When the “Amazon smile” was added in 2000, it was a very different company. I used to work there a few years after that and did not leave on good terms a decade later.
In those early days, there was a bunch of innovation that was good for customers, for example showing critical reviews online (vendors were horrified as previously only curated good or editorial reviews were shown), or listing used items alongside the new ones, Amazon music let you upload your own mp3s, AWS majority leveled the playing field for startups, …
But even back then everybody knew that the warehouse jobs had very bad conditions (though that was certainly not unique to Amazon).
By 2015 I had certainly had enough. Vendors were squeezed for every cent, Amazon just copied successful products and produced them themselves in China, the management culture became more and more toxic (Managers had to find bad performers in their team, no matter if there were any), new people earned so much more than people who had some the same job for years, promotions decisions were majority influence by office politics, senior managers ran pretty much unchecked, the interview process was so hard, everybody who was involved from the Amazon side doubted they could make it through themselves, … Currently, established authors have 0 recourse of somebody sells AI-generated books under their name.
When the “Amazon smile” was added in 2000, it was a very different company. I used to work there a few years after that and did not leave on good terms a decade later.
In those early days, there was a bunch of innovation that was good for customers, for example showing critical reviews online (vendors were horrified as previously only curated good or editorial reviews were shown), or listing used items alongside the new ones, Amazon music let you upload your own mp3s, AWS majority leveled the playing field for startups, …
But even back then everybody knew that the warehouse jobs had very bad conditions (though that was certainly not unique to Amazon).
By 2015 I had certainly had enough. Vendors were squeezed for every cent, Amazon just copied successful products and produced them themselves in China, the management culture became more and more toxic (Managers had to find bad performers in their team, no matter if there were any), new people earned so much more than people who had some the same job for years, promotions decisions were majority influence by office politics, senior managers ran pretty much unchecked, the interview process was so hard, everybody who was involved from the Amazon side doubted they could make it through themselves, … Currently, established authors have 0 recourse of somebody sells AI-generated books under their name.
I could go on :p