<story><title>Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gopalv</author><text>&amp;gt; Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company&lt;p&gt;Amazon and Oracle couldn&amp;#x27;t be more different in this point of view.&lt;p&gt;Amazon&amp;#x27;s predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer.&lt;p&gt;Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy.&lt;p&gt;The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon, while the consumers see instant access servers on EC2, Amazon Go for lunch breaks in a city or One hour shipping of diapers.&lt;p&gt;In comparison, Oracle seems to be going after those who pay them already.</text></item><item><author>AtlasBarfed</author><text>Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption.&lt;p&gt;Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO&amp;#x2F;CTO level of &amp;quot;nobody ever got fired for IBM&amp;quot; level of reasoning.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. Great that it took ten years to reach that level of agreement, now hybrid cloud needs to take over the grey haired CIO &amp;#x2F; CTO level.&lt;p&gt;Long live Postgresql!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwaway981211</author><text>I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT.&lt;p&gt;Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes.&lt;p&gt;Is Amazon predatory to its employees? Some organizations are - yeah absolutely. Are we worse than other companies I worked prior to Amazon? No. Does that mean it’s okay? No. I’m just saying there’s a public perception of Amazon being at the deepest level of hell and it’s not true.&lt;p&gt;We absolutely burn people out. We overwork employees. We don’t promote them when we should. We try to find the tiniest bit pick reasons not to promote. We practice stupidity and call it frugality? You’re an engineer making $200K total comp a year? Your computer doesn’t work and is crashing? Oh too bad - we won’t replace it for you. Yeah I mean that kind of fucking stupidity.&lt;p&gt;We encourage everyone to automate their role so we can replace those folks with college hires.&lt;p&gt;Amazon is not a place you can have a long career at. You’ll have to jump teams or orgs every couple years and eventually you’ll get tired enough that you learn to manage upwards yourself and stick with a manager that you can manage.</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon’s Consumer Business Turned Off Final Oracle Database</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/migration-complete-amazons-consumer-business-just-turned-off-its-final-oracle-database/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>gopalv</author><text>&amp;gt; Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company&lt;p&gt;Amazon and Oracle couldn&amp;#x27;t be more different in this point of view.&lt;p&gt;Amazon&amp;#x27;s predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors, while being mostly great towards the customer.&lt;p&gt;Everything from their warehouse workers with timers, the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy.&lt;p&gt;The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon, while the consumers see instant access servers on EC2, Amazon Go for lunch breaks in a city or One hour shipping of diapers.&lt;p&gt;In comparison, Oracle seems to be going after those who pay them already.</text></item><item><author>AtlasBarfed</author><text>Amazon is a slightly annoying company that I rarely root for, but Oracle is a predatory company whose customer relations strategy seems to actively involve litigating them as a default assumption.&lt;p&gt;Amazon is considered a paragon of IT, so their expulsion of Oracle is a useful tool at the CIO&amp;#x2F;CTO level of &amp;quot;nobody ever got fired for IBM&amp;quot; level of reasoning.&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, AWS is becoming the new IBM in that reasoning. Great that it took ten years to reach that level of agreement, now hybrid cloud needs to take over the grey haired CIO &amp;#x2F; CTO level.&lt;p&gt;Long live Postgresql!</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>whack</author><text>&amp;gt; &lt;i&gt;Amazon&amp;#x27;s predatory instincts are pointed inwards and downwards, towards employees and vendors... the crying software engineers and all other things I hear about them are about running an internally facing extraction economy... The squeeze is being put on those who draw a paycheck (or at least, a profit) from Amazon&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I know 10+ software engineers at Amazon, including people in their early 30s making close to half-a-million in yearly income, and people working 10-6 M-F. Most of them are very happy with their careers, and I don&amp;#x27;t know a single person who describes their work-life the way you just did.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not disputing that horror stories exist and that some people are being given bad reviews and are being managed out. However, there is a severe disconnect between the median Amazon employee&amp;#x27;s experience, and public perception.</text></comment>