how does Google’s culture differ from Amazon?
Jun 14, 2020
11 Comments
I came into Amazon from an acquisition and haven’t been impressed with the broader Amazon culture. It seems like employees aren’t really valued as actual people and the work/life balance isn’t great. Now I’m looking at a role at Google and wondering: In what ways is the culture similar/different? Thanks!
comments
* WLB: Google wins, no doubt. Not to say that there aren't workaholics - there are, but you don't have to be a workaholic to succeed here.
* Respect: Googlers generally are nicer to each other. You will be valued as a person. You won't see people shouting over each other in meetings.
* Psychological safety: Making sure you feel safe is paramount at Google, but not really at Amazon. The negative side of this is that low performers can stick around longer at Google before they're put on NI/PIP.
* Customer obsession: Google has something similar. But in practice, most of the product decisions are made by high ranking engineers vs actual product managers. This usually means a really well designed, well engineered platform and system, but no actual customers/users who want to use it.
* Engineering excellence: Decisions made by engineers mean really amazing systems. Even the builder tools here are amazing. Major version conflict never again (you'll trade it off for a single version in a monolithic repo). If you want to build, Google is the place to be.
* Perf: Everyone obsesses over perf and promos. This isn't unlike Amazon. However, one key difference at Google is that building new things that are flashy gets you promoted more easily than maintaining an old system. I'm told this is changing, but I have yet to see the difference in the half a decade I've been here.
* Politics: Backstabbing in perf and background politics still happen. You get compared to your other peers at same level in calibration (Google's version of OLR). There isn't a forced URA, but there is unwritten caps on ratings/promos. So about the same as Amazon?
* Sense of urgency: This is where Amazon's bias for action mentality far exceeds what you will find at Google. You are waiting on something to be done to get unblocked? Yeah, you'll be waiting a while. You need to respect the other person's WLB. This can become frustrating if you're a highly productive engineer surrounded by low productivity.
* Career growth: At you go up the ranks, you'll need to influence other people to get things done and moving. Scale in numbers. But guess what? Those other people don't have a sense of urgency and maintain their WLB. So, once you hit a L5 (equivalent to low-mid L6 at Amazon as per levels.fyi), you're probably gonna stay there a long while because getting anything done at scale takes a long time. Unless you're shooting for a PE role at Amazon, you'd probably be fine.
If you get a chance to work at Google, absolutely take it. It's a rewarding experience. It'll help you grow mentally and emotionally. It'll be an amazing addition to your resume. Eventually down the road, if you get bored and frustrated, you can always go back to Amazon. Probably even at a higher level.
Also I agree with you that the general feel i’ve gotten is that employees aren’t valuable lol. there are rare teams where it’s better, but i wonder if that’s because they just have been dragged down by toxic peers yet