"it wasn't like this X years ago. It is a shame you joined at this time."

Heard that multiple times during my short tenure. Always smelled like bs to me.

Looking at the author's resume, they've only been at AWS since 2020. It's unlikely they have a very good understanding of how the culture has changed over time.

It’s true, I’ve only been here since COVID and from what I understand 2020-2021 were exceptionally good years. Lots of growth, fully remote, and plenty of new people and ideas.

Well, another option is it’s true and it’s monotonically getting worse. From my time at aws, it appears to be that’s the case. It was better X years ago, and it will be worse at X+n years for all values of n and X.

"This year was worst than last year...But it will be better than next Year..."

Same at Google - was there from 2016 to 2023. And i strongly believe everyone at BigCo underwent a step-change in 2023.

I do give the VP in TFA some credit for trying to give shelter and time. Google went rancid, you'd go to work one morning, get an unannounced event on your calendar, and be informed as a group you were locked out of everything except the internal job posting site and had 8 weeks to find a job. Meanwhile everyone had negative headcount. I've heard at least two dozen stories like that personally.

Another effect is best communicated by a quote: "there's a fuck you got mine attitude." The internal peer support group i was a location lead for was overwhelmed by people with just bonkers stories of aggression and antisocial behavior from middle management punching down. I heard so many stories that wouldn't have gone down at even the strangest and most inexperienced startups I worked at. (Hiring friends with 0 experience, outright lying, pushing out people)

The bullwhip effect of management not really needing to learn to capital-M manage and now being asked to really exposed a lot of issues. Breaks my heart. (I left because of this)

Many managers don't know how to handle firings/layoffs and there's little incentive to because you're gone after the event anyway.

It is true. Amazon was always brutal, but two-pizza team six-pager culture was a great place to rule in hell as opposed to serving in Heaven as a generalist at Google. Two-pizza team six-pager culture died sometime during the last decade. At a guess, when they imported so many AI academics and they brought all the toxic worst practices of academia to bear on it.

The Applied Scientist title at Amazon is the single worst thing they ever created: 15% higher comp and stock if any L10 or up decides you are one, a 100% political position that set everyone against each other just like separating the bonus for the success of Google+ from the rest of Google did in 2011 (was there for that idiocy myself).

It is true now, and has always been true, that parts of the company are healthy places to work and parts are not. Despite the 'all bad' narrative you see around here. Not to defend Amazon, I mean, they ought to just get it to all be good and of course they won't. But it's annoying having to argue about this all the time instead of everyone just understanding that it's a mixed bag and which org you end up in counts for everything.

Maybe this is true for many parts of Amazon culture, but the big factor recently is that the RTO mandate is company-wide. With very few exceptions, it doesn't matter what org you're in, RTO affects you, and can have a drastic change on the entire company's culture.

Every big enough company, is, for those not on the c-suite, a collection of 1000s of different companies with a single HR department.

> which org you end up in counts for everything

maybe... then maybe it's time to name those orgs instead of just weaving their legendarium web...

It’s great to win, until you lose.

And it's also annoying to argue that "it's a mixed bag" is not an excuse for Amazon being in general or on average a huge step worse in terms of work life balance and pleasantness. You are much more likely to end up in a more excruciating role than the average software co.

Amazon will always eventually Amazon.

I had a professor who worked on security at Amazon 12 years ago. He would always go on and on about how terrible his job was there, and how much better it was being a teacher and getting to see the sun.

Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.

Oh, Amazon absolutely is cut throat and ruthless. But always within the law, never caught cheating. And it moves incredible fast at incredible scale, so you learn more in a year there than you do in 5 elsewhere.

Some people are repulsed by that, others drawn to it and some thrive under these conditions. Heck, I really enjoy my life and job after Amazon. And still I miss the speed, the fast feedback on decisions and actions, the laser focused pursuit of a common goal, ruthlessly focused on efficiency, risk and details. Thought about going back there myself, lucky I didn't. Propably wouod have been equally lucky if I did.

