My Time at Amazon
Posted by vinhnx 17 hours ago
Comments
Comment by rvz 17 hours ago
They are the worst of all companies to join [0] and always have tight profit margins every year, meaning they need to find ways to eventually increase that and have to lay off at least 10,000+ employees out of necessity on top of the constant politicking just for that promotion to survive the next layoff.
They are about to cut another 14K+ employees because they can [1] and want 30,000 jobs cut in total (For comparison, that is 6x OpenAI, 0.95x of Nvidia and 0.38x of Meta employees) this year.
There's 1.6M+ of you joining a forever squid game to survive elimination when the company openly wants to replace their (warehouse) workers with robots AND the (corporate) rest with AI agents + humans, meaning an eventual reduction of human labor to increase their margins.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45774189
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-plans-...
Comment by 46493168 6 hours ago
If you're someone who comes from the American Hinterlands [0], i.e., not a born-and-bred Coastal Elite, this could be the difference between barely surviving and being able to help your extended family survive. If you can keep off the hedonic treadmill yourself.
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28...
Comment by sometimes_all 4 hours ago
After my first few years of experience, I specifically started filtering out companies which have people from Amazon in a leadership role. Their work culture is poison, and I'd rather not join than see myself become a zombie for the next couple of years. This has helped me stay sane in my career, but there still are some early scars that remain.
I explicitly do not believe that you can "make it anywhere" if you survive some brutal culture, and that surviving a few years in that place will bless you with the ability to "live life at another company". Why ruin my health and sanity when I can directly join that other company? This glorification of bad environments needs to stop.
Comment by 46493168 3 hours ago
Well, that’s just the idea. Some people can only get their start by joining Amazon and not the other company.
Also, I wouldn’t call Amazon’s environment “bad.” It suits some people for some amount of time, clearly, or they wouldn’t do it.