I don't think Bezos has a technical background... I thought he was a hedge fund guy before moving out to Seattle.
So what can you say about this post posted here 3 years ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882. The blog post was down, archive.org didn't help also :). But as far as I remember the blogger was praising about bezos leadership skill. Also comments on HN supported that. I am reading HN for about 3 years. In first two years I never saw this kind of amazon bashing.In fact there was many post praising about amazon's internal culture. How on earth things change so dramatically in last one year. Is there some kind of PR war happening here? Honest question.
I had the fortunate opportunity to present to Bezos once. That guy is sharp as a tack - asked some very tough, but fair questions, all of which suggested he got what we were presenting and grokked at least the bulk of the technology underlying it. It was not at all a "uh huh that's nice go do it" scenario at all, and I was pleasantly surprised.
He may not write code, but I think it would be a mistake to claim he isn't a technologist.
If the rest of the company's management had half the managerial competence of Jeff Bezos, I'd run back to that company with arms wide open.
PR war? Check out Amazon Glassdoor reviews for engineers! This sentiment has been consistent. I am a little surprised that people were praising Amazon's culture here. This also explains I was down-voted in the past. One thing I really learnt well at Amazon was how not to treat your developers, and what mistakes you shouldn't make to build great, and long-lasting teams.
There is a PR war, and it's been waged by Amazon since the mid 1990s when they went public. They had terrible numbers, and so they reframed themselves as a "tech startup" to get in the dot com boom.... and it worked.
There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs. In fact, I saw an article the other day comparing the two.
It's nonsense. Bezos, in any other context, would not be a bad person. He's got good management skills, and he has a desire for keeping the quality bar high. But the problem is, he doesn't give a damn about other people.
He's got a very utilitarian viewpoint of other people. Every interaction with them, from his perspective, seems to be about how he can best profit from them. He sees people as resources to be exploited.
I'm a pure capitalist, I don't have a problem with trade, but he's more like a predator.
At least, this is what my interactions with him, and the culture he created at Amazon tell me.
You can sustain such an illusion only for so long, however. In seattle, as far back as at least 1998, everyone know that Amazon was a terrible place to work and an even worse place to do business with (as a supplier, etc.)
I knew that, but I didn't want to believe it, when I took the job.
I do accept responsibility for the stupidity that I displayed in doing that, and in sticking around after I should have left as others have pointed out. I could have avoided this, and should have, by simply holding myself in higher esteem... and never taken that job.
> There has been, and continues to be, massive propaganda efforts from Amazon to try and pitch them to people, and to position Bezos as a visionary in the style of Steve Jobs.
I can't speak authoritatively since I didn't work on that component, but Amazon takes the integrity of these things very seriously. I would be extremely surprised if any of these widgets are "tainted", as it were.
For all the crap I've thrown at Amazon in this thread, if there's one thing they are clean of it's working against their customers. It is, by a very long shot, the most customer centric big company I've ever seen.
> Amazon takes the integrity of these things very seriously [...] if there's one thing they are clean of it's working against their customers.
I'm pretty convinced this is true in general. I just couldn't help wondering if this one case would be a little too tempting for them. But absolutely, it could be completely on the level.
So what can you say about this post posted here 3 years ago. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=465882. The blog post was down, archive.org didn't help also :). But as far as I remember the blogger was praising about bezos leadership skill. Also comments on HN supported that. I am reading HN for about 3 years. In first two years I never saw this kind of amazon bashing.In fact there was many post praising about amazon's internal culture. How on earth things change so dramatically in last one year. Is there some kind of PR war happening here? Honest question.
Edit: found archive.org snapshot http://web.archive.org/web/20090211060734/http://blog.layer8... .