[noahm]

I worked at Amazon for 3+ years, leaving just under a year ago. "It’s the greatest place I hate to work" pretty much sums up how I felt about the place. The crazy thing is, I kinda want to go back! The scope and scale of the engineering problems is simply unmatched, especially if you're like me and you don't want to work for a primarily advertising funded company.

I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site. It sounds like most of the people interviewed for the article were on the retail side. In AWS, I never felt any sort of competition with my peers, nor did I feel like people were trying to sabotage me with the anytime feedback tool. In fact, it really felt like there was a refreshing lack of office politics there. Everybody worked very hard and there was mutual respect among all my peers. The workloads are heavy, for sure, but never really unmanageable, and the work is almost always interesting.

Ultimately what finally ended it for me was the complete lack of paternity leave. Amazon offers, to the letter, the bare minimum family leave that they can legally get away with. If the company isn't interested in my health or that of my family, should I really be putting effort into helping them succeed? I think policies like that really run counter to their "hire and develop the best" principle. How exactly do they plan on doing that if they don't treat them with respect?

[retailengineer]

> I worked in AWS, which I'd always understood to be culturally a bit different from the retail site.

I'm an SDE on the retail side, and the funny thing is, there seems to be a consensus among the engineers on the retail side that it's much harder to work at AWS, because of poor management. Glad to know that's not the case.

My engineering team at least is pretty chill. The business teams have the harder job, but not nearly as hard as the article suggests ("cancer? screw that!" -- sure, that's how it is). Totally agree about the lack of paternity leave, though. One of the guys on the team who has a two-month-old hardly gets any sleep at all. Perhaps all this bad PR (and all the customers saying "I won't buy Amazon anymore!") will make Amazon address this issue.

[msoad]

So many new accounts defending Amazon here! Nice try Amazon!

[brianpgordon]

How many hours per week did the engineers work in AWS when you were at Amazon?

[noahm]

Typical tech hours. 40-50, maybe more during crunch time right before a new feature launch or something. Not really any worse than any other place I've worked. Hours were flexible, too; I'm the type who arrives at 9:00 or 10:00 in the morning and leaves after 6 PM, but I had co-workers who worked 7 to 4 or something.

[thothamon]

A close friend of mine was recently -- as in a week or two ago -- recruited by Amazon. The process did not get as far as an offer, because the hiring manager told my friend that the expected hours would be around 80 per week on average. This was a non-starter for my friend, so the process concluded. (At least the hiring manager was honest up-front, and understanding when my friend said this would not be possible.)

Based on this, I think we can conclude two things. First, a lot of current Amazonians are unaware of other teams working insane hours, and second, those other teams are apparently doing so anyway.