I interviewed at Amazon once. It was a horrible experience. The people were obviously in over their heads, and not very good engineers (for the most part). They actually flew me up to interview, had me start in the morning, and then AT LUNCH told me the job had been filled. Apparently they’d offered it internally some months back and the guy hemmed and hawed about it UNTIL he heard someone had flown in, and then he took it. They let me hang all morning pretending we were actually talking about something material when we weren’t, and then insisted I finish out the day so they had “good info” on me “in case something came up.” From what I saw, their systems had grown far too large far too fast, and and it was a DAILY thing that they felt lucky when some major system didn’t break down. I was really glad in the end I never got an offer. No way I wanted to live in Seattle THAT badly.

Soon after, a longtime engineer friend told me he was looking into Amazon. I tried to warn him off, but he accused me of being over-sensitive, thinking maybe I’d had an off day. HIS interview experience was so bad that he swore off ever USING Amazon for life, and got his family to do the same. From what I know, they STILL all refuse to shop there. (This guy is an extremely solid engineer, and moreover, much more personable — and forgiving — than I am. It was huge that this was his experience and reaction).

Fast forward another year or two, and another engineer friend of mine not only said he’d interviewed there, but he was taking the job. Again, I tried to present a warning. He told me he had good feelings. Two years later as he left, he told me about what a mess they are, both the people and the systems (they’re actually racist anti-white in the organization, according to him). He felt he’d grown from the experience, but in a “what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger” sense only. He really felt a chunk of his soul went away during that period of his employment.

That said, they’re the ONLY place to get certain books, especially programming books, any more, and I personally do still buy some stuff from them.

But good luck getting them to improve. They have a huge system that grew from nothing in no time, no good way to QA anything, and they’re basically running as fast as they can to catch up. Actually instituting logical features at this point would be a pipe dream. Imagine a certain legacy software module that you and I have both worked on (and I continue to), and I think you might start to get an inkling about what I mean.