This reads a lot like a PR piece for Amazon, with most "answers" promoting Amazon nearly like a press release and very little negative points.
A few sentences that stand out:
> If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.
> Q: I know there have been a number of collective actions among Amazon warehouse workers around the issue of safety during the pandemic.
> A: (a series of measures implemented at Amazon)
> Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.”
> Q: Has Ring brought Amazon into much closer relationships with law enforcement?
> A: it would really surprise me if any of those relationships were the result of the Ring acquisition [...] I think Amazon also kind of backed into that situation. We only realized after the fact that we had all this data about who was coming to people’s front doors.
This absolutely has to be a PR piece, or one filtered through a marketing layer of some sort. The only thing that threw me for a loop are the negative points, but this could just be a clever ploy to further the deception. The company we pay to do marketing has all kinds of ridiculous tricks they propose, so I wouldn't be surprised if this is a thing.
Speaking as someone who worked in the PR sector. This reads like an article crafted to influence public opinion by polish the truthful elements while downplaying their flaws.
It's been established that "selective whistleblowing" articles are deemed to be more trustworthy than official marketing statements. Therefore, it would be foolish for corporates to not exploit that to their advantage.
This seemed like a fairly normal level of knowledge to me, honestly. There's a lot of public information about the company, and you work there so you want to learn and know more - from both internal/external sources. Anything you found particularly surprising?
This person is very clearly mixing things that he knows directly, things that he's read about in books (e.g. Amazon's strategy in the early days), and rumors that he's heard (e.g. Jeff Bezos' personal life). There's no way that a cybersecurity engineer at a company as sprawling as Amazon has reliable firsthand knowledge on so many different unrelated topics.
The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
It is verging on irresponsible journalism to give this person anonymity without providing any details on their knowledge or credentials and seemingly spending no effort challenging or fact checking any of these answers. That isn't how these pieces are supposed to be written.
> So if you have cancer and you might die from your cancer, we won't help you get treatment
It just feels.. off. I wouldn't go as far to say the person doesn't work at Amazon at all and instead wants to jab at them but I'm definitely thinking it loudly
> Jeff Bezos studies other “great men” in history and imagines himself to be a kind of Alexander the Great. There's even a building on the Amazon campus called Alexandria, which was the name of one of the company’s early projects to get every single book that had ever been published to be listed on Amazon.
I'd guess the building is named after the Library of Alexandria – one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world – and not because of a god complex as the story implies.
Giving the benefit of the doubt, he sounds like an experienced senior guy so he's surely plugged in to internal communications, discussions, and rumors. And a lot of times in security there are opportunities to work with a large cross-section of teams.
I've worked with engineers at Amazon up to the senior principal level. Even if you grant that people in cybersecurity see a broader swath of the company, there's just no way that he can talk authoritatively about everything from AWS sales tactics, to hiring practices for former DoD procurement people, to real estate strategy to Amazon's own supply chain, to Jeff B.'s personal life. It would be like a mid-level employee at State Department talking about how the Trump administration views farm policy, and what the National Park Service is planning, and what types of cool things the US Mint is cooking up. That State Department guy might have heard about a lot of those things either from reading the news or from talking to buddies, but he wouldn't come within a mile of it as part of his job.
I'll add: even if he is speaking for AWS with some authority, he certainly doesn't speak for the rest of Amazon. I've seen some teams with _really_ bad practices (security and otherwise.)
As for your comment about the writer, the entire website feels very "off" to me - no author listed, no "About" page with names/links, nothing to give this credibility. I did see the link to the cofounder's Twitter page, so at least there is someone behind it, but it is pretty well hidden.
Maybe it's an interview of Bezos himself? It's written a lot like from someone's point of view who a) knows the early history b) is familiar with current daily business (like covid) c) is familiar with how different factions inside the company were years ago. If you look at the company from a global perspective but still from the inside, there are only few people around who can write such an interview.
Caesar wrote his books in the third person as well. Bezos seems to me like the kind of guy who'd do that.
Also I'm not too familiar with how Bezos writes, but from the few interviews of him that I've heard, it sounds a lot like him to me. See also this letter... guess the author :). https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/923473337115914240
> The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
What’s an example of a division that AWS subsidizes particularly heavily?
Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life
The only weird thing about this take is I could believe it. And so what if it’s true? The guy has worked to become the richest man in the world (though I may be against his methods of doing so), and isn’t even from a prominent family. I don’t see how anyone could be upset by this XD
Agreed. Also, Prime Video IS a major incentive for a lot of people to sign up for Amazon Prime and thereby helping perpetrate their near monopoly - so I guess it's a win win for Amazon and for Jeff's sex life.
> If you're working in Seattle for Amazon and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, you have far fewer opportunities. Where are you going to go, Microsoft? There's not nearly as much mobility. So I think a big part of the reason we have less organizing [than Google] is that people are more afraid to jeopardize their jobs. If you want to stay in the Northwest, you keep your head down.
Is that... really how people view Seattle? Feels like there's always a zillion companies hiring here.
There a lot of tech companies in Seattle, many of which are growing their head count. I'd say it's just as good a job market as SF or NY, albeit slightly smaller.
I don't buy the BS from the interview/blog article.
