"On the contrary, the way Amazon treats their employees does harm them substantially, they just haven't paid the price visibly to the public (or quite as hard as they will, eventually)."
If it hasn't hit them yet, it might after the rant.
Given the Dilbert Employer From Hell publicity generated by the rant and the subsequent discussion, I'd say that they might have trouble filling in for the people that leave. Heck, even some of their current employees might read the rant and realize how crappy their current situation is.
Off on a tangent:
"I couldn't even run multiple dev environments on it, like I had to for my JOB, and building my code took 12 full minutes, instead of, say, 3."
Local dev environments? My current workstation has a mere 2GB memory and an Athlon X2 which was all the rage in 2005 :) The builds fly, because they are delegated to a compile farm. The added benefit is that I don't have to muck with the build tools settings.
Locally in Seattle, Amazon has a really bad rep. Only on places like hackernews where everyone is excited about AWS (despite its many, huge, annoying flaws, remember when ebs when down - AGAIN?) do people not realize this.
Amazon has lost a lot of key tech talent, it's been happening since about 2006 when the economy picked up a lot more.
Seems like only people in Seattle, and Ex-Amazonians have a clue about working for Amazon. Don't be surprised if HN trolls down-vote your comments out of sheer ignorace.
I think a large part of it is that traditionally companies that are back working environments also produce crap for products.
But yet Amazon, product-wise, is fast-moving, innovative, and often right on the money when it comes to what customers want. It's a lot like Apple in that regard.
So it becomes difficult to grok how this seemingly innovative company that has its finger on the pulse of retail (and beyond) can become such a doggish place to work.
It's the ultimate siren call isn't it. It took me two years before I decided throwing myself at that brick wall every day wasn't worth it, cool products or otherwise.
If it hasn't hit them yet, it might after the rant.
Given the Dilbert Employer From Hell publicity generated by the rant and the subsequent discussion, I'd say that they might have trouble filling in for the people that leave. Heck, even some of their current employees might read the rant and realize how crappy their current situation is.
Off on a tangent:
"I couldn't even run multiple dev environments on it, like I had to for my JOB, and building my code took 12 full minutes, instead of, say, 3."
Local dev environments? My current workstation has a mere 2GB memory and an Athlon X2 which was all the rage in 2005 :) The builds fly, because they are delegated to a compile farm. The added benefit is that I don't have to muck with the build tools settings.