Things I've had to buy myself to work better at Amazon:
1. A better chair (Steelcase Leap). They give us some shitty chair that's barely adjustable.
2. A second monitor. Yup, they give us one monitor.
3. My own whiteboard markers.
4. A better keyboard. (This hardly counts, though, since I have odd keyboard preferences, and the default keyboards are fine).
Things I've yet to buy but need to:
1. A new & larger hard drive. I got a 140GB drive in my dev desktop. I regularly work with various data packages over 10GB in size, and I need multiple versions deployed at once. This quickly eats up my available space. Haven't done this yet because I'll lose a day or more to reimaging.
2. More ram. They only give us 4GB.
We don't get a free Prime membership. No free kindles. No free AWS accounts for personal projects. Only $100 off per year at Amazon.com. And let's not forget the obscene cost of lunch in South Lake Union (around $10).
One of Amazon's core tenets is "frugality" but they're going to have to start spending more on equipment for devs or they won't be able to hire anyone. Hiring is hard enough as it is at Amazon, and we are going to lose good devs to organizations that value them more.
(I know, I know, First World Problems. My employer only gives me money instead of free things.)
I used to be at Amazon, I hear you on all the frustration, and it's amazing how much more productive I am now when many of these pain points are removed.
I seriously have no idea where Amazon finds their office chairs. Nobody's asking for Aerons, but the chairs Amazon puts in their offices are worse than my chair at home I got at IKEA. It's like someone went out there and spent effort finding the worst, least comfortable, least adjustable chairs they could manage.
Where I'm working now there's a firm belief that if you need gear to do your job, just buy it and expense it. I've never been challenged on any tech expenditure, including a 30" Cinema display, something that would be the height of luxury (and entirely unheard of) at Amazon.
For those not familiar with Amazon, they do provide whiteboard markers - you can fetch them from the copy room at any time, along with all manners of office supplies. For some reason though, nobody ever orders enough whiteboard markers, and pretty much whenever someone restocks the copy room the markers are gone in a matter of hours. It's a frustrating part of Amazon life to raid nearby conference rooms so you can actually have your meeting, or when someone else wants to jump in on the whiteboard you have to hunt around to find another color. This really is a pain point that shouldn't exist. It's a fucking whiteboard marker for crying out loud. Facilities also insists on stocking those rainbow-palette packs of whiteboard markers, which means every pack of markers you run across will be full of the colors nobody uses (yellow?!) and the black/blue/red will always be gone.
It's not really that frustrating while you're there, but in hindsight I'm not sure how I put up with that. It's such an unnecessary waste of engineering time.
> "Things I've yet to buy but need to:"
They just need to give devs new desktops. Before I left my dev desktop had a 140GB drive, with 4GB RAM, and a Celeron CPU. A full build of my code base took 15 minutes when on any modern $700 desktop it'd be a small fraction of it. I'm pretty sure Amazon has lost enough money on my engineer-twiddling-thumbs-while-code-compiles lost time to buy a room full of top-end desktops. It's the most puzzling, absurd frugality strategy ever.
I've worked at a number of code shops before, and Amazon is the only place (and the largest company, puzzlingly) where the hardware was actively, and massively holding back my productivity as an engineer.
When I was at IBM, they gave us ~$200 to spend on office things (Buy on Demand, I think they called it). I ordered a $160 17" LCD to replace the 70 lb CRT that felt like it was giving me a sun tan. My manager called me into her office and explained that she was canceling my order, because if _I_ got that monitor, then everyone else would want one.
There was also the time my officemate decided to order supplies for the three of us. She was questioned for requisitioning 3 pens. Because she could only use one at a time.
It's ironic that most of the main article's links go to amazon, especially the very first which points at a big box of whiteboard markers. (The warehouses are probably on the other side of the world, but still.)
Sounds like the pendulum has officially swung too far the other way. Lunches, Aeron chairs, top of the line computers, free employee shipping... all used to be provided for free.
That went away with the dot-com bust, and despite their current success, they didn't bring the useful components back (I never minded not having my own door-desk).
Wow. That is idiotic. At my company, we give all the developers credit cards and tell them to buy what they need. But I try to beat them to it, as I'd rather they focus on coding.
E.g., last week I noticed a couple of developers trying to get a wireless mouse working; they couldn't find charged batteries. Time lost, 5-10m each. So I ordered a dozen sets and two chargers. Cost, maybe $40. (Thanks, Prime!) The opportunity cost of developer time is large (our rule of thumb is $250/hr), so most purchases (including all those you mention) are obvious wins.
Things I've had to buy myself to work better at Amazon:
1. A better chair (Steelcase Leap). They give us some shitty chair that's barely adjustable.
2. A second monitor. Yup, they give us one monitor.
3. My own whiteboard markers.
4. A better keyboard. (This hardly counts, though, since I have odd keyboard preferences, and the default keyboards are fine).
Things I've yet to buy but need to:
1. A new & larger hard drive. I got a 140GB drive in my dev desktop. I regularly work with various data packages over 10GB in size, and I need multiple versions deployed at once. This quickly eats up my available space. Haven't done this yet because I'll lose a day or more to reimaging.
2. More ram. They only give us 4GB.
We don't get a free Prime membership. No free kindles. No free AWS accounts for personal projects. Only $100 off per year at Amazon.com. And let's not forget the obscene cost of lunch in South Lake Union (around $10).
One of Amazon's core tenets is "frugality" but they're going to have to start spending more on equipment for devs or they won't be able to hire anyone. Hiring is hard enough as it is at Amazon, and we are going to lose good devs to organizations that value them more.
(I know, I know, First World Problems. My employer only gives me money instead of free things.)
Edit: Formatting