I've worked at were, incidentally, never ex-FANGs, just talented individuals who decided to put in the work.

I don't know, I failed Facebook several times and never got an interview at Apple. Getting an interview at most companies isn't that hard, but with Amazon on the resume I'm out of the game for companies like top trading firms and Stripe, Airbnb etc. I think I simply don't have the intelligence to do so. I'm sure some people have the ability to get offers after doing thousands of leetcode problems but I've never met them - everyone I know that's successful has only done a handful and passed their interviews without any trouble.

I've put in the work, but I've gotten nothing out of it. It's hard not to be discouraged by that.

Amazon is probably a better name to have on your resume than the vast majority of other companies out there. I'd imagine you'd instantly be considered higher at first glance than someone with say, JP Morgan, or Lockheed Martin, or IBM, or any number of no-name startups on their resume.

I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.

So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.

It's the professional equivalent of "being good at taking multiple choice exams". But just because someone got 100s on every biology exam in high school doesn't mean they are an expert in biology, just that they are a good test taker.

If you want to look up to someone because they are actually a good engineer, then that's great. But don't look up to someone just because they are a good test taker. And don't look down on yourself just because you are a bad test taker. Taking tests has so little relevance to how good you actually are as an engineer. Amazon is chock-full of completely mediocre engineers, and also rejects plenty of actual engineering wizards.

The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.

No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?

If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.

Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.

Wow what??!

*Edited: Turns out I have been misusing the word "counterfactual" for quite some time.

386.1b dollars / 798k workers = $483,834.58 / worker

That's impressive, but... Alibaba: $717.3b / 251k workers = $2.8m / worker FlipKart: $436.2b / 30k workers = $14.5m / worker Texas Instruments: $14.38b / 30k workers = $468k / worker G.E.: $75b / 174k workers = $431k / worker

I would agree with your assertion that it is one of the most productive companies to have ever existed, but so are a lot of other companies and they don't seem to hire people just to fire them later.

And heck, the last company I worked for was a small firm capitalized with several tens of thousands of dollars from its founders followed by a $75k angel round. Its revenues last year were around $38m with a staff of about 45 people or around $800k / worker. And they achieved it with a couple orders of magnitude less investment than AMZN.

Strictly speaking, I don't think this is a counterfactual. A counterfactual is a figure of speech that considers a situation wherein the facts are different than they really are. For example, "If I were you, I'd quit." This is a counterfactual, because I am not you, but if I _were_, then so-and-so would be the case. Google gives the example, "If kangaroos had no tails, they would topple over."

Its the equivalent of the corporation being a person smoking cigarettes. It imparts some benefits and doesn't kill right away but given enough time it still causes disease. They'll start to miss opportunities. They'll run slower.

The metaphor vanishes in a lot of ways though because the corporation can pivot and simply say "we were wrong". Microsoft is a perfect example. It regularly threw away people and this caused damage and various big failures but not enough to scuttle them. They are still successful. Still growing.

Students of history know that Microsoft's story of success hides a lot of messy details including behavior where plenty of law had to get involved. Amazon will go down a similar path. Or has likely already begun.

Truth is that any given time no company is perfect, they can simultaneously being doing things that give them an advantage in the market and doing things that undermine their own efforts. As long as the advantageous stuff outweighs the self-sabotage, they can be successful.

Some of the trouble is that people see success and assume that 100% of the things they are doing are the correct thing to do. Not considering that maybe the reason they can get away with one sort of bad behavior is because they have such a huge advantage in some other area.

So for Amazon, the soaring stock price serves as a big financial incentive that allows some employees to overlook the work environment. But that may not always be the case, and the more people share negative experiences about the work environment, the more new people avoid joining altogether. The negative reputation and the turnover may not be enough to doom the company, but on the flip side they'd probably be even more successful in the short and long term if they didn't have a firing quota.

Revenue, net income, employee head count, customer satisfaction, customer retention, customer lifetime value, return on invested capital, end price reduction for customers, stock price and market capitalization, SKUs available for sale, new products/services launched, etc etc.

IKEA makes cheap, good enough furniture. Similar to Amazon's approach. You can't argue that either is not hitting a certain high quality bar when neither are striving for it.

Disclaimer: I work for AMZN

It's so fascinating how diverse people's viewpoints are! My first experience of IKEA was that it was a confusing, frustrating, poorly laid out and inefficient labyrinth designed to get you lost, and also funnel you to the "hot dog" items that make them the majority of their profit. I've taken many of my parents and observed similarly people's parents and grandparents of friends get just as frustrated and confused at the layout. For god sakes, I just want to be able to walk in, go to the "kitchen decor" get what I need, and walk out. I don't want an "experience", but I digress.

IKEA is not attempting to sell the highest quality furniture in the world. They are attempting to sell furniture that is "good enough" at a great price. Have they succeeded? Their customers seem to have dollar-voted with resounding "yes".

On the other hand, I have all Ikea furniture and it's survived 3-4 moves and only gotten stronger - my last mover's hobby was repairing furniture and he fixed everything with his pile of spare parts.

I use it for some small businesses of mine but I wouldn't use it for a medium company. I would just get some servers from smaller provider in different data centers and deploy whatever I need.

AWS, was definitely the service that convinced everyone they needed the cloud. Most of the companies I've seen move to aws are just wasting money, don't need the scalability and are massively over-provisioned.

A few unicorns needs the cloud's powers to scale massively now - and, given how much it costs, they'll end up rewriting it anyway to save hundreds of millions a few years down the line.

That said, AWS is solid and best in class in many areas, and to paraphrase the old saying: "no one ever got fired for choosing AWS"

Amazon has 12 million skus walmart 75 million.

End price reduction? Amazon is rarely the cheapest.

Employee headcount, is more or less better?

Things always seem rosier.

??

Sorry but Amazon has far, far more than 12M SKUs.

Comparing online shopping revenue to social media revenue kind of feels like comparing apples to oranges to me.

Amazon could downsize by 90% and most of these would still hold up.

In order to scale back that far without suffering negative results you'd have to assume that those 90% of people aren't doing much day to day, so their loss would not be felt, and that is frankly not true and kind of insulting to the hard work that Amazon employees do.

I'll add 90% was hyperbole.

I'm not sure I understand your reasoning. How would any of these metrics not rapidly collapse under a 90% workforce cut? Are you assuming that the majority of Amazon is somehow automated? It definitely isn't.

> someone described that the reason AWS works at all is the size of their firefighting team

Customers don't care all that much why AWS "works". They care that it "works". And, again, it "working" is not their end goal. Rather, AWS "working" is yet another means to an end.

You don't have any of that at Amazon, there is firefighting instead of research, they aren't running out people willing to work for them yet, and personnel turnover is stratospheric.

Yes, they do make money, but you can't buy advancement.

It may make sense to guarantee a certain lower-than-maximum productivity than to shoot for a more risky absolute-maximum-at-all-times and sometimes miss that shot, and this system goes for the former.

But their stock price keeps going up and they keep eating up new markets.