this post was submitted on 30 Dec 2023
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I'll be honest: I love this. If you have ever known anyone who works at Amazon proper, (ie not in a warehouse or delivering), they are the most insufferable people I have ever met. Basically all of them are just caricatures of people who are masters of throwing buzzwords around that only they would possibly know because its some ridiculous 'Amazon' spin on a pretty standard concept in the tech industry.
Then 5 minutes later the conversation topic shifts to them being very, very concerned about some social issue or tragedy at home are abroad, and they will always be blissfully unaware of how what Amazon does as a company usually causes the thing theyre very worried about in an indirect or sometimes pretty direct way, you know like gentrification or rising income inequality, or food deserts or collapsing economies of quaint and charming towns they want to retire to at age 42, but can't because all the local shops collapsed due to everyone ordering everything from Amazon.
God help you if you point out the technicals of how most of their 'unique and innovative' software solutions basically always boil down to stealing other people's ideas, putting a slight twist on them to make them harder for users of their services to quit or enterprise partners to migrate, that you can do basically everything they offer for far far cheaper with libre code and 5% of the money Amazon is throwing at it.
Then, in private when they think no one else is listening, they giggle about how superior they are to other people because they work at Amazon, but they do it in a very muted, posh sort of way.
Then they'll also have a bunch of hairbrained side projects for making money on the side that revolve entirely around wither exploiting the poor very directly, or being paid an absurd amount of money to develop some simple software that one of their other socialite tech bros or gals can convince their idiot boss to pay waaaay too much for because 'you know this guy works at Amazon he really knows his stuff' is sufficient to convince most boomer VPs.
I fucking hate Amazonians.
At least with most MSFT employees you can at least rather quickly tell they fall either into the 'i am so jaded from my job this company is evil but it pays well' camp or the 'i am a megalomaniacal lunatic who will scream at people about things I dont actually understand when asked about why some process or paradigm is so complicated and counter productive' camp.
The irony is that you obviously think you're so superior to these people who you think sound pompous for, in your opinion, thinking they're superior.
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It's not that we didn't think it wouldn't affect us, it's that Amazon pays unfathomable, life changing amounts of money to their engineers. Don't get me wrong there are absolutely insufferable people there, but I'd wager most people are there for the money alone.
I was an intern at AWS, and my return offer for full time was $220k per year fresh out of college to do 40 hours work weeks with a 24/7 one-week on call once every two months. My sign on bonus (lump sum on first paycheck) was $60k, or almost the average yearly pay of a US citizen. Unless you came from money, you'd take that offer in a heartbeat. I grew up middle class so money like that was impossible to say no to. I knew what I was getting into, and I tried to get a comparable offer right up until my start date, but few companies will dump over $200k per year on a new grad software engineer.
I got out a few months ago, and it has been the best thing for my mental health. My anxiety is much more manageable, I don't have week long 24/7 on call shifts, I'm full remote, and my pay is only 10% less. With that said, I wouldn't change a thing if I went back in time. I have financial stability I didn't even know was possible, and it gave me a massive headstart in life.