Amazon is a peculiar place.

amazon seems to be the place where the worst leaders i've experienced who have been forced out of the organizations i've been a part of all inevitably wind up. based on this, i don't think i'd ever like to work there.

Usually, people quality follows a normally distributed curve at any place I worked that had enougj peoole in each grouo to make it mathematically work. Amazon transfromed tgat, IMHO, into a bathtub curve, really great (and ruthless, driven, qualified) folks at the top end, then nothing, finally those only checking one of the above mentioned boxes and offsetting the others with excelling at politics. S I said, a peculiar place.

Something else I learned the very hard way: what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective.

That being said, realizing Amazon is not a place for you before joining is the best thing you can do. I have seen my fair share of people that realized after being hired, and for them the place was hell. Careerwise, and I explicity talk about white collar folks, Amazon had no negative impact on them. But going through personell hell 50+ hours a week for months until ypu found something else or you are let go during probation is torture. I know, I had the same thing after Amazon once, it sucks and drains you dry.

> what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective.

for myself, and the organizations i worked for, it was about results. these leaders swooped in from other prestigeous organizations, introduced toxic politics to completely disrupt existing cultures and working processes, and in the end, for all that drama, they never delivered

The worst manager I’ve ever worked with had an Amazon background. Still remember how he was hyped up before starting as an amazing senior engineering manager that’s gonna bring some grown up experience (him being in his 40s, most of the team 20s/30s) to the team.

The pettiness, backstabbing, political games and kingdom building that ensued was a nightmare. I don’t think the team recovered even after he was eventually fired about a year later.

It’s hard to consider hiring any manager coming from Amazon after that disaster.

Doesn't mean he wants to be there. Sometimes life is not fair.

Yes the job sucks, but they pay me so much! Life is not fair.

In my experience professors are very good candidates for top tech companies - many have management experience, many have taught algorithms at one point or are good at them already. I doubt this professor didn’t have a choice.

Yikes, I’ve had the opposite experience, uniformly. Professors join to great acclaim, and everyone then slowly learns (again for the Nth time) that “managing” students, writing grant proposals, and running research projects, has very little carryover to managing a team of engineers inside a large complex project.

Ok, but that doesn’t change the fact that they get offers and thus have many choices.

My experience (at a BigCo) has been the opposite. The below applies to about 60% of them; the other 40% are good or great.

Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach.

Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university.

And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo.

Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.

This sounds like a Google experience - not something that happens at Amazon. Which is perhaps why OPs professor joined Amazon again after complaining.

I worked at Amazon too, and this scenario has happened there as well.

> e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”

Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.

I quit and went back. "Boomerangs" are extremely common. The golden handcuffs are hard to shed. Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.

> Also, Amazon has its problems (mostly cultural, as of the last few years), but it also has a lot of upsides and fantastic people.

yep, working at Amazon (AWS specifically) is like playing for the 2000/10s Patriots. Belicheck will work you to the bone and indoctrinate you into the AWS Leadership Princip... er, I mean the "Patriot Way", and your SVP Tom Brady will chew you out in the "correction of error" process. But if you want to be at a place where people want to win at all costs--with all of the pros and cons that entails--there's no better place to be.

Amazon hate comes from people who don't see a problem with getting the Washington Commanders giving you a $100 million contract to put in the bare minimum effort. To some people that's a dream deal, but not for everyone. To each their own.

Given the average tenure of an NFL player is relatively short, wouldn't it make more sense to go for what would offer the highest reward with lowest CTE risk?

A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars. Washington doesn't even have income tax.

That's what I mean, it depends on what the "highest reward" means for each person. $100m is $100m, but what's Tom Brady remembered for, and what's Albert Haynesworth remembered for? One is near-unanimously considered the greatest of all time, and the other is known for being one of the worst free agent acquisitions of all time. They both have more money than they know what to do with, but one probably feels a bit better about his career.

This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine too! There's room on the planet for both types of companies, thankfully.

The "Washington" in "Washington Commanders" is Washington, DC. Not Washington State (which has no income tax).

