Soon America's most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a cool company isn't always that hot. These employers, and the others hiring for tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs, listed below, will look spiffy on a resume someday, but for now the only good these jobs promise the world is the pleasant feeling you and I can share knowing we're not the ones stuck in them.

Support engineer, Washington-Seattle, Amazon.com

"Who knew that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos chose his wife in part because he felt she could, if necessary, get him out of a third-world prison?" Portfolio scribe Kevin Maney asked at the start of a Q&A for the magazine. The answer: Any 13-year-old who's read Jeff Bezos: The Founder of Amazon.com. Bezos goes on to explain to Maney that his criterion was really a proxy for resourcefulness.

Thanks to an intrepid Dallas Morning News reporter, Amazon.com shoppers in Texas may soon have to pay sales tax on goods purchased from the site. Maria Halkias asked Robin Corrigan, a sales-tax policy expert in the Texas comptroller's office, why the state doesn't collect sales tax from Amazon. Corrigan said it's because Amazon.com "told me they don't have a distribution center in Texas." That's incorrect. Go ahead and apply to be a senior operations manager at Amazon's Irving, Texas facility.

Less than a week after Forbes sang the praises of his "modest $82,000 annual base salary," Jeff Bezos cashed in another 2.15 million shares of his Amazon.com stock, adding another $168 million to an earlier $135 million sale to boost his take for the last three months to a cool $300 million-plus. Not forgetting those less fortunate, Jeff also set aside 252 Amazon shares, or about .01 percent of last week's sales, for donation to a nonprofit.

(Photo by Zhang Yong/ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images)

At the JavaOne keynote this held at the Moscone Center this morning, EVP of software Rich Green took the stage and told the assembled crowd, mostly developers, "Welcome to the revolution. Businesses used to drive technology adoption, but now it's all about consumers." Which suggests the company, known historically as an enterprise hardware and software provider, is changing focus to enable more consumer-focused applications. Not mentioned? Last week's announcement of a $34 million quarterly loss and a stock price that has hardly improved since plummeting 20 percent. But look everybody, Neil Young!

New York state legislators passed a law that will require Amazon.com to collect sales tax on items New Yorkers purchase on the site. Amazon lawyers call the idea "unconstitutional" and have filed a lawsuit in New York's Supreme Court. These lawyers say New York can't ask Amazon to collect sales tax because Amazon isn't based in New York. Legislators there disagree, arguing that if any Amazon affiliates — independent websites which market Amazon.com's catalog of goods, and receive a cut of sales — are based in New York, and several thousand are, Amazon very much has a presence in the state. Amazon's complaint, via Epicenter, is embedded below.

For the makers of e-book readers, the raincoater audience — the straightish men who frequent adult bookstores for the promise of a little action in the back — are an unlikely market. They're not even there to read, for starters. But for literate smut fans, who have been choosing Amazon.com from the first day they made erotic books available in discreet, brown-wrapped boxes? If they're turning to the Kindle to deliver their porn, Amazon's not telling. Not entirely. We've got numbers on how well the same books sell in print, but not for their Kindle counterparts. Better figures might be possible if everyone's who's spindled their Kindle dropped Amazon a line.

In case you missed their guest appearance on Today, Jenna and Laura Bush have collaborated with an illustrator on Read All About It!, the $17.99, 32-page tale of math machine and science whiz Tyrone, a reluctant reader until the books that his teacher read to the class actually came to life. All five-star reviews so far, with the exception of one Zebo Quad, who opines: "This book just proves that celebrities could vomit onto a blank page and publishers would publish it." It also suggests Steve Jobs was onto something when he dissed the Amazon Kindle e-book reader:

Meet Maria Thomas, arts and crafts auction site Etsy's new COO. "Why the heck am I COO?" Thomas asks in a video (embedded below). Her answer: She ran Amazon.com's camera business, back when the site still had navigational tabs. The Brooklyn-based Etsy is already profitable. We're hoping it gets really big, goes public, and catches the eye of New York's insular media. Because we can't wait for the SNL parody of clips like this one:

Jeff Bezos can safely unclench his legs. Amazon.com reported first-quarter earnings of $143 million, up 29 percent from the same quarter last year, on sales of $4.14 billion, up 37 percent. Wall Street dithered over the forecast, sending shares down in after-hours trading, but the underlying reality is this: Amazon.com, already large, is growing at a prodigious rate at a time in its life when most expected it to slow down. And the growth had little to do with digital sales or Web services. No, people are simply buying more online, more often. CFO Tom Szkutak said the company saw no signs of a recession in U.S. shoppers' buying behavior. How can that be, as other companies complain of economic woes?

