Been in Amazon for 6 years as SDE. Plenty of my friends ask me about joining Amazon. Four years ago, I encouraged all of them to join and apply. Recently, I stopped. This is why. # NYT article is true Recruiters will refute this and say that 1) Amazon has changed a lot 2) NYT article is only true for some teams. But reality is that due to Amazon’s decentralized nature, VPs, directors and managers can do whatever the fuck they want. There is zero checks in place. HR is their doormat. They will make up data if they need to lie to SVPs, they will ignore data if it doesn’t match their goals, they will make your life hell if they don’t like you. Number of teams that have grown to resemble the NYT article now far exceeds the number of so called “good” teams. # Appeal of 100 teams Recruiters will tell you that you can transfer internally and find the team you like. This is no longer true. Directors, senior managers, and managers will use Amazon’s internal tool against you. Because it’s already so hard to hire, they will prevent you from transferring out of their org by putting you in dev plan and PIVOT, which blocks you from transferring and keeps you as a prisoner in their org. Think you can escalate to HR? Check out all the Amazon HRBP horror stories. # Employees What they say about Amazon being customer obsessed is true. But at the same time, they do this at the expense of employees. Amazon’s decentralized culture is causing havoc with Wholefoods and Twitch - check out their reddit threads. The same is happening in corporate. There’s no perks. There’s EAs guarding the food outside a lunch meeting. They deny your vacation if they need you on a failing project. When you leave Amazon, they treat you like a statistic and an easily replaceable resource. If you are SDE I or II and quit, they won’t even blink. When you jump off a building, they call it a one-off. # New build When you become an SDE in Amazon, you are not building anything new. If you are lucky, you will get the chance in a few years. You will be oncall with internal employees shitting on you, running scripts to fix problems and fixing dashboards. You will work on database migration projects, fixing bugs in the service, and reducing infrastructure cost. You will only have a chance to do interesting work if there’s a big escalation from customers. You will suffer using and debugging Amazon’s decade old tech development tools.
True
Hot damn! Thanks for the warning!
+10. Holly Molly.
Thanks for this post. I only take Amazon interviews for practice anyway. Would never want to subject myself to such a hostile work environment.
Context: Amazon puts the 10% low performers on dev plans and fires half of them every year. It's a competitive place in that you really don't want to be the bottom ten percent. From his post about how dev list (the 10%) was used against him to prevent him from transferring, OP's one of them. And yeah, if you are bottom 10 percent at Amazon you probably do cry at your desk. And if you are bottom 20 percent you likely live in fear of being bottom ten. Your life will suck and if you find you can't make it here the best thing I can tell your is get out. Not everyone works out here. But it's worth calling out this is not the experience of the other 80 percent. For people who are actually good at their jobs Amazon is a very different experience.
Top 80%, you mean? Lol. So, always trying hard not to be last instead of enjoying your work. That's depressing and stressful. Profitable companies are rarely good for employees in the long run.
It's okay if this is related to performance and not used to tie people down and destroy their career. FB pips people too but I don't hear a lot of employees complaining about them doing it for the wrong reasons
7355608 is brainwashed.
He/She (probably a recruiter or manager) is in the small number of “good” teams remaining in Amazon. They probably have not experienced these common scenarios yet. I’ve seen top performers (or the other 80%) suffer. Think about these common Amazon scenarios for the 80%: - you now have a new VP hell bent on creating their own culture - you have a new manager that you embarrassed in front of their director when you presented accurate data and wants to get their revenge - you have a new SDE II on the team that’s a jerk in disguise (but hides behind Amazon leadership principles: Bias for Action and Ownership) - you are in the middle of your promo project and it comes to a halt because leadership team made a new promise to someone to advance their career - your director fakes data to your SVP about a project and you have to keep working on it despite negative customer feedback
OP has several valid points. Depending on manager, team and org everyone might have a different response. It may or may not apply but his points are valid.