That average is dragged down by certain positions and also the great number of practice squad players that get pulled up for a game or two. I think to the "average" "good" nfl player, 20 vs 30 million lifetime doesn't make as much difference as being a champion. Probably a great many players would trade some lifetime earnings for a ring. I imagine most nfl players also don't manage their own money, so they are even more inured to the idea of making a couple million more over 3 or 4 years.

That's not true though.

I've been working there for 6 years and the scale at which layoffs have been happening since 2022 is unparalleled to what has happened in the past.

There may have been some rare team closures here and there before, but people could easily join another team and it was a rare event anyway.

Now, since 2022 it has been massive team shutdowns with hundreds of people laid off every time, while there is a hiring freeze in the whole company. And this will continue in 2024.

Amazon always had a cutthroat culture but at least if you were good (aka not PIPed) you knew you'd fine another team and weren't worried about not having a job the next day. This is not the case anymore.

Google has been doing the same thing. The fact is that these companies simply have too many employees and they aren't able to properly utilize everyone.

I hate to say this, but I genuinely think customers are going to find AWS become more unreliable as time goes on.

It seems to me that you can have high levels of reliability, a great working culture and high levels of staffing, but if you mess with any one of these elements you will find the wheels start falling off the train.

It’s already happening… it’s a total mess of weird microservices that make no sense to reason about and the hidden costs on things like free tier etc… not good

I think I may disagree about the causes. Amazon A/B tests just about everything, the implication being hidden costs would have been found in A/B testing to net increase revenue. That is just profit motive and business ethics coming into play.

The scattering of weird microservices I think is the same reason the Amazon detail & home page never get a full ground-up update. It's hard to do large scale data experiments to demonstrate the benefit, and it's too many teams with too much at stake (too many cooks)

> Amazon A/B tests just about everything

Are they testing for the UI's that confuse customers the most? \s

In a way actually! The things that are hard to A/B test get neglected. If you need A/B testing (ie: data) to make any decision, then places where data is purely qualitative - there will be no data to be had and therefore no decision can be made.

The Expedia example really comes to mind too of micro-optimizations and everyone working towards their own org's goal can all make sense individually, but really fail when taken as a whole: https://www.qualtrics.com/blog/upstream-thinking-saved-exped...

Expedia had an example of this: - the sales team wanted sales - the phone support team wanted to turn over calls quickly -

If there were a way to measure confusion, it would be improved and

Can I A/B test whether there will be a 10% increase in sales if I lower prices on Ec2 instances by 5% - YES! Can I A/B test that the presence of 30 service options is the tipping point of spending 1 hour to get something done vs wanting to hire an "AWS"

My fault for a milquetoast response. I disagree. My thoughts are informed here by insider experience at Amazon. I believe I observed these problems over a decade ago (hidden fees, high attrition, poor culture, scattered & non-consolidated service offerings). EG: There were a number of places that could have had a better customer experience, but A/B testing showed there was more money to be made than customers lost. Second example, seeing what was required to get 2 to 4 teams to cooperate was impressive.. The detail and home page touches the bread and butter for entire orgs, thousands of people, ramifications for dozens of teams and then dozens of backend teams behind them.

I believe it was an Amazon VP that I was talking who pointed out that the homepage and detail page had not changed very much over time at all (lots of evolution, but never revolution, never fully redone, never will be fully redone).

This was pertinent because we were in an org that ran offshoot sites, similar in a lot of ways, but less hands in the pot & we did have liberty to do a full rewrite of our detail pages & homepages. In the conversation, the VP of that org was highlighting that flexibility and went into small detail why that was not the case for the big mother-ship retail pages.

A/B testing is an Amazon thing, but is it also an AWS thing? I thought AWS engineering culture was pretty different.

Here is a page from AWS executives with insights on how your organization can also be data-driven too!

https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-do-you...

AWS does have differences for sure - but the "everything is only decided based on numbers unless you are Jeff Bezos" is universally true.

