this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2026
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Why would anyone ever work there. Every time I have gotten hit up by their recruiters, I kindly tell them that I could never work for a place so hostile to employees.
The majority of their employees are in warehouses. They have more than 1 million employees. Most people don't have options, even white collar workers are outmatched in the employment relationship when they depend on income to survive month to month. Few are those who have the relativve luxury of employer political alignmnet.
People can barely feed themselves. The federal minimum wage hasn't gone up in 19 fucking years. Think about the implications of that in a high inflation environment. That is work for no pay essentially.
Trust me, I understand my privilege. I don’t begrudge anyone working there because they have to. In the tech (read:coding) industry, where there are more options (though fewer these days), I don’t understand putting themselves into the meat grinder if they don’t have to.
Not to say that I would willingly choose to work at Amazon, but I do know the reason. It's documented here: https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer
Better benefits and pay than most other options in a lot of areas, especially warehouse workers in smaller towns.
That's the only way they can keep bringing in people while forcing them to pee in cups. It is one of those last choice desperation jobs.
My girlfriend worked for Amazon doing finance stuff around a decade ago. They treated their software engineers like royalty and everyone else like robots. She said they had open bars and chefs preparing gourmet meals on demand that only the tech staff could use, while she was brown bagging her lunch every day. Maybe that's common in that industry, I don't know, but hearing that made me laugh because it sounds so Amazon.
Amazon has never been like that, Google has had more perks like that in the past, but Amazon has always been much more frugal.
I suppose you worked at every Amazon location a decade ago? I think I'll trust my girlfriend on this over some rando on here.
Every manager can expense what they want if they can get their manager to support it, so some offices (or more realistically, some teams in some offices) have nicer perks than others, but GREF doesn't provide anything for free. If she was getting free food, that was her management chain doing that, not amazon as a whole (unlike say Google or meta that has free cafeterias, I've never seen a cafeteria in Amazon with free food).
They pay more than average for pretty bad working condition
Because they pay well and most of the corporate side has good benefits and perks.
Didn't they literally just introduce free coffee at the office post-pandemic?