No Amazon engineer I know was worried about leaving/loosing their job. All but one said their engineering culture wasn't fun to work in, and they all left before fully vesting... so i wouldn't say they were held hostage in any way.
To be fair, with the way Amazon's TC/RSUs work you always have some left unvested - I don't know if it is possible to quit "fully" vested (unless you're referring only to the initial grant.)
I'd add Microsoft and drop Facebook, personally, but... yeah, the first part is kinda fair. That said, the second part is wrong. It was no trouble at all to jump from Amazon to Google Seattle when I felt the time was right. My desk at the office (if you remember offices from the pre-pandemic days) is less than two blocks from my original desk at Amazon.
Facebook and Google both have multiple offices around Seattle. I wouldn’t be surprised if Apple or Netflix were interested in hiring in Seattle either.
It's also not that uncommon to see people go from Amazon go to Microsoft especially in teams like Azure. There's more difference between teams within the two of them than there is between the two as a whole. Although, people generally go to Microsoft for better work life balance and benefits. Going from Microsoft to Amazon to boomerang back to Microsoft is also quite common.
As someone who pays for and reads Logic Mag, I would caution others to take what is said here with a grain of salt, and also not to be surprised by the low quality interviews they feature, often with a rambling lack of focus. I started purchasing issues of Logic after reading one promising excerpt at a bookstore. However the overt biases of what topics they cover/how they cover them, the frequent reliance on vague anonymous sources of dubious quality, clear political biases, and low signal to noise ratio mean the current issue may be my last.
Author asks 1 semi-security-related question, I think here we go, follows up with "so you guys acquired some unrelated product, how's that going?"
Wtf is this article even about, am I reading a random lunch conversation between old friends that was made more interesting by the guy coincidentally working in security (a hot topic) and being made anonymous (so that people would assume shocking secrets are to be revealed inside)?
But when funding dries up for startups and companies have to shutter, then all of their digital operation overseas is cut loose. And the people who lose their jobs go into cybercrime. They think, “There's no other options for me. So sure. Let's do it. Lock and load.”
this section is just nonsense. So the crisis happens then devs in "developing countries" become cybercriminals ? total bs ...
Readit News
A few sentences that stand out:
> If you have a ton of data in your data center and you want to move it to AWS but you don't want to send it over the internet, we’ll send an eighteen-wheeler to you filled with hard drives, plug it into your data center with a fiber optic cable, and then drive it across the country to us after loading it up with your data.
> Q: I know there have been a number of collective actions among Amazon warehouse workers around the issue of safety during the pandemic. > A: (a series of measures implemented at Amazon)
> Internally, people say, “Oh, we’re probably better than our competitions, or other warehousing and logistics companies.”
> Q: Has Ring brought Amazon into much closer relationships with law enforcement? > A: it would really surprise me if any of those relationships were the result of the Ring acquisition [...] I think Amazon also kind of backed into that situation. We only realized after the fact that we had all this data about who was coming to people’s front doors.
It's been established that "selective whistleblowing" articles are deemed to be more trustworthy than official marketing statements. Therefore, it would be foolish for corporates to not exploit that to their advantage.
The writer is a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard Law, which is an organization I have tremendous respect for, so it's really a shame that they were naive enough to publish this.
No names. No contact information. No accountability.
This isn't journalism. It's a random blog that claims to put out a print edition three times a year.
> So if you have cancer and you might die from your cancer, we won't help you get treatment
It just feels.. off. I wouldn't go as far to say the person doesn't work at Amazon at all and instead wants to jab at them but I'm definitely thinking it loudly
I'd guess the building is named after the Library of Alexandria – one of the largest and most significant libraries of the ancient world – and not because of a god complex as the story implies.
As for your comment about the writer, the entire website feels very "off" to me - no author listed, no "About" page with names/links, nothing to give this credibility. I did see the link to the cofounder's Twitter page, so at least there is someone behind it, but it is pretty well hidden.
Caesar wrote his books in the third person as well. Bezos seems to me like the kind of guy who'd do that.
Also I'm not too familiar with how Bezos writes, but from the few interviews of him that I've heard, it sounds a lot like him to me. See also this letter... guess the author :). https://twitter.com/LettersOfNote/status/923473337115914240
I don't see a writer listed. What am I missing?
(Disclosure -- I'm a BKC fellow this year)
Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life
errm... That should be on their SEC risk report
> If you're working in Seattle for Amazon and you're good at your job and you want to leave your job tomorrow, you have far fewer opportunities. Where are you going to go, Microsoft? There's not nearly as much mobility. So I think a big part of the reason we have less organizing [than Google] is that people are more afraid to jeopardize their jobs. If you want to stay in the Northwest, you keep your head down.
Is that... really how people view Seattle? Feels like there's always a zillion companies hiring here.
I don't buy the BS from the interview/blog article.
No Amazon engineer I know was worried about leaving/loosing their job. All but one said their engineering culture wasn't fun to work in, and they all left before fully vesting... so i wouldn't say they were held hostage in any way.
source: work at MS
Dead Comment
Wtf is this article even about, am I reading a random lunch conversation between old friends that was made more interesting by the guy coincidentally working in security (a hot topic) and being made anonymous (so that people would assume shocking secrets are to be revealed inside)?
this section is just nonsense. So the crisis happens then devs in "developing countries" become cybercriminals ? total bs ...