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Comment by shados | Hacker News Reader

Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones.

Sometimes, the people part of the bad ones wake up and start bitching, then you get this.

Google has great reviews, but it has its share of bad departments. It also has a lot of koolaid drinkers, so the people who work in those just bitch about it a lot to their friends and it never goes any further than that... Eventually someone will post a NYT article about it and make Google sounds totally horrible because of those localized issues, just like Amazon. Or maybe they'll just keep drinking the koolaid. Who knows!

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> Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones.

I don't buy this as an excuse. There are too many stories about Amazon culture to write them all off as a loud minority. Either Amazon has more bad departments than other companies or the bad ones are just worse. Either way I don't care, I don't want to work in a toxic environment and am not going to coin-flip that I get put into one of the good ones.

from the people I know who work there, yeah, there's a bit more bad ones than at other places for sure.

Though I blame it more on their slightly looser hiring practices. A lot of people get hired there that have no business working as engineers on hard problems anywhere. Then Amazon does what most tech companies seem to have trouble doing: can them (they should not have hired them in the first place, but still). Then they write stories about it complaining about how great they were and were canned.

> A lot of people get hired there that have no business working as engineers on hard problems anywhere. Then Amazon does what most tech companies seem to have trouble doing: can them (they should not have hired them in the first place, but still).

You're suggesting Amazon struggles not because of bad management (as almost every story suggests) but because their developers aren't skilled enough? That's a really strange claim on the face of it.

More people say Trump would make a great president than people say Amazon is a bad place to work. Tons of people saying something doesn't make it true.

That said, they totally have bad management. Like the majority of tech companies minus a couple of shiny ones. What I'm saying is that, aside from the fact they are a pretty visible target among tech companies with shitty management, one of their main issues is that they have very lax entry requirements, so not only people bitch about the real issues, they ALSO bitch about non-issues because a large segment of their devs suck. Yes.

Yeah, when I quit %80 of my team had already quit because our manager was terrible. They were not bad engineers. He literally was trained to be a prison guard, and was managing programmers as if they were prisoners.

Silly of you to claim amazon has lax hiring standards.

Ah the good ole vitimizing the victim routine. Touche.

Don't they have bar-raisers in the interviewing process anymore?

They do, but when your "bar raiser" in a programming interview is a non-technical guy whose degree is in criminal justice... he aint exactly raising the bar. Still amazon gets stronger engineers working there than they deserve. I think in large part because they don't have the negative reputation that they justly deserve.

> there are good/great departments and bad ones.

I find this to be true of the megacorps I've worked for but the problem at amazon seems to be the entire culture starting with Bezos.

There are definitely good/great teams at Amazon. However, a big problem is that the overarching corporate culture, corporate leadership, and corporate policies are toxic and corrosive to job satisfaction and healthy working environments. That means the good teams are much less numerous and also constantly under threat. It also means, as an individual, there aren't corporate level resources (HR, etc.) who are in any way invested in helping you advance your career or improve your work experience.

Funny because I haven't seen this level "bitching" from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies.

We are not talking about a single person here. There is a systemic issue it seems.

I have worked at Amazon and Microsoft. At Amazon the culture was abusive. At Microsoft I saw arrogance and incompetence and various other irritating things- what you get at any big company. But it's not malicious. Amazon is highly political and set up to be effectively malicious. (The other large companies I've worked for were more like Microsoft.)

The Amazon issue isn't just that they are large. IT's their culture, which is employee hostile.

> Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones.

Companies have processes and policies, I don't buy the "bad department" excuse. Of course, some have it better than others, but often bad working conditions are the result of policies put in place by the upper management.

A really large company also has trouble _consistently_ enforcing said policies. Different organizations interpret them in different ways.

So what's Amazon actually doing about those bad departments?

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