I've worked in both companies in non-tech and want to know if my experience can be generalized to explain the both companies culture. What's your experience? Amazon: If you're smart and willing to work long hours you get promoted. If you're dumb, your idea get ignored and more likely get piped. You get compensated pretty good (in stock) if you perform well. Pay bump on promotion is worth. You gotta know how to fight with other people or you can't survive. - it's more like a real version of Survive. Microsoft: Promotion isn't based on performance only. If you stick with the company for a while and know how to deal with politics (eat your manager's ass) you get promoted regardless. TC increase for promotion is a joke. You get around/or sometimes < $10k increase for the promotion. Even if you're dumb, your manager would still support your idea and they will never say bad things if front of you but in the back. This created a ton of mess in almost all workstreams. Your manager isn't likely providing you the honest feedback. They want to be acting like one of FAANG but the people are so old mindset. Their culture and bureaucracy will never make MS to be as efficient as other tech giants. The diversity is a joke - this shouldn't mean for one ethnicity.
All I know is anecdotally, I’ve never known a person in real life who liked working at Amazon. In fact most of them we’re looking for off ramps to Microsoft as soon as they vested. I had an amazon offer once and turned it down because everyone in my life who worked there said it was a nightmare. I realize its a big company but outside of “online” I’ve never met an Amazonian who didn’t hate their job.
I worked at amazon, I liked it there.
Engineers are consistently thrown under the bus. In Amazon, your manager is not there to support your career. Since Amazon has attracted a lot of shady managers, it's a common practice to quietly keep their reports on "dev plan" in HR system without even a sign of performance concern or feedback, and later surprise them with a PIP built on pretext reasons. HR is not there to protect you because your manager's monologue is the source of truth. So often undeserving candidates gets pushed out based on pretext reasons (mentioned in legal PIP document) to meet double digit % of forced PIP targets. Reading such lies about yourself in the emails and the legal documents to be signed, is mentally disturbing and confidence crushing. The average stay in a team at Amazon is less than one year, and the average stay in Amazon is less than 1.5 years. That is why Amazon is always hiring. Managers are rarely PIP'ed for poor performance.
At Microsoft, handful of people get laid off so easily - they call it "re-org". If you're a non-ethnic person, you're more likely to be "re-orgged". I understand the fear of getting pipped and that was a bit of a stress to me as well but when you start seeing stupid people are getting moved up within your org, you would lose all motivation. I know this is more a personal preference though.
Every increase promotion I’ve had has been greater than $10k. I have seen surprising promotions and lack of promotions, though, based on my experience with the performance of the affected people.
Amazon is for FDD(fear driven development). PIP will eat you even if you work hard or top perform. One reorg will put you under new manager and you could end upFired! Reorg happen regularly!
Add in the constant fear of PIP @ Amazon. Even for people that are good performers, because I remember not wanting to be put on thin ice of PIP when I wasn’t even a target for PIP.