last time I ordered from Amazon
March 2011(checked email archives to confirm). Just a truly ruthless company(took me a while to realize how bad), much like Walmart(whom I never really ever bought from but learned of their business practices in the mid-late 90s I think and certainly not given them business since). I lived in the Seattle area from 2000 until 2011. A big part of moving away from that area was ex-Amazon folks infecting companies all over the area in misguided attempts to instill amazon culture/practices in those companies. In the early 2000s it was a lot of ex Microsoft folks, but at the two startups I worked at(back to back) founded by ex-MS people (and the employees in general) I never got bad vibes like I did from ex-Amazon. In fact both of those startups from ex-MS started out with Windows and switched to Linux(I joined after the transition was well underway in both cases).
One of my last straws was an interview in 2011 at a then pretty well known tech startup(in that area at least). The only interview I've ever had where I was just a hair away from standing up and walking out because I saw the blaring red flags(my ears at time literally felt hot). But I needed a new gig at the time, so I told the "tech leader" what he wanted to hear, his approach to computing wasn't a bad idea in concept(he basically wanted to build their own "amazon cloud" using the same techniques he claims he learned at amazon, meanwhile his linkedin profile implied he was nothing more than a low-mid level tech), it was just a horrible idea for that and many other companies who don't have the resources to do it properly. My approach is pretty much polar opposite of that. I knew they would fail. They gave me the job offer, less $ than I expected, they said it was because I didn't have as much experience(HAHAHA) as they wanted. Ok whatever, I declined and went to work at another company in California my former boss was trying to talk me into going for a few months, ended up staying at that company for just about 11 years. That was after leaving another tiny startup run by tons of ex Amazon folks. My last manager at that small company was a 12 year veteran of Amazon, he was a real cool guy I liked him a lot. He resigned the day after I did, and later tried to recruit me to join Oracle cloud. Having my boss quit immediately after me happened at two different companies in a row.
I have a friend who was a vendor for that company that interviewed me and he had close contacts with them for years, at one point their entire network team walked out. Eventually, maybe 18 to 24 months later(after I declined their offer not after the network team quit) I forget exactly when but that guy was fired and escorted out of the building. The company had to pay above market rates to try to recruit new folks as their reputation had been soiled.
I have many friends who work/worked at Amazon, some of them really liked it there(not in close contact with them these days), others I know did not(I'm told it all comes down to the manager). I had one co worker in early 2000s that came from Amazon who everyone thought he had a mental disorder (like Tourette syndrome) as he would openly attack people's ideas very bluntly leaving everyone in the room pretty speechless. It wasn't until several years later the New York Times published an in depth article on Amazon culture in 2015 and after reading that I realized that guy was just raised that way early in his career at amazon, wasn't a metal disorder.
And that's not even counting all of stressful situations I've dealt with over the past almost 14 years with seemingly countless executives who are sold on the "cloud" and just can't believe the cost numbers when they actually see them. It's practically never ending. Seeing new low/mid-level system admin types hype up on the cloud for the same reasons(and can't accept the truth of costs) not realizing the actual costs/complexity is annoying as well though at least with those people I never have to deal with them (outside of forums). Certainly there are situations where public cloud is a great idea, but they are a small minority of workloads(saying that as someone who has hosted their own email/web/dns since 1997).
If you haven't seen that NYT article, check it out, it's pretty interesting(and sad).
I still feel dirty when innocently ordering stuff from Ebay and Newegg and maybe 3% of the time it comes from Amazon.
so yeah, I'm not a fan of amazon haha.