[cromano]

I've been a developer at Amazon for about 3 years, and I've stayed for the following reasons:

- Reasonable work-life balance. In my 3 years here, there have only been a few "crunch times" the whole team has had to work weekends. We viewed it as a failure in planning and conducted a post-mortem to understand what went wrong.

- Nice people. Honestly, I've never experienced poor treatment like that which was highlighted in this article and the NYT exposé. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but in my experience, Amazon has no singular culture. It's more like a federation of start-ups with distinct cultures; if one team isn't a good fit for you, it's pretty easy to switch.

- Competitive pay. This is partly due to timing (the coincidental soaring of the stock price when I joined), but in general, my experience has been that Amazon offers strong stock compensation.

- Fascinating, hard problems. Pick _any_ specialty within software engineering or data science, and there's a team within Amazon at the forefront. I'm always learning, and I never feel like the smartest guy in a room. I get to work on "moonshot" projects that few other companies would have the resources to finance or the risk tolerance to stomach.

I'm not writing this comment to brag or imply my experience is representative of everyone at Amazon. This is just one perspective to even out the chorus of voicing saying it's a terrible place to work. In my experience, it's the polar opposite.

[gozzoo]

I don't see how this is relevant to the article or the parrent comment. You are just hijacking a popular thread to plug a praise for your employer.

[rurounijones]

>> Why do you stay?

> I've stayed for the following reasons:

The parent puts the question before the quote so that might be a bit confusing

[throgdor]

All the things he said are pretty cookie cutter responses you'll hear echoed time and time again from Amazonians. They aren't original thoughts, and I wouldn't expect that this poster would respond 100% honestly if he did have concerns about his job as his profile easily links him to a real id, and Amazon doesn't take kindly to criticisms from NDA'd employees. For more context there's usually a training involved to be able to post online about Amazon, and it is explicit in not voicing criticisms.

[deanCommie]

Maybe they're cookie-cutter because they're true.

Amazon is not for everybody, and not everyone figures out how to identify bad teams and avoid them, and they have a bad time.

But if you have decent EQ, some backbone, and good technical skills, you can work on solving really hard problems with awesome peers that disproportionately do the right thing without being asked (because we cluster together).

[dbliss]

I work for Amazon, but I don't speak on behalf of Amazon. The social media policy boils down to mostly common sense, don't share confidential information and make it clear you're not speaking for Amazon. No where does it say don't criticize Amazon. Be respectful of each other, our customers, partners, and others (including our competitors). You can criticize with out being disrespectful.