Comment by gallerdude
2 days ago
I had a very hard time working there, maybe the worst time in my life. I worked with a lot of very smart people, but something about the company culture is doomed in a way I haven't seen before.
Last year I read the book Julia by Sandra Newman, which shows the story of 1984 from Winston's lover's perspective. Spoiler, at the very end of the book, Julia escapes Airstrip One, and we find out that Big Brother has just been captured by the good guys, and he is now a decrepit old man with no understanding of the world.
This implies that all the suffering, hardship, and pain experienced in the dystopian classic happens for no reason at all. Airstrip One is just a machine that gnashes and grinds each individual person within it and outputs... nothing.
This is the closest any book has gotten to describing my Amazon experience. I read headlines like this and wonder how long the machine continue to run for.
That's a great analogy. I would add that since I left every single smart person in my extended network that worked there has left. As far as I can tell all my former teams are held together with jr devs and bubblegum.