In 2001, Brian Valentine, then a top Microsoft executive, was pumped about Windows XP, as a spoof infomercial shows. By the time Vista was getting ready for release, his enthusiasm had waned. The reason? Some believe he was pining for Gianna Puerini, a sales manager who had left Microsoft for Amazon.com in 2003. In July 2006, Valentine secretly signed an employment contract with Amazon.com. Microsoft did not reveal that he was leaving for Amazon.com until September 5, less than a week before he started his new job. The business rationale for hiding his departure was obvious: Valentine ran the team that was shipping its Windows Vista operating system. Losing their leader would have killed morale.

Wired spent 13 columns of fine print detailing the birth of Amazon Web Services, Jeff Bezos's scheme to rent out his online store's Web infrastructure to startups. The magazine stayed carefully on message; if you attended Bezos's talk at last Saturday's Startup School, you'll find the story extremely familiar. "You don't generate your own electricity," Bezos asks, rhetorically. "Why generate your own computing?" This is the same line Bezos has been peddling for years. Aside from the rehashed quotes, Wired did squeeze a few numbers out of a reluctant Bezos. The facts about Amazon Web Services, stripped of the hype, amount to roughly 100 words:

Alexa, the Internet-traffic measurement site owned by Amazon.com, has revamped its famously inaccurate rankings. Its argument for why website visitors and publishers should trust it now? Because it says so — a claim likely as trustworthy as its old rankings. [Alexa.com]

There is only one story ever written about Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos: That he has defied the skeptics, has had the last laugh, and is now looking to the future. Fortune's latest iteration of the formula is no exception. It begins with an obligatory near-death experience — in this case, a not-quite-fatal helicopter ride near Bezos's West Texas spaceport. And then, Christlike, the escape from death, the resurrection, and the glory. The glory: A stock price driven up not by technical innovations like Amazon's Web services, but by expanding profit margins, the result of tightened R&D spending. Wall Street, not Bezos, has the last laugh, but that conclusion doesn't fit the formula.

A number of servers running Amazon.com's Elastic Compute Cloud service, which provides pay-by-the-hour computation, went offline this morning from 2 to 3:30 a.m. EC2 is one of Amazon's developer services, offering low-cost virtual servers mostly to startups. Dozens of users complained in this thread on Amazon's message board, where an Amazon staffer reported the "notworking team" — a Freudian slip for "networking"? — was on the problem. What were they complaining about? That their websites stopped losing money for 90 minutes?

Getting a little taste of their own doubloon-looting medicine, the Society of Authors in the U.K. has determined that piracy will do to book publishing what it did to the music business. If that means fewer parking permits for glistening pec caresser Danielle Steel here in San Francisco, excuse me if I don't shake my fists at the thunderheads and wail unto the storm. Seriously, what's the real issue here?

Remember how print-on-demand technologies were going to liberate anyone to publish books? Still true, as long as you don't want to sell your wares on Amazon.com. For access to the online bookseller which controls 15 percent of the U.S. market, you'll have to use BookSurge, an Amazon subsidiary. That's according to a number of print-on-demand authors and publishers who've been contacted by Amazon and told to either switch to BookSurge or see the "buy" button disappear from their books' listings. The books will still be listed, but customers will have to order through resellers, and the titles won't qualify for Amazon's free shipping offers.

Citing a more challenging consumer environment, greater customer-acquisition costs and investor reluctance to pay above-market prices for shares, Goldman Sachs today cut price targets for Internet stocks including Google, eBay, and Amazon by 10 percent. For more reasons why Wall Street is suddenly less impressed with your tech stock portfolio, see Goldman's entire report, embedded here:

Sorry, Thom Yorke. it appears a critically acclaimed career as Radiohead's front man isn't enough to outsell Eliot Spitzer's call girl on the Web. Ashley Alexandra Dupré, also known as "Kristen," considers herself something of an R&B artist. She sells her music on Amie Street, a New York-based music site in which Amazon.com CEO Jeff Bezos took a personal interest and later had his company invest in. It sets its pricing based on the principles of supply and demand. The more a song sells, the faster its price rises. So when Amie Street flack Zane Groshelle confirmed that Dupré's single, "What We Want" rose to 98 cents "just as quickly if not more quickly" than Barenaked Ladies and Thom Yorke, the market's message is clear: She knows what we want.