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by jxub 3045 days ago
Yes, I've also been curious about how the rainforest company can get away with treating its employees supposedly not as well as other top tech companies, and other than AWS, I don't know of any special tech they've got going on for them (maybe the stock options carrot is the materialistic but true answer).

Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size.

3 comments

>Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size.

The amzn [0], aws[1], and awslabs[2] github pages combined have 500+ repositories. AWS contributed back to the Linux kernel[3] and Xen[4] for Spectre and Meltdown related things. There are other projects large enough that they are under their own page, like Blox[5]. There's been plenty of others I've stumbled across randomly - this list isn't meant to be exhaustive or even close to it, but just what I personally can think of off the top of my head.

(Disclaimer: I work at AWS, and contribute to an open source project as a portion of my job. This isn't an official post or anything of that nature, and opinions expressed are my own - I'm just a random dude that wants to share that a lot of cool open source stuff happens at Amazon/AWS!)

[0] https://github.com/amzn [1] https://github.com/aws [2] https://github.com/awslabs [3] https://cdn.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v4.x/ChangeLog-4.15.... [4] https://lists.xenproject.org/archives/html/xen-devel/2018-01... [5] https://github.com/blox/blox

Thanks, wasn't aware of that trove of information!
> Also, surprisingly, both Amazon and Apple aren't really known for prolific OSS contributions according to their size.

I can't speak to Amazon, but Apple has quite a few prolific OSS contributions. Off the top of my head there's llvm/clang, cups, swift, GCD, and webkit.

But...but those aren't JS frameworks or used by web devs, so obviously they don't count! /s
I think if they were located in the bay area they wouldn't be able to get away with treating their employees so poorly. It's all about the supply and demand for labor. Outside the bay area, the labor supply and demand are much more inbalance whereas the bay area has limited labor supply due to the housing crisis. On the penninsula there are 4 jobs for every 1 resident, this gives workers a much larger bargaining power.
The Bay area (outside of the bay area) isn't even known for good working conditions. At least if I ask my friends they have a bad picture of it. It's much easier going in other parts of the country. Seattle is just a bit worse.