How to survive in Amazon

1. Work hard 2. Work hard 3. Don’t slack 4. Work hard 5. Work hard

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”Today as always, men fall into two groups: slaves and free men. Whoever does not have two-thirds of his day for himself, is a slave, whatever he may be: a statesman, a businessman, an official, a scholar or an Amazon employee.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche

Network, network, work, leetcode, work

Wow... why would you ever want to work there?

I got a call from them for program manager position and they are offering good compensation however every post I see, everyone is b*tching about them. Here also I hear all those bad things except amazon employee himself. I am testing water before diving in :)

Deliver results Dive Deep Earn Trust Ownership Bias for Action (If I had to pick five)

Eat 🍌

From someone in a non-tech role (I’m in Retail): 1. Chose your manager wisely (preferably someone who is recently promoted so they are more concerned with your development than their own promotion. And someone who has not been in the role for a long time (because it might indicate that they will rotate soon). 2. Don’t be arrogant, expect to do tasks that feel “beneath you”, it will serve you well longer term to know the bits and bolts of the business. 3. Go above and beyond. Look for pain points and come up with a solution. Try to automate or outsource, and scale to show off. 4. Do a few things really well, rather than try to deliver 100 things mediocre. When it’s time for promo, a few solid deliverables are better than being the hero who kept all the small stuff together. 5. Make your manager’s life easy. One of my directs sends me a summary every quarter listing her results, initiatives etc. Imagine how easy it is for me to enter the OLR and defend her, I literally have a write up ready with all the stuff she has done. Same for promo doc, super easy to pull together as I don’t have to figure it all out by myself. So be proactive. And lastly: remember to focus on “knocking your day job out of the park” before doing other shiny things. It doesn’t matter how great you are delivering shiny projects if you are under-performing in your day job. Get clear KPIs from your manager so you know what you are being measured on. Ok one more thing: understand the promo process. You will need a certain amount of feedback providers, and they need to be at a certain level. Make sure you do work with people who will give you this feedback when you need it, and make sure you spend enough time nurturing these relationships. A lot of people feed back “yeah he is great but I haven’t worked closely enough to give promo feedback”. So make sure you involve stakeholders sufficiently for them to know you well (get credit for what you do)