Surprised OP is being so dogmatic about this. Come on man, you know the NYT varies from team to team. I personally haven't seen it at all. And lunches being guarded? No way that's the norm. I've never seen that happen. By no means am I saying Amazon is the greatest place to work. We have more than our fair share of problems. But you can't make blanket statements about a company with 500k+ employees. You just can't. Quilted ones, maybe.
The question is whether these are bottom 10% orgs or are they top performer orgs? 😀 If they are the bottom 10% in terms of culture, why aren't those orgs canned? 😁
The vindictive tone of his post tells me he's trying to get revenge for being told his performance isn't meeting expectation
Very true and thx for taking the time to share with others who has never worked in that place! Even they pay you $400, it does not worth in terms of your skill development, job satisfaction and all your sweat and tears!
Whatever Amazon is doing is working for their business. Welcome to capitalism
I am an SDM, been at Amazon four years. I know the policy inside and out and I have friends across the company in management and ICs. OP has given a correct description of what your experience is at Amazon if you are identified as a low performer. It absolutely sucks. The NYT story is true to the extent that it describes what it's like to be a low performer at Amazon and ten percent of people have that experience. And it's more or less exactly ten percent because we have goals around that and metrics to track it. It's not more. It's not less. It's ten percent. I don't understand why people even stay around and fight such things. If my manager ever comes to tell me I'm not meeting expectations I'm not going to wait around to get Pivoted. I'm going to go find a job where I'm valued. Amazon has different expectations than other companies. We put a whole lot more emphasis on behavior than most places (aka leadership principles). Call it koolaid if you like it is absolutely what will make or break you in this company. Most people claiming that they are being unfairly targeted for subjective things are people who have been identified as having poor leadership. You can call it subjective and complain all you want. It's what matters at Amazon and it's the one thing you HAVE to do well here. Some people never will really be able to and others are great at it. I know people who absolutely failed at Amazon, really failed, who are great engineers and went on to be fantastic at companies where this doesn't matter as much. It actually matters at Amazon not just because your manager was told to evaluate it but because we set the company up in a way that makes it necessary to succeed on a day to day basis. The so called service oriented architecture forces you to constantly reach out to and negotiate with people across the company. If you can't do that well you will actually fail. I think it's very useful for people to know these things so they can decide whether Amazon might fit them. If you are somewhere on the autism spectrum for example you're going to fail hard here while you may be a fantastic coder who can leetcode better than anyone. That's too bad at some level, some people like that are actually fantastic developers if only their manager would approach them the right way. Your Amazon manager won't. On the flip side if you're basically competent and you are great at collaborating with others you are going to have a great time at Amazon and you aren't going to wind up complaining about subjective leadership evaluations because you are going to ace that.
To all these engineers please come to Apple. We care about your technical acumen- leadership principles can burn in a fire. The overwhelming feeling I get when using amazons products is all mechanical and efficient and _cold_. There is no craftsmanship, nothing they do is the best or the next insanely good product- just a minimal viable product.
That's fair, very different culture than Apple. Time to market is prioritized above all else at Amazon, there is no doubt. We don't think we are Steve Jobs or will ever be. We think the best way to figure out what customers want is to put something out there and collect actual customer feedback. No doubt that works a lot better for a service oriented model where if you screw it up you can push a patch. And we don't care about UI design the way Apple does, we care more about delivering functionality even if it's ugly. And it works for us. Probably wouldn't work for Apple which is probably why it didn't work for Fire Phone. Different problem space. Not as a rule or anything, just like Apple isn't only visionary people dreaming up the next iPhone. But it's definitely a different zeitgeist, you can see it as a trend. Oddly despite our zealous focus on time to market, it's Apple the has the horrible work life balance. Some teams at Amazon get hammered but me and most people I know in tech work a 40hr week. Non tech can be a different story.
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And there is another thread wondering why on earth is Amazon less prestigious than Google/Facebook 😂
To be fair, best friend moved to Facebook a year ago and is thinking of leaving because of how hacky everything is
It is not about that. It is about talent, pay, perks, culture, etc. And from an employee perspective, how well the company treats its employees