Being that rigorous about data-driven-decisions is really quite powerful. The S-team are 1000% of this mind-set. I'm paraphrasing, the saying at Amazon that they tell new recruits and pride themselves over is that there are only three correct answers: "(1) Yes, and here is the data why. (2) No, and here is the data why. (3) I don't know, and I'll have the data shortly"

I see A/B testing as just one small component of data-driven decision making.

You can make still great decisions based on your data without doing the thing where you ship the same feature twice and see which one works better.

A priori, data-driven decision making is very powerful. One nice thing about working with former Amazon engineers, is they do bring that mindset. No premature optimization, no belief in facts without data. I think when you get burned a few many times to realize you believe things that are wrong and data shows you to be wrong, you tend to think more about why you know things and what data you have. It's powerful.

By way of clarification, I rarely observed the same feature being shipped twice. It's generally more the 'A' test was the existing functionality and 'B' was whatever change you wanted to make.

The A/B testing platform at Amazon received a lot of investment - it's powerful and so it's used for a lot more than mere A/B testing. It's also a feature toggle platform, lots of things are shipped under that framework so they can be "turned on & off". The metrics collection was powerful and highly integrated. Even if there is no actual comparison in parallel, the metrics that are generated were worth a lot (and often needed, as everyone's goals are all data based, so you want data to show you are hitting those goals. Can't just say we launched 5 features, and can't say we are just still here, it's data or nothing at Amazon)

Most importantly, the "great decisions" is interesting. The power of gathering data very quickly and often is you see when decisions were not great. Amazon was excellent at this, things that made more money were given support, things that lost money were quickly terminated and re-organized. The data provides light on the decisions, it's virtually a BizDev super-power to be able to pivot away from losers so quickly like that.

I think this is true of any company. As things get larger, red tape increases, and the mess of spaghetti code and complexity/inter-dependencies of systems means it gets harder and harder for any one person or team to fully understand the environment and avoid/recover from issues.

I actually think that the "pizza team" model in Amazon can help mitigate this, as each individual team operates as its own entity that is discouraged from relying on other teams for uptime... but this is only effective to a point.

As the article points out, this is a very expensive way of operating and requires very high headcount. They don’t want mass layoffs because of the cost of doing so, thus they employ the unethical tactic of making life miserable for the ones they would have tried to lay off.

What it also means is that they can use younger and cheaper workers. They can also outsource their work. Thus my concerns about reliability.

It seems like a house of cards. I truly wonder for how long they can keep this up. Given our reliance on cloud computing and their prominent position within it, it may become a very rocky ride at some point for businesses who have transitioned their operational infrastructure to AWS. I think a lot of people treat AWS as an infinite resource that will never run out and will be completely reliable forever. I think, sadly, many organisations may get a shock some time into the near future.

Here is maybe an uncomfortable truth for software engineers: it’s more efficient from a cost perspective to just something out there that is good enough, even if it makes no logical sense and is a mess.

Maintainability and readability are best solved through brute force hiring instead of better practices.

In what world does maintainability and reliability increase through brute force hiring of low skilled and experienced staff?

The world where good enough / more cpu resources and just works is easier to get to than design the system in a logical way.

In other words, it doesn’t exist.

Do you really think that engineers must commit code on a weekly basis to prevent infrastructure from crashing down because of some sort of "decay" that happens in the software naturally?

Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last several years to now not allowing it.

Company culture can change over time but that does not mean it will change for the better over time. The problems I mentioned - cutthroat culture, stack ranking, PIPs, forced cuts, high attrition - have all been a thing at Amazon for at least the last 15 years.

I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in context of this article. The article doesn't mention most of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.

The mass layoffs were 1.7% of the company, and the author himself says they didn't have much of an impact. It's no different than what every other big tech company did, and their numbers were a lot worse. The rest of what he talks about ("Making them miserable and silently sacking them.") is what I'm referencing. RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift. Amazon has never been an employee friendly company. Forcing people to quit when a department's salary gets too much or when they are nearing their 3rd or 4th year vesting periods is basically part of the manager handbook over there.

> RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift.

Again, this is just demonstrably false. But if you want to continue to have some personal vendetta against Amazon's culture, you do you.

Are you implying that amazon allowed remote work prior to the pandemic?

