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Comment by belval | Hacker News Reader

Bingo, I've had a hard time reconciling the HN's perception of AWS SDE work and my job. I have people telling me that it's horrible, attrition rate, constant grind and endless oncalls. Yet I've never experienced any of those things. Of all the places I've worked at in Canada, AWS was the nicest and I highly recommend it.

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There are certainly some toxic teams out there, just like there are in any large org. I think an even bigger factor is the fact that Amazon is an enormous vertically-integrated monopoly that:

- abuses its market position to run competitors out of business

- mistreats its most vulnerable, low-level employees

For many of us, that's a moral dealbreaker. But there are certainly some great teams and interesting projects in the SDE space if that's what you want!

I wonder how much of this is the perception of Amazon warehouse workers being transferred over to Amazon technology workers. I've heard a ton of bad things about the former, but the folks I personally know who work at Amazon / AWS as tech workers all seem to be happy with it. Of course, how Amazon treats its warehouse workers is an indictment on the overall company, so I think I'd have a difficult time choosing to work there.

I don't think it started with warehouse workers, there was a famous NYT article talking about office workers at Amazon where entire teams would leave a meeting in tears:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

Among folks I know in Seattle, Amazon had a bad reputation as a burnout factory before those stories about the warehouses ever really came out.

I know two acquaintances that are SDEs that worked at Amazon and hated it. One of them was "forced" to work until 3-4 AM. His manager said to him, "How can you even think of sleeping right now?". Fortunately he found a new position at Microsoft. The other SDE feels like a cog in a machine and hates it so much he's going back to his home country.

You’re always a cog in the machine. If you think otherwise you’re being naive. No matter where you work, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, your company would send “thoughts and prayers” to your family and have an open req for you before your body got cold.

I definitely can’t imagine “being forced” to do anything at a job too often before I’m looking for another job.

But there was the suicide of an office worker in Seattle.

There are more than 3 suicides every day in Seattle, I don't see how 1 suicide of a person that happened to work for Amazon is really telling of anything.

I am not aware of anyone working in any other FAANG tech space attempting suicide after sending an email to the CEO about transferring teams.

https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-employee-email-note

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