Why does Amazon get a bad rap around here? Excluding the non-existent perks, I personally haven't had any negative experiences commonly mentioned in other posts (e.g. long working hours, PIP culture, etc). I honestly like my team and I am optimistic about career growth prospects. Did I just get lucky? edit: Or, are the people who feel burned by Amazon the loudest voices and Blind is an echo chamber for them? TC: 270K
Great to hear all of you first hands. I have many friends at amazon and all say Great things
The thing is for some people Amazon is straight forward. I never had major issues there except with some shit personalities (someone crumpling up a white paper and throwing it in your face in a meeting. Managers making people cry etc). I always blew those people off as posturing even when they were VPs and my reviews were always either Exceeds or TT (they don’t use those anymore as I understand). I worked longer hours sometimes but other times I worked much less and I never understood those doing the same job as me working until 7, 8, or 9pm. Something was deeply wrong with them. That said if you’re mediocre it can be really rough and MOST people are mediocre. The trouble is that Amazon doesn’t pay great if you’re mediocre. In fact you basically keep getting pay cuts over the years which adds pressure to you.
Wtf
Which part
Amazon is definitely not for everyone. I like my team and manager, but have been through some cutthroat environments
You got lucky. I’m guessing you are a man. AWS can be brutally sexist for women.
I am a cis-gendered man but I do not work in AWS. I agree that systemic racism and sexism are an issue with the industry but my impression is that those aren't reasons why people on Blind take issue with Amazon.
Wow. Did you just completely invalidate my experience and override my voice? Am I not a person on blind? Can confirm you are a cis- gendered man. 😉
Amazon India is good. I have many friends and all are happy and good. Some are getting married.
Amazon actively works to make sure that none of its employees make too much money. For instance if the stock does well enough they take away your bonus. If you leave before two years of joining your 401k does not vest. The extreme backloading of the equity grant is total bullshit, 5/15/40/40 is a joke. And if you get PIPed a day before your equity vesting day, you get none of it. There are so many others, really I could go on for days, but these are just a few instances off the top of my head of the bullshit you have to deal with at amazon which doesn’t exist anywhere else.
I’ve never seen anyone. Ever. Get pipped in close proximity to their vesting and not actually receive it. Seriously. It would be an easy lawsuit and nothing Amazon would want to deal with.
Ya, never seen any correlation of PIP with stock vesting. Managers or HR have no incentive to do that, why would they even try to do anything like this. It's not like they are paying from there pocket. Amazon also does not have as much tight budget control as other companies have where there is even a budget quota on Promotions (looking at you Microsoft). Everything is decided by a tool.
I had a somewhat good experience at Amazon, only got above average ratings and negative unavoidable feedback was very minor. Still it wasn't the best place in my 10+ years career as an SDE, and some aspects - those, that cause high unnecessary stress - were definitely the worst. I've also seen how badly some H1B people were treated by their managers, I've seen relatively young people on antidepressants due to high pressure from their managers. I've been around before I came to Amazon and I've never seen - before and after Amazon - so many examples of mistreating good SDEs who would work just fine in any other place (at least taking all my other employers as an example). In retrospect that was good experience. I still love Amazon products, I use their retail website for shopping and AWS for hobby project. But do I want to go back? Probably no, at least as long as I can land a job that pays similar amount of money somewhere else. Thinking a bit more on this - Jeff did a great job as a founder and CEO, but if you learn a bit more about him - he is not caring about others. His personal life and recently revealed scandalous details only reinforced my belief. I definitely don't think he is pure evil, every man has flaws, but that part of his character is what translated to the entire company and will likely stay that way in the future. So, naturally, given all the above and wishing luck to random strangers / fellow SDEs on blind, I am honest about my perception of that company. It *may* be good for your resume but high impact on mental health is not worth it: be prepared to leave when you start feeling that impact. Also, be sure you understand why you're hired. Certain managers hire people only to support the "forced bell curve" ratings so they have someone to give bad ratings to. Think that you're on PIP from day 1 - that'd be the right attitude if you want to have high chances to go through your two years of Amazon. Some teams are actually quite good in terms of technology, your peers and your bosses, I've seen couple examples myself. Be glad if you ended up in one such team and your management chain incidentally is more humane than in the other orgs.
Stack ranking, poor management quality, primitive approach to ops, and sheer size all play into it. I was talking to a former teammate who mentioned that 80% of the company's employee base joined in the last few years. That's made a huge impact on how quickly the company can move -- it means that you'll find a lot more pockets of bureaucracy and politics than previously. But that's to be expected in a company of Amazon's size. It is a trillion-dollar company, after all. The forced stack ranking itself is a lot more deleterious, I think. It incentivizes hiring meat shields and creating internal competition/antagonism which ends up being pretty expensive. It also means that if you have a low level of tolerance for that kind of stuff on a day to day basis, not only will you not enjoy it and feel unproductive, but you may not survive in so far as getting enough political cover to survive. Luckily, it's extremely easy to transfer, and the silver lining of the forced attrition is that teams are /always/ hiring. I had a bad experience with the first team I landed on at Amazon, but I was also relieved that there were systems in place to let me move around. Frankly, the forced URA and bloodbath culture will probably prevent A from reaching F/G/N level territory in terms of prestige and median IC quality of life. But that doesn't mean that there aren't great organizations inside A doing incredible work where people are generally very happy and bring the company tons of money. Now how you go about finding them -- that's the hard problem. And if you figure that one out, drop a line my way. I'd love to know.
They figured out the system that let mediocre to bad managers run the whole place at scale. Imagine what happens when you tell a clueless manager to "raise the bar" and "earn trust". I was literally told to figure out how to reduce time to RCA by half, when we said it took a couple minutes to find the root cause. After many of such examples I lost all trust in the manager but guess who had the power?
I feel the same, though I'm still in the honeymoon phase and haven't been close to a review process yet.
I've been through a few review cycles so I wouldn't say I'm in the honeymoon phase. I am, however, biased as I have found success working at Amazon.