From personal experience: yes. But I don't really see what that has to do with anything, because even just looking at during the pandemic (remote work culture) to now (in-office culture) is a demonstrably different culture, so I still have no idea what you're arguing.

That’s a specious argument. It includes all of the warehouse workers, delivery drivers and other non blue badge employees.

That's not really a culture, rather a policy.

Culture is how people in the organisation think about work. Are they desperate to take credit? (Individual or team) Assign blame? (Individual or team) Overwork? Do they care about developing the employees' skills? Is the pay fair, are increases given to retain talent?

Amazon's long had a culture of high pay, work people very hard, accept the high churn.

This is just arguing semantics over the word "culture", but I'll bite.

The culture of Amazon during 2019-2022 was that people throughout the organization "thought about work" as something that could be done remotely (yes, even before 2020 there was remote work at Amazon), but required different working styles. There was more focus on employee engagement, encouraging things like taking online training or organizing team meetings that were focused on team connectedness. Teams were less overworked because there were always new people being hired to pick up the extra slack.Pay was constantly increasing, and especially so during the pandemic (Amazon famously removed its salary cap in 2022, and readjusted its entire pay scale to be higher).

Post-pandemic, but pre-layoffs, Amazon encouraged work travel to go and see coworkers in-person. You didn't even need a reason to do so, but book the travel and your expenses would be auto-approved. Expense budgets were large, and planning team events or happy hours were encouraged. Pay increases continued. Rapid hiring and team growth only got more rapid.

After layoffs happened, that all changed. Work travel began to be actively disallowed, pay increases slowed (or stopped). Team training became restricted unless it was free (and even then, only a certain amount of days were allowed). Hiring slowed to a crawl, so teams were more overworked, and overall mindset was more negative because you knew no help was coming.

All of the things I'm describing are vast culture changes that I personally saw happen between 2019-2022. You can go ahead and call these "policies", but policies are an important factor that shapes culture.

And yet… it’s one of the most highly valued companies on the planet, and a clear #1 in cloud services.

Blackberry was at its most valuable 2 years after the iPhone came out and a year before Android was released.

If there was a cloud equivalent to the iPhone I feel like I would have heard about it. It could have been Kubernetes, but it hasn’t been.

Maybe it’s them being behind on GenAI. Of course all of the OpenAI competition is trained on commodity cloud services that are basically lift and ship to any cloud with GPU capacity - so Amazon is at worst in the middle of the pack.

But the iPhone came out in 2007 and the for g1, 2008..... so, uh.....

Android was basically nothing until Verizon started selling them. The G1 was only on T-Mobile - at the time a distant 4th in the mobile space.

It was so bad that not even Google’s CEO at the time used it and he still used his BlackBerry.

For comparison, Steve Jobs felt the same way about Macs before OS X, the first two years he was back at Apple he used a PC running Next

This is a really ignorant comment. Of course this number one because the big money gets in early and gets out early. All the suckers are left behind. Financial capitalism doesn’t care about companies, It cares about profit.

There’s no evidence of a big money exodus. The only potential company to leave for is Azure.

There’s no evidence of a big money exodus….YET.

Or more companies can realize that they can be almost as productive on their own hardware as they can in The Cloud but at a fraction of the cost.

Even more funny to see a Developer still employed at Amazon publicly bashing his Company and Manager on a public blog. The Next one-on-one will be embarrassiiiiiing...

He knows he’s been laid off. His managers through the VP level know they’re done for as well.

It's not his manager, VP might as well be on the moon. They're people who were in early enough or have enough experience to have their job be arguing about other creatures of their species re: things like headcount.

That's why blogs completely fine blasting him, the whole overarching point is the VP's sociopathic nonsense (firing-not-firing-but-you-better-get-a-job is so VP can keep headcount) is in the way of OP's goal. (getting on paper "you're fired" so he can get severance). The more awkward the next 1:1 is with the VP (which will never happen, people are by and large cowards), the more likely it is reality has asserted itself and the VP can't keep lying to his employees to avoid getting in trouble with HR.