Working in a data center is not glamorous. Neither is working in warehouse. I used to spend lots of times in warehouses at HP and Apple working in logistics. Big buildings with racks and rack of pallets. I remember when the Mac 512K was going to be released and people were excited about the product. I said the Mac 512K is no different than the Mac 128K, same size box, and it weights the same. All that is different is the sku # and a label. Many times the servers look like that to people in the data center, it’s another 1U server, what processor it has, RAM, HD, or SSD isn’t that much difference. How much does it weigh, how much power does it consume.

BBC has a controversial post from a warehouse worker in the UK on the conditions inside the warehouse.

"We are machines, we are robots, we plug our scanner in, we're holding it, but we might as well be plugging it into ourselves", he said.

Prof Marmot, one of Britain's leading experts on stress at work, said the working conditions at the warehouse are "all the bad stuff at once"."We don't think for ourselves, maybe they don't trust us to think for ourselves as human beings, I don't know."

He said: "The characteristics of this type of job, the evidence shows increased risk of mental illness and physical illness."

One of the observations I have made and asked others about.

“Do you notice that we don’t see people at other data center companies that are ex-Amazon data center staff?"

“We’ll see ex-Microsoft, ex-Google, etc. But, when was the last time you saw someone who was ex-amazon data center? Many of us know a person or two who have joined amazon.com and once they are in, they disappear."

One way you could explain is they are so burnt out of working on data centers at amazon.com they don’t want to do it any more. Maybe the noncompete agreements are too painful.

Any vendor who works on amazon.com projects knows they say nothing about their work for amazon if they want to stay a supplier.