I think what they really mean is "30-hour workweek while being physically present in the office". I would find it difficult to believe that employees wouldn't continue working from home under pressure from management or simply because of tight timelines.
Amazon is a sweatshop. The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours.
All this is doing is giving people more freedom to burn themselves out at home, while further blurring the lines between work and life and throwing in a 25% pay cut as the cherry on top.
It's like the opposite of Google campus life, but with the same goal.
I wouldn't agree with this broad generalization. I work in Alexa and the work environment on my team is pretty awesome. Lots of freedom to try new things, good work life balance, and generally a high level of respect for engineers. I turned down Google to come here and I have no regrets (though not to imply that Google isn't equally awesome).
I'd have to disagree. I've been at Amazon for 2 years, and while it's not a sweatshop, it's definitly a challenging environment where I know of no one who works an exact 40h week at all times.
There's zero buffer to slack off, a less productive day is followed by a longer one.
I like working at Amazon. I like the challenge, the projects, the people I work with are fun and smart, but it is not a place where you can easily balance your life for a long period of time. I've never met someone past the 5 year mark that does not define his life as an Amazon employee first, everything second.
You can try to keep yourself at 40h, but eventually it will hurt you, it'll show in your review, it'll hold back your promotion, and if you're unlucky enough to have a management switch at a time where the team is expected to perform, you might even lose your job. I've seen it happen.
Now, maybe in some teams things are different, but in my 2 years, it's been my impression that this is the culture here. You either like it, as I do, I enjoy the rush and the busyness, makes my days fly by. Or you don't and you leave.
I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse.
> I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse.
I work 40 hours per week on average. For the 20 years I have been in the industry.
I solved some problems in the shower, but I also slack away on my desk sometimes.
Hi there! Sorry I didn't get a chance to reply to this earlier.
So my basic response to that is "it depends". I have previously been in a different team at Amazon and that team definitely had much less room for slack. If you didn't push yourself hard, you probably couldn't get promoted there. But then again, they also had issues with attrition.
The culture in teams can vary quite a bit at Amazon. I think it mostly comes down to the leadership. More than any other "big company" I've seen, Amazon emphasizes ownership. As a VP (and even as a manager, though to a much lesser extent), you get nearly full freedom to define your team's culture and set the direction of your product. So yeah, I don't think every team has a great culture within Amazon; a lot of it depends on the culture defined by your leadership team.
In regards to your last point:
> "I'd be curious to know though, and be honest, you've really ever only worked 40h weeks? You havnt logged in on a weekend or an evening, stayed longer on an Thursday, checked your mails when off work? Not ever? Ignoring on call time offcourse."
Most weeks I probably put in a bit more than 40 hours. Maybe closer to 45 or 50 hours. That's the average. Have I put in more occasionally? Of course. Do I sometimes check emails on a weekends or evenings? Yep, of course. But there have also been times when I've come to work at noon or left by 2pm if I needed to do something else. And, 90% of the time, I don't respond to emails outside of work hours. That doesn't feel very much like a "sweatshop" to me.
I've worked at other companies besides Amazon and I have plenty of friends who work at Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and Apple. My friends at Microsoft will often put in 50 to 60 hours during a live site outage or near a product release. I have friends at Google who check their email on evenings and weekends. One of my best friends is at Facebook and does the same. I know less about Apple, but I've heard their culture is pretty intense. So, in that sense, I don't feel my team's work culture is any worse.
Overall, I like my team and I think that credit goes upwards through my management chain. Good managers make a huge difference. Perhaps Amazon needs to do a better job in ensuring teams are more consistent in creating a good culture across the company.
It all started with the warehouse worker complaints, which were general complaints that any warehouse worker will have and not really egregious comparatively. This fed into a media narrative and causes sites like that to pop up.
When startups ask a lot of their employees its showered in praise. When Elon Musk demands 100 work weeks, people are in awe of how great he is. When Nest does the same people squint because Google bought them.
I know a lot of Googlers, most put in ~50-60 hour weeks but get free lunch so its ok I guess? Same with Apple.
