At a certain point, I guess you'd have to say to yourself (or I'd have to say to myself, would be a better way to say it), "I'll whore myself out for X amount of time for X amount of money, then I can do whatever I want or work for whomever I want for X amount of time, after."

"Everyone has a price"

Im no streetwalkin floozy but 20 bucks is 20 bucks.

flexible ethics? not everybody.

There are different degrees of flexibility. Perhaps some people are utterly inflexible, but I wouldn't much want to know them! As for this specific case, it's not like you're going to be breaking legs for the mob. A person might believe that Facebook or Amazon are a net negative for the world, but that doesn't mean that everything they do is bad or that one's individual contribution can't be good, or at least neutral.

There are certain lines people won't cross, of course. Too much rigidity, on the other hand, is a disorder. If there's no traffic at 4 a.m. and I jaywalk, does that mean I have flexible ethics because the cost to benefit ratio is right for me... I guess. Would I murder a child for a billion dollars? No. That's over a line for me.

I guess then, yes. My ethics are flexible, depending. I have also followed the two second rule, even though I find eating food off of the floor abhorrent =(

I'm not sure there's "change your values" type money for everyone. Though for me, $1MM is enough to consider working for Amazon to attempt to change it from the inside. Perhaps we're saying the same things with different words.

Amazon is not going to change from the inside for anyone making $1M. If you go in thinking it is, you're deluding yourself and will be much less effective than if you just accept that Amazon is what Amazon is and you're whoring yourself out to them for $1M/year.

Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.

I know a guy in there (who most likely isn't making anywhere near 100M), who transferred into the HR org to try to make a dent into the problem of employee turnover, PIP BS, etc.

Last I heard, he was giving middle managers a hard time for perpetuating the sorts of bad behaviors that give Amazon its bad reputation as an employer.

Maybe Amazon is a lost cause, maybe it isn't, but you won't know if you can fix it unless you try. </two-cents>

PIP culture at Amazon comes from the very top. Bezos was a huge fan of it and so is the new CEO. There's no way your friend is going to be able to fight institutional power like that.

$100m/yr? You have some very interesting ideas about corporate ceo/SVP salaries

Is $100m too low or too high?

Too high. A small handful of CEOs have started making >100M in annual comp recently[1], but outside of the very highest paid CEOs, even top executives don't make that kind of money. (Although they certainly might see a capital gain in excess of that amount on their stock and options when the share price goes up.)

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/

Yeah, I assumed that was TC (in which case for a CEO the majority of that will be shares not the base salary) - but of course most CEOs don't run Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc.

Out of curiosity, what turns you off about Amazon?

I interviewed there (with about a half dozen people). Interviews were a joke, it was all whiteboard leetcode with no real insight into technical thought process or real world work talk.

I did ask every person I met "How many hours, on average, do you work in a week?"

Ever single person gave me a non-answer that tried to change the topic. My favorite response to the question was "We are super flexible on where you work, like sometimes I like to work from a cafe". If that had been the only person I asked, I might have thought he misheard me. Since a pattern had been established at this point, I just moved on.

I know every team in a big company is going to be different, but my experience is that they churn and burn fresh coders and let the more ruthless, politic-y type rise up.

Let’s put it this way: if a company tries to brainwash you with 14 “core” principles, those cogs aren’t principled at all.

I went through the loop and made it to final round, despite my reservations just to see what it would be like. Of the 6 people I spoke to, I only had 1 positive experience. Everyone else was either being aggressive for no reason, or they were regurgitating words and had no value in the org. Hell, the “bar raiser” was the worst and asked follow up questions that were answered in the questions prior. On the design interview, another interviewer bragged about winning some AI award and was adamant that Kafka was the optimal solution for real-time doc editing- not my proposed web sockets… he was just downright rude about it.

Anyway, Amazon sucks for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they are so successful brainwashing people inside and outside. You can see their success in all this by observing how quick we forget that their policies force employees to piss in bottles, die working in a tornado, and unethically hold a beauty contest to siphon tax payer dollars from the lowest bidder

Websockets at scale are a special problem and he was probably right.

Asking questions for follow up meant you were missing some core piece of the ‘Amazonian’ way of tackling the problem.

Not being able to take the hints or criticism and thinking about it for years is probably evidence that Amazon would not have been a good place for you. That’s not always a bad thing.

I think you’ve just made my point clearer that Amazon is good at brainwashing. You’re basing peoples capabilities to fit in so rigidly, and worse yet, in such an uncouth way.

Being super conscientious isn’t useful. That’s not an Amazonism, it’s from living in South Africa.

The ability to fit in isn’t rigid. Many people don’t examine data, the impact to their customers, or actually explore a problem. Hearing people’s work history is often a series of assumptions made with little to no care for alternatives.

Most of the feedback I’ve read about working at Amazon seems to be negative. It’s hard for me to reconcile though. As a user of AWS, I love many of their services and the possibilities AWS opens. Most of the negative feedback I’ve read centers around: PIPs, management, work/life balance, on-call, and frugality. If Amazon wants more folks to consider working there, I think they really need to get in front of this from a PR perspective and address these concerns.

Lol when I said that at an org-level all-hands everyone laughed, but the need for improved PR is very real.

But it’s important to remember that there are a ton of extremely happy people at Amazon (or at least AWS, where I worked) they just aren’t as vocal online - management, scope and culture were incredible in my experience (it’s a huge company where managers have a lot of flexibility, YMMV). And some of the biggest day-to-day issues you hear about like crappy offices or excessive frugality were a thing of the past when I was there. And in terms of PIP, I only had one experience with it - having a mechanism for identifying and getting rid of the people who are a drain on everyone else was very nice.

Thanks for commenting here with more context. I’ve considered apply to AWS in the past, but was hesitant to due to the mostly negative online feedback about working there. However, as you suggested, there has to be folks who love working there. I read the reviews for my current employer and there are some negative reviews that don’t seem accurate of my experience there. I think my employer is a generally good place to work. I typically work 50-60 hours a week consistently, so I wonder if the work/life complaints regarding AWS would be that different from the demands of my current position.

Not the OP. But I interviewed once got a contract to hire position. The recruiter said after about six months I could apply for full time. If I got accepted then immediately the expectation is to put in 60 hours a week or more.

"We will squeeze you like a lemon with hope of getting a full time job and after 6 months whrn you get burned out, we will throw you away".

It's famously where high-achievers go to feel bad about themselves. Also the Amhole stereotype is well documented.

The experience of trying to use S3.