Amazon redux

Y'know, despite all my bloviation over the wonderfulness of AWS, I would be remiss if I failed to mention that Amazon have taken a dent in my estimation recently due to this story by the Times of London documenting work practices which appear to be if not illegal, then at the very least inhumane. I would be surprised if being threatened with dismissal for more than 6 days of illness is acceptable behaviour under UK employment law.

Even though working on AWS would be a dream job, I'm writing this anyway because I don't believe in candy-coating the nature of 'the beast'. Just like individual people, groups of people also have facets of their collective nature that should be lauded, or condemned, and hopefully redeemed.

Not sure if the next batch of presents will come from Amazon.co.uk though.

Update 1 Feb. 2009. The Sunday Times badly misrepresented Google's energy efficiency a while ago, so also took a dent in my estimation of their credibility, so who knows about the above? Maybe it's an equally manufactured controversy.