A lot of the stories on that site are from corporate, not the warehouses.
Also I know a lot of Googlers as well (hard not to living in Mountain View), and they work roughly 40 hour weeks in general. It is night and day between Amazon and Google based on the stories that are coming out from current & former employees. I've heard issues about Apple as well, but nothing on the level of the stories coming out of Amazon.
Even in Alexa there are some teams that are being pushed too hard. I work for Alexa as well and there is plenty of burn out and "sweatshop" teams in our org. It really varies a lot from team to team and what that team's role is.
Haha, no. I get the impression from his post history that he works for an ASR/NLU team. They tend to have a more reasonable workload than some of the other teams.
Exactly. Most of the people who say "Oh its not that bad at Amazon" are white collared workers who are living in their bubble and don't know the hardships of different class of employees.
The perils of non-white-collared workers are of little relevance when discussing whether or not a company is a good workplace for white-collar workers. When you go for an interview about a programming position, you probably don't ask your potential employer about working conditions of security contractors or people working at company's factory floor in another town.
Most of the white collar people here have never been to a town that Amazon opened a warehouse in and actually talked to people there. I have, and reception is generally quite good. Anti-Amazonism is something I associate with upper middle class people.
Good for you! I am glad to see others supporting this because I also feel Amazon isn't a sweatshop. Every big company has a bad apple or few in the bunch and those are the loudest criers. The great teams (majority) don't complain because they have no complaints! Keep up the good work on Alexa!
I work 40 hour weeks at Amazon as an SDE and never feel pressured to put in more. I don't take my work with me. It varies by team ofc I'm sure there are bad ones.
2 years and I've gotten a promotion and gotten no comments about the hours I work in any performance review so I guess those hours aren't considered bad in my org at least.
I've worked at places exactly like this. You go to the office, get work done, get home after an 8+ hour day...and then work until midnight. It's exhausting and honestly not healthy. I gained a majority of my current weight doing that and went to the hospital twice for what ended up being severe anxiety (physically thought I was having a heart attack; worst pain ever).
I now work at a much better place where I feel more valued and my work life balance is simply amazing in comparison.
>The expectation is salaried employees put in ungodly hours.
I am not US based and I've always wondered about this. In virtually every other western country, it doesn't matter if you're "salaried" or not - your employer is legally prohibited from not paying overtime. If your employment contract says you work 9-5, then anything outside those hours must be compensated, often at a higher rate (1.2x-1.5x is not uncommon in many European countries).
In the context of the US labor law, does being "salaried" functionally equal "being required to work unlimited overtime"?
There's two classes of employees in US labor law, exempt and non-exempt. It's called exempt/non-exempt because a class of employees is exempt from the Fair Labor Standards Act which defines rules for overtime.
To be exempt you have to be paid on a salary basis, you have to make over a certain wage (which, until a few months ago, was a comically low $23,600/yr), and have certain job duties.
These job duties that are required are defined in the FLSA. There's executive employees, administrative employees, professional employees, computer employees, and outside sales employees. The text is here: http://www.ecfr.gov/cgi-bin/text-idx?tpl=/ecfrbrowse/Title29...
In general, most salaried employees do not regularly work unpaid overtime in the US. For example, the one time I ever worked overtime in my software engineering career it was paid overtime (paid at my normal salary). I had a friend who was an (I think?) accountant and she had to work on her vacation otherwise she'd fall behind. Some workplaces are abusive and the law allows it for some classes of employees but it's not the norm outside of the bay area software industry.
The US has overtime laws as well, but certain types of job are exempt from them. I don't know all the details of the law but in practice, basically all white-collar jobs are exempt.
And Jeff Bezos is proud of this culture. He turned sweatshop definition (watch Recode interview) around into a good sign of a culture they want to promote (cost cutting).
While I would not like such workplace, it sort of makes sense. It's similar to what Elon Musk said once - if you work more then everyone else, over time it becomes noticeable. Perhaps Musk shops reward you better?
