How is the culture @ Amazon? (Engineering)
Is it as bad as the media seem to portray it? People talk about PIP around here a lot. Would like to hear from the current/former Amazon employees. Please share the good and the bad.
Depends on the team.
< 40 hours/week, good team, decent impact, on retail side. I’ve never dealt with the horror stories firsthand but I’ve seen them happen around me. People aren’t kidding when they say it’s team dependent. Amazon unlike other large company is a collection of startups.
Learn yea, grow no, overall likely not your best choice if you have to ask - definitely.
Bad
Good
It all comes down to the senior leadership of your org. An ambitious director pushes his manager reports hard who in turn push their direct IC reports. This translates into whether the team has good work life balance or not. Similarly some directors are ruthless when it comes to culling people even after a short period of ineffectiveness even if it is through bad luck. That percolates down through the org. There are quotas to be met for culling people and so it doesn’t incentivize people to move to the best or the most technical team because you run the risk of being at the bottom even if you are good. This is leading to people staying put in their teams more than moving around. Oncall load is somewhat leadership dependent as well. Some leaders push for delivery a lot more than others and so corners are cut to deliver features sometimes at the expense of long term maintainability. They say that good code doesn’t run a business. Also we are the only company which uses stock growth of past grants as a means to not award present or future stock. This somewhat disincentivizes people from going that extra mile because even with a top rating, there isn’t any or much difference in compensation as compared to rest and vest. To be honest most people stay just for the stock and I don’t think it can go on forever. It is true that you learn a lot but that is often under tight deadlines and high pressure. That comes with everyone else around you working hard and any perceived mistakes or ineffectiveness putting you at risk of pips. As they say there is no free lunch. So it’s mostly true that it depends on the team but even more true that it depends on the director the most. Based on what I read on blind though, it’s not as bad as Facebook.
Deadlines are always very tight but I also learn and grow a lot. I would say it’s medium at best work life balance/culture wise.
And what is the culture of dealing with mistakes or missed deadlines?
what can you learn at Amazon by working very hard? Do they eventually give you tasks that compete with projects posted on engineering blogs at other top companies?