Tech IndustryMar 20, 2020
AmazonKaton🙏🔥

On why you should not join or stay in Amazon

Hi everyone, I wanted to write this as I have a lot of free time now...my vacay was cut short due to coronavirus and I essentially have like 3 weeks of free time before my next gig. I enjoyed working at Amazon's subsidiary from 2017 to 2018. I delivered very well for my manager here and our team was small and nimble. I was working on some really cool tech and I was a top performer (rated TT). I even got promoted. But when we doubled in size in 2019 and we officially became Amazon (dissolved our subsidiary), we became dysfunctional. And personally due to no refreshers from the BS comp philosophy, I was feeling unmotivated. While I overall enjoyed my time at Amazon and learned A LOT, I burned out last year mainly due to very low comp boost/politics/growing pains. This has a negative effect on the psyche and motivation to continue working at Amazon. Here were some things I had issues with in my org: 1. No team outings unless we pushed for it. We had 1 team outing last year when one of our new hires complained to our skip about this. Outing was fun, but we knew we'll need to push again for the next one. 2. No recurring team lunches. I think we had maybe 3 team lunches in total last year. Typically we did this to celebrate new hires. Even after a reaching a project milestone, we did not do team lunches. 3. The office is quiet. Nobody talks casually in the workplace. Everyone looks sad. Everyone looks robotic. Also, the office is a shitty building. The bathrooms are old and outside the building LOL. 4. Principal engineer is a well known anti social ass. He is abusive towards junior engineers. He's been at Amazon for 15 years. For 14 years he was SDE 3. However because he's been here for so long, he knows Jeff Bezos personally so he is very powerful. He does not have the mindset of learning new technologies. For example, he thinks ReactJS is a waste. He prefers using HAML + JQuery as the front end stack and frequently shuts down any ReactJS based projects. We don't innovate. He is also dead wrong about a lot of things but no one can really say anything. In fact, there is a circulating quip document that was made to document all the abusive things he's been doing. Not sure where this will go. 5. My manager is 100% blatantly biased towards business and moves away from engineering best practices + design. He is shaping the culture to be more business / customer oriented at the expense of engineering design. No tradeoffs here. Business always wins. 6. A lot of politics. Many meetings had a lot of pointless arguments and blatant backstabbing. Many older employees left. Newer employees enjoy their new ownership power...for now. 7. Lower hiring bar. Things got worse when a bunch of new hires came in. The new hires understandably want to prove themselves and are willing to work hard. They are more motivated than the existing older employees who have been through this overly motivated phase before only to see no proper rewards as time goes on. As I was feeling very unmotivated, I was asked to both tech lead and PM a big project. But I was struggling with this though doing my best and so the very same manager I helped out of the dev list had put me in the dev list. Essentially he wanted me to work hard just to survive and cope and escape the dev list. I disagree with this concept. I feel that one should aim to thrive in any environment. I don't mind working hard if there is a proper reward to look forward to. I refuse to work hard to just survive. I tweaked my schedule like waking up earlier and worked really hard to Leetcode + sys design everyday. After 4 months, I received 3 incredible offers from FNGMULLA. I had set up a meeting with my manager and for the first time I felt very powerful. I had options and I strong armed him to see what he would do. My manager knew I was a top performer and I enjoyed seeing him struggle to justify the way he treated me before. In the end, I rejected his dive and save offer and told him he ruined the trust we had. I think he eventually respected me when he realized I worked hard to get these offers. When I announced my departure, many engineers and other SDMs in the org wanted to meet with me to find out how I did it. For the first time I saw life in my co-workers when they asked me for Leetcode advice. They seemed pretty motivated to leave. 2 Chinese girls who were usually always quiet were bustling with personality and they were genuinely happy for me. My advice to you all is this: Do not join Amazon. If you are in Amazon now, look into leaving ASAP. Their management culture is very screwed up. I literally saw my manager's brain change from humble and intelligent to political and anti intellectual over the years. If you are happy now (as I used to be in this very org) it will be temporary. Every team in Amazon will scale up and eventually go to shit. Bezos hasn't not yet figured out how to scale teams properly. I don't think he intends to. Escape while you can. Good luck! Old TC: 220K TC: 305K + 20K relo YOE: 4.5

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Amazon emll52 Mar 20, 2020

Different strokes for different folks. I don’t like to talk with co-workers casually. I don’t mean harm, just generally not good at making small talks. The rest of it is team/org based. Can’t generalize to whole company.

Amazon emll52 Mar 20, 2020

Everybody can say “I’m not happy. If you are happy it’s temporary, you will soon become unhappy”. You are not giving any advice. You just want to vent and judge whoever feels different with you.

TriNet jhndeo Mar 20, 2020

Congrats

Nurx ozxG22 Mar 20, 2020

Thanks for wasting your time on a novella exposing how junior you are 😂

Amazon Katon🙏🔥 OP Mar 20, 2020

My goal is to make a lot of money and leave the 9-5 as soon as I can so I don't end up old and washed up like you.

Rally Health FUPayMe$$ Mar 20, 2020

^amen to that brother!

Salesforce mahomes Mar 20, 2020

Can’t generalize but may be applicable for most teams! Let me see how my interview with Amazon goes 😀😀

Amazon liiikii Mar 20, 2020

Congrats on making the great escape! Backstabbing culture in Amazon is everywhere - the things that people say about other people when they’re not around is horrible. Tenured engineers usually don’t like innovating as it puts them at a disadvantage needing to learn new technologies. We eat our lunch while we work at our desk and had team lunch 3 times last year - only when we have a new hire or intern lol Do you have recommendations on how to study for sys design? What resources did you use?

Amazon Katon🙏🔥 OP Mar 20, 2020

Hey! Yeah, looks like we've seen similar things that we can relate to. I used Grokking and Interview Kickstart materials to prep for system design. I've also heard good things about interviewcamp, but not sure since I've not used it myself.

Google yolo. Mar 20, 2020

I was at Amazon for long time, and left due to backstabbing issue. Very happy and don’t want to ho back. It’s not bad place for people with thick skin, and people managers though. Given the low hiring bar, it has provides employment to numerous engineers who would be rejected elsewhere, so they are having overall positive impact. Amazon experience is respected outside, so well worth the trade off.

Coherent Logix Alpha_7 Mar 20, 2020

Congrats on the new job & I hope it's all you ever wanted. Just a few tips: 1. Team outings & team lunches are generally considered a waste of time by a lot of high performers. Yes, the motive is good, but depending on your audience, it could have an opposite effect. Don't list this as your initial 2 reasons. Makes you seem inexperienced & naive. 2. As someone else mentioned everyone's personality is different. Often engineers are asocial. Also, you're going to the office to work & not socialize or admire the amenities. Have you tried having a non work related intelligent conversation with people around? (More than once) 4. Yes, there are such power houses. Either provide that person with data to show the need to switch to new technologies or accept your fate. You took another step & moved to what you wanted. Kudos to you. 5. Most mangers are more business oriented. However, a good manager will have the knowledge to have a good balance. Have you had a conversation with the manager about your concerns? 6. Welcome to the corporate world. Most big companies have this. 7. Get involved in the hiring process so that you can raise the bar wherever you go. All the best.

Salesforce mahomes Mar 20, 2020

What company are you in?

Coherent Logix Alpha_7 Mar 20, 2020

May I ask why do you want to know? (Since it's not really relevant to this post)

Rakuten tooQ10 Mar 20, 2020

Grats on the new job and thanks for the data points on Amazon - I work for their Japanese equivalent and applied for a few Amazon positions (didn't get a callback). Amazon sounds like a really depressing place to work. Well-paid, but depressing.