| I used to work for Amazon, in a different department than the author, and I agree with this part. My old team employed two contractors "in perpetuity", to my protestations, and the reason wasn't monetary. Not directly anyways. At the time (circa 2009-10) upper management was freaking out about the economic downturn. Hiring caps were put in place, and every team was watched like a hawk for "unnecessary" headcount. Bringing in a full-timer was basically impossible, especially for a position that was "second class" (read: not a PM/TPM/SDE). Turns out though, you can hire contractors just fine so long as you could prove need - and this conveniently let you hire someone without exposing yourself in upper-managerial whack-a-mole. All in all, I learned a lot at Amazon, but it is a terribly managed company as a whole. There are good parts, there are bad parts, but much of the upper management is more interested in politics than the product/customer/company. This sort of systemic dysfunction was just one of many "quirks" of working there. Funnily enough, that same hiring cap was what eventually got me to leave. During this whole time the team had a need for more software engineering hands, but we were always turned down by management since other teams had more acute needs and needed to fit under the hiring cap. We built up a massive tech debt in the meantime as our maintenance and workload increased at breakneck pace. Eventually, a couple of years later, the hiring restrictions were relaxed and my team of 3 engineers opened up seven positions in the same month. I spent the next 3-4 months basically interviewing and sitting in meetings full-time. Then I decided I enjoyed coding more than interviewing people and explaining why interviewing people for 5 hours a day was causing nothing to get done. |
Some of Bezos's urges and reactions are good, some are bad. It's not too much unlike Microsoft.
As a species we can do a better job at running companies!