Mohammad Husain, former Software Engineer at Amazon.com (2011-2015)
1) Amazon does business process *really really well*. Management does not give a shit about employee happiness or work-life balance. The workplace environment is toxically frugal (although this has been changing lately, due to the Facebook office opening next door recently.. thanks Zuck!). Combined, these lead to incredibly high attrition, all the time. But, the company is very good at managing people leaving all the time. This means reorgs, shuffling, new VPs, etc. Services keep running, and who can argue with that?
2) It has a core of incredibly loyal smart people who don't really care to leave. Seriously, I've had conversations with some highly intelligent engineers in my time at the company who could easily be very senior at Google/Facebook/etc. and they enjoy having their niche at Amazon, their problem space, and simply chugging away. They're paid literally about 3x-4x lower than their counterparts at other companies (seriously - I sacked up, moved to Mountain View and got a real tech job and am now making more than my old skip-level manager, even adjusting for increasing cost of living, for chrissake) but they just don't give a shit.
3) The internal service-oriented architecture is highly decoupled, which means that mediocre teams with high attrition usually (I'm looking at you, DW and parts of FCS) have isolated impact. Coral is a *fucking awesome* services framework, bar none, and I am working at Another Big Tech Co. now that you all know and use and it doesn't come close (the Yegge rant was prescient). Coupled with (2) above, it means that it doesn't matter if your people are leaving because, again, their impact is isolated and the smart blindly loyal people will pick up the slack.
4) Bezos is brilliant. After Jobs' passing, the best CEO in the world today, bar none. He's also a supreme douchebag who is a pain in the ass to work with (sometimes for no apparent reason - seriously, talk to some of the 10-year people who used to bump into him). But he has made serious strategic bets that are going to pay off big and eat whole industries. AWS. Kindle. Amazon MP3. AmazonFresh. Amazon Prime. Amazon Studios (bye-bye, MPAA and Hollywood, after this shit gets traction...) And of course the core Amazon.com website itself. Frugality and customer-centrism executed well are a fucking deadly combination.
Summary: Amazon sucks to work at, but it's going to eat everything and there's nothing you can do about it.
