[throwaway6497]

Amazon is turning a new leaf. They stopped publishing to any major conferences after their last significant paper, DynamoDB.

My perception of Amazon is that they take everything from open-source but don't actively give back. Amazon and open-source never went hand-in-hand. Making their deep learning frameworks open-source is cool. Kudos to the team which managed to do this. I am sure internally, it must have been a huge struggle to get the approval from execs.

[Edit: Grammar]

[throwaway6497]

For a second, a thought crossed my mind that Amazon is actively trying to change its external perception after the NY times article and is trying to cozy up to developers. I found this on Glassdoor. Apparently, it will take a long time for them to make their culture less toxic.

===From Glassdoor===

Cons

====

The management process is abusive, and I'm currently a manager. I've seen too much "behind the wall" and hate how our individual performers can be treated. You are forced to ride people and stack rank employees...I've been forced to give good employees bad overall ratings because of politics and stack ranking. Advice to Management Don't pretend that the recent NY Times article was all about "isolated incidents". The culture IS abusive and it WILL backfire once stock value starts to drop. I'm an 8 year veteran and I no longer recommend former peers to interview with Amazon.

== [Edit: Formatted to make it clear what was pulled from Glassdoor]

[eranation]

I just joined AWS ProServ and I really don't see any of these things. Pretty amazing team and one of the best work life balance I've seen in a tech company so far. I have 4 other friends who work at AWS and all seem very happy so far. I found the glass door comment and it seems to be from an engineering manager. I have a friend who manages one of the AWS products and he seems to be pretty happy.

I just joined so I really am not a statistically significant case but so far it's no where near what was in that NYT article.

Edit: I can't read apparently :) thanks heuving for clarifying and the commenter for reformatting

[inopinatus]

I suspect an inverse survivorship bias in the public representation of the company by ex-employees. Those of us with positive recollections tend to say very little, and (in my case at least) that's due to respect for Amazon's culture.

[jsolson]

Eh, I had a pretty good ride there myself. I believe every incident in that NY Times article happened.

If you were at Amazon for any length of time and didn't notice the existence of toxic teams and the random chance element of being hired into one of them, you weren't paying attention.

[eclipxe]

Concur

[hueving]

The GP pulled that from glassdoor.

[ryanobjc]

amazon management is more likely to optimize for optics than actually fix the "problem". In bezos's mind the problem is the NYT article and the external reputation. The work culture isnt an accident nor is it intended to be eventually fixed.

in my tenure at Amazon, I went from getting a 2 and PIP, then to a 4, then having my promotion held up because my VP didnt like me. Finally when I left to Google they offered SDE3, and another $15k a year. I didn't take that offer.

This was all back in the 2001-2006 timeframe. Sounds like nothing has changed.

[throwaway6497]

You know what I find unbelieveable! In spite of several people calling out that Amazon doesn't officially offer paternity leaves and that it sucks, Amazon leadership is simply doing nothing about it. Google/FB/Linkedin/Netflix/Microsoft have officially announced 3-unlimited month paternity leaves. It appears Amazon simply doesn't care about employees or the optics in this case. How do they officially justify their stand. We don't offer paternity leaves because - ???. WTF. Really

Update: They started offering 6 week paternity leave since Jan 2016. 20+ weeks is what other companies mentioned seem to offer.

[eclipxe]

"The company said it is now offering up to 20 paid weeks of leave, consisting of four weeks of paid pre-partum medical leave for pregnant employees, followed by 10 weeks of paid maternity leave and six weeks of paid parental leave. The latter is the new element and is also available to “all other new parents who have been at Amazon for a year or more,” the company said in a Nov. 2 e-mail to employees. "

[jvolkman]

http://www.bna.com/amazon-expands-parental-n57982063587/

[throwaway6497]

Thanks for pointing me to this. I didn't know they started offering 6 weeks leave regardless of Gender. 6 weeks feels half-hearted though but better than nothing.

[manigandham]

> take everything from open-source but don't actively give back

There's nothing wrong with this. There's no contract when using open-source and this is probably how 99% of people interact with it.

[barnacle_bill]

You really think Amazon has something to contribute? A popular thing to do at Amazon is take a complex open source package, wrap it in a web server and announce your team has launched a revolutionary new PAAS. Or take an someone else's web service and build a new web service on top of it with minimal new features and more restrictions. Then announce it and hope for Jeff visibility.