I think what Amazon is doing with AWS is a superb technical achievement and positions them well for the future. It's all very impressive, even as Google gets more mainstream attention.
There's one thing that holds my admiration back, though: I've read in a few places that Amazon is not a great place to work. Would those of you here who have firsthand knowledge, or have friends who do, care to comment on this?
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about free massages or foosball tables or any of the stuff in that endlessly-recycled article about "fun" workspaces we've all read a hundred times. I want to know what the culture is. Is Amazon a place where creative people have respect and are free to do great work? Is it a place where great hackers would want to be? That kind of thing.
I've been at Amazon for 6.5 years. People work pretty hard and are recognized and rewarded accordingly. There's still a startup feel to the company. This is manifested in the intensity with which we work and in our rather frugal approach to spending money on fancy office furniture and other frivolous things.
There's a really deep technological core to the company. I remember an occasion which took place just a few weeks after I started there which really made this clear to me. An engineer benchmarked an "a" and a "b" distribution of the same version of the Linux kernel. "a" was 5% faster and he took the time to figure out exactly why this was the case and to see why this had happened. When you are running hundreds or thousands of servers,a 5% performance degradation can alter your cost structure significantly.
We have fun by doing great work. There may be a foosball table or two somewhere in the organization, but by and large our energy is focused on doing a great job for our customers.
Every company likes to claim that they are customer-driven. That is truly the case at Amazon. If you do something heroic to help a customer in need, you may even be recognized in front of your peers at your team's next all-hands gathering.
Creative problem solving is encouraged, but it is most likely going to happen within the space of your team.
Reasoned, fact-driven arguments prevail in meetings and in the overall decision-making process. You won't get too far with an argument that starts out with "I am guessing that..." If you do your homework, collect up the facts, and have genuine numbers to back up your hunches, you will do great.
As a developer you will be on pager duty 1/N of the time, where N is the number of developers on your team. After some piece of code wakes you up at 3 AM twice in the same week, you'll figure out that it is a weak link in the chain and you'll figure out how to strengthen it. This continuous improvement process helps us to make our systems more and more reliable over time. Of course, sometimes the fix is to rearchitect. Figure it out, put the plan together and make it happen.
We do have a "get it done" approach. There's nowhere to hide and no room for slackers or pretenders. Working in our environment tends to weed out those kinds of people pretty quickly.
Benefits are good and once you've proven yourself the pay is good too.
Like I said, I have been at Amazon for 6.5 years. I am still thrilled to come in to work every day (when I'm not traveling or working from home, that is).
Sound good? Track me down and I'll tell you about our open positions...
Fair enough, though I think we have to put an evangelist discount on everything you say.
Based on what I've observed, I have no trouble believing that Amazon is extraordinarily customer-focused and still has a startup feel. That's not quite what I'm asking about, though. I'm trying to figure out whether good hackers are esteemed by the culture or downtrodden by it (as they are in most organizations, and were in most startups of Amazon's generation). Not because I'm looking for a job, but because I'm interested in testing a pet theory.
I'm a researcher. I have friends who've had research-y jobs at Amazon (I don't think they have a separate research division, like Google and unlike Microsoft/Yahoo.) I've heard uniformly negative opinions from them. It could be just that research is given short shrift, but it probably also reflects on the overall culture.
No no, it's much more interesting to read about what color shirt the guy wears. I mean, that's pretty important, and is clearly the key to Amazon's success.
I am also impressed with Amazon's other offerings, like the order fulfillment service. As a programmer, it bugs me to see people solving the same simple problem again and again; in this case filling a warehouse with packages, and paying someone to stick a mailing label on it. With Amazon, that problem is solved -- they store your stuff and send it out, freeing you up to do something that's never been done before.
The "cloud" services are the same. Instead embarking on a year-long project to build Yet Another Data Center, you can just bust out your credit card and start uploading your files.
There's one thing that holds my admiration back, though: I've read in a few places that Amazon is not a great place to work. Would those of you here who have firsthand knowledge, or have friends who do, care to comment on this?
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about free massages or foosball tables or any of the stuff in that endlessly-recycled article about "fun" workspaces we've all read a hundred times. I want to know what the culture is. Is Amazon a place where creative people have respect and are free to do great work? Is it a place where great hackers would want to be? That kind of thing.