[amzn-throw]

That's not a conspiracy theory,

I work for Amazon - for a decade. I love it - best job I've ever had. And historically, while it's been a tough place to work, we've always been able to attract top talent. Partially - impactful work. Partially - stock doubles every year.

Well guess what happened in 2020/2021? Despite incredible perseverance through the Pandemic, the stock stopped doubling.

Meanwhile, Microsoft, Meta, and others figured out that they can poach our engineers with a promise of way more base salary, and a less intense work environment.

We've had SDE1s (Juniors) leave Amazon for Meta because they got more money than our SDE3s (Seniors) were getting.

SDE2s (Intermediate) looked at their status quo thought "I COULD bust my ass and get promoted to Senior...or I could go to Microsoft TODAY, get a Senior offer for what I'm already doing, and for more money than my raise would be". (No offense to any of my friends at Microsoft, but https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Microsoft&track=Softw... doesn't lie)

I've talked to a few acquaintances that have left and the universal responses is: "My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money".

How can anyone think there is anything wrong with that? You can't. You can speak about Mission and Impact, and some engineers will be attracted to that - I work on building Forever APIs in the AWS Cloud that gets millions of transactions per second. That to me is WAY more interesting than working on Chat app 15/18.

But for most people they just want to make money and live their lives. Fair enough!

The result? Even though Amazon has adapted somewhat by bumping salaries, they've still lost an ocean of people to nothing particularly ambitious or interesting. They're being parked by Microsoft/Google/Facebook to work on boring unimpactful projects so they can't help Amazon kick their asses.

Sometimes one way to make your house nicer is by breaking the windows in the neighbor's house.

[anonporridge]

Makes me wonder if junior developers are getting bait and switched.

They get pulled away by the lure of money into an environment that causes them to stagnate in their skill and career development, then companies pull the rug after only a few years of this high pay with layoffs. Now you've got hoards of developers with junior/mid skills who expect senior salaries and can't find jobs. Amazon doesn't want them anymore, because the new grad pipeline has plenty of people nearly as technically capable and much hungrier.

Only those who manage to recognize this short term period of plenty and rapidly stack investments toward financial independence will be alright in the end. Those who thought the raining cash would never end are in for a world of hurt.

On the bright side for Amazon, they get to trim off the employees who a) aren't paranoid enough about the viciousness of the business world, and b) are looking for a way to cruise and do minimal work.

[com2kid]

> They get pulled away by the lure of money into an environment that causes them to stagnate in their skill and career development

Microsoft is in an insane number of markets, far more than Amazon. While at Microsoft I did everything from compilers to robots to wearables, and if I talk to 10 Microsoft alumni they will have a job history of working on a completely disparate set of amazing technologies.

If you are bored at Microsoft change teams. You can find teams writing assembly, or C++, or C#, or Rust, or JavaScript, or Typescript. You can find teams working on browser engines, on ISO standards, or consumer tech.

Get bored with all of that, go work on video games for awhile.

[thenightcrawler]

I think Amazon would have a better rep if they didn't have a stack ranking system.

[amzn-throw]

Every competitive has a stack ranking system whether they admit it or not.

They put lipstick on a pig but everyone's getting ranked and the lowest performers getting weeded out.

The whole "People get fired even if they're doing a good job just by being a low performer on a strong team" is an edge case that happens INCREDIBLY rarely but when it does gets all the attention.

[Brystephor]

People are typically ranked by influence at companies as well. If you want to increase your influence, hire more people beneath you. Amazon managers specifically will be looked at for how good they are at hiring and how many people are beneath them to see if they're ready for the next level. At least this is what an Amazon EM told me.

[q7xvh97o2pDhNrh]

I definitely empathize.

I worked for a while at another company also known for being hyper-aggressive and a brutally difficult work environment -- probably the poster-child for that sort of thing, back then. I burned out hard after a couple years and ended up prioritizing "work-life balance" in my next job searches.

I landed at a 40-hour/week place where I usually work less than that. There's a strong appeal to working so little for a solidly decent salary. I have to remind myself often how good I have it, especially when others don't have jobs at all -- or they have to do back-breaking labor for table scraps.

But I agree it's also undeniably boring. I constantly find myself fantasizing about being back in the adrenaline-fueled environment of my last job. A large part of why I burned out was my own poor stress-management skills, and I like to imagine that I could probably perform well -- and excel -- in that sort of boiler-room environment now. (Especially if the comp could be what it was, too!)

On the other hand, I think all companies that have tried that aggressive approach have not made it sustainable. People burn out, or the whole company burns out, or both. It's tough to keep it going without lots of support and motivation (financial and otherwise).

The idealistic part of me likes to imagine it's theoretically possible to sustain such a thing, though -- a healthy, psychologically-safe place where people could work on ridiculously impactful things at a velocity and scale not available anywhere else. But it doesn't seem like anyone's cracked the code -- not my former employer, who faded away in a blaze of toxicity, and certainly not Amazon.

[golly_ned]

When I left Amazon, I never thought I'd miss it, but I'm finding this true for me as well:

"My job is so boring now. I miss Amazon. But It's not stressful (because there is no pressure on me), and I get paid more money"