[amzn-336495]

The story is that Amazon sacrifices engineers and others after every big project, success or failure. They have developed a weird human sacrifice culture. Fire phone? It was a failure implementing Bezos's wacky ideas. Engineers had to be purged to atone for it. Fire TV? Huge success but we don't want engineers getting any credit for it. Result: purge some engineers. Echo? Another success that now had to float all those managers from both echo and phone project. Better kick some more engineers off the life raft.

http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hardware-division-layo...

They have a real 'slaughter the goose that layed the golden egg because holy shit! there is a huge expensive golden egg and it's mine all mine, die, die, die..." culture. Bezos probably has an employee purge button built into his desk.

[pyb]

This startling quote is in the article :

"Many of the people who helped create the Echo no longer work for Amazon..."

As you say, it sounds like success gets punished at Amazon.

[runT1ME]

Isn't it more likely that after shipping a 'named' consumer product, many of those engineers rose in value a tremendous amount and rather than negotiate a raise they took a huge salary bump working for Apple/Google?

[pyb]

In my experience, companies are not that great at recognizing and rewarding achievement. So unfortunately, I'll stick to my cynical interpretation. Also, we're talking about dozens or even hundred of people moving on from Amazon here...

[runT1ME]

>In my experience, companies are not that great at recognizing and rewarding achievement.

Is your opinion the crazy stock grants that are happening right now at big tech companies not due to achievement and instead just political or random?

[pyb]

Google and Facebook offer largeish stock grants when you join the company, no ? Google is also known, to offer some kind of bonuses on merit, but that policy is seen as remarkable in tech.

I'd guess Amazon is more political and/or stingy than the above 2.

Anyway I was not referring to big tech specifically.

[serge2k]

Probably more likely that a lot of people just wanted something different after years of working hard at lab.

Plus it's amazon, you stick around you are probably gonna end up doing oncall ops BS.

[126throwaway126]

And Amazon has lots of tiny shell companies like Rawles LLC, fostering distrust and compartmentalization between product teams. Not a healthy work environment.

[serge2k]

They are just extremely (ridiculously) secretive.

I remember at one point half of the team (up to director level I mean) knew about a project and the other half didn't. The VP and director had to argue hard to just get everyone in the damn loop. Then they made us sign extra stuff and reminded us that we could be fired or sued if we leaked anything blah blah blah.

Dysfunctional.

[senderista]

When I was at AWS they seemed to be much more open internally than Digital, but the trend was definitely toward secret projects, e.g. WorkDocs and Aurora. Not being micromanaged by Bezos probably makes AWS generally less dysfunctional than Digital.

[mgrennan]

This is just life at lots of "Heartless" companies. DELL for example, Cuts the bottom X% of staff based on "Performance". Sic, getting a divorce, new children, ask/forced to work odd shifts, working in some managers experimental project...

Your CUT.

[eclipxe]

Yeah, that's not how it works at all. Not sure how you're making that conclusion?

[amzn-336495]

That is how it works at all. The company took in $107,000,000,000 dollars in 2015 but were just forced to layoff off engineers. Right, no despotic dictatorship banana republic stuff going on there.

[TheDong]

It didn't "layoff off [sic]" engineers; they quit.

It could be argued with that much revenue they could afford a better work environment for their employees, but it's not as bad as you make it out to be.

[amzn-336495]

Did you read the article at all? "Amazon laid off "dozens of engineers" in its Lab126 hardware unit"

[bunnymancer]

It's okay to just say Billion instead of trying to enhance the statement.

Also that's revenue and not income, which was $596 million. Quite a difference.

[amzn-336495]

They took tens of millions of dollars of revenue and built some huge balls in downtown Seattle, so I don't think they were hurting for money.