Yesterday, Ashley, Connor, and I took the lead on a site visit to Amazon. The majority of the site visit focused on Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS is an Amazon subsidiary that focuses on providing on-demand cloud computing services and data infrastructure to companies. Their customer base includes Airbnb, Zillow, and NYSE. When Steven McGoyer, the employee who organized our site visit, discussed the various companies using AWS’s services, we were shocked to hear the breadth of their customer base. Steven explained, “When the power went down at our data center in Washington, our stock prices actually went up. Investors realized for the first time just how many servers use our services.”

After the visit, Connor turned to me white as a sheet and told me how frightened he was about the sheer power of AWS. To be honest, I am somewhat scared too. Several of the boys on the trip joked that “Amazon has more power than the US government.” In some ways, I think there is a grain of truth to this statement. With the sheer sales and economic power of the company, they are able to change government policy. In Seattle, they threatened to decrease their presence if corporate taxes were not decreased. Big surprise, Seattle recently announced a decrease in corporate taxes.

From a personal standpoint, I was slightly disappointed with the visit to Amazon. While the presentations were highly informative, the focus was not on supply chain (my major). I was hoping to see a more direct connection with my studies, and I had not prepared questions for AWS and Alexa engineers. Also, when Alan Reddy, the premium support operations manager for AWS, discussed the graduate program, I had little to no interest in pursuing that type of job.

I had been curious about what a role in Amazon’s corporate offices would look like and was surprised to see I had such minimal interest in this. Also, with the limited office space we saw, it felt more clinical than Google had. Google was light and bright. While some of the furniture, bean bag chairs and ping pong tables, were the same, it didn’t embody that same creative feeling. The building was brand new and employees were still moving into the new offices, however I believe that the culture there is more closed off. This is due to the fact we had to sign a NDA and agree not to take photos. Everything felt very serious at these offices — we were actually the first US group that the company took to tour the offices. Overall I don’t believe I will be working for AWS anytime soon. If I apply to Amazon, it most likely will be in a distribution center, in a role where I can apply my studies.