Why do people hate working at Amazon?

Toxic

Because bananas is not a currency. Also they hired many bad managers that micromanage and have led many to have a bad experience. Those managers may have left and some are protected by upper management but in general the stigma sticks. Also the 5/15/40/40 vesting is not employee friendly. No free food. Very frugal in general benefits. The list goes on. The managememt isn't bothered by it because the stock keeps going up but they must realize they need to bring themselves upto industry standard at some point.

1. Biggest tech company there is 2. Generally people only comment about bad experiences 3. More engineers = more bad experiences = more bad posts/comments It’s also very team dependent. I’ve had a great experience at Amazon thus far.

Amazon software is terrible. Indescribably bad. Engineers main job is to be the human in the loop to work on pages of sev2s and write reports about the failures that caused actual customers to notice. 2am 3am 430am pages are commonplace every night for the oncall. Other companies have oncall, but none have it as bad.

For the same reason slaves disliked their socioeconomic station in life.

There are good and bad apples in every big company. Dont worry about the brand but focus on the team & product you work with. I left google to join amzn and had an amazing experience. Not with amzn anymore though, wish I hadn't sold the stock :(

One aspect that I don’t like Amazon is that it’s in the retail industry (though it also does software services) and for retailers, frugality is the principle, especially when they have over half a million employees...

Just chill out and take Amazon offer.

You get tired of bananas

A bunch of reasons. Traditionally Amazon was a very efficient company focused on relentlessly delivering customer value. Anything that didn't contribute to this goal was not valued, and so the culture inspired and provided opportunities for people who thrive in a very aggressively productive place, and efficiently chewed up people who didn't. This is the culture basically enshrined in the original leadership principles of Amazon. The people who did well there were doers, people who just got things done and delivered with no nonsense, who thought big and took bold bets and stood behind them until they either succeeded or clearly failed. Courageous, thrifty, hardworking people. Maybe a little lacking in social skills, or a bit abrasive at times. This was "Day 1" culture as Jeff B would call it, and it's what made Amazon great. It's why you've heard of us. Then the company grew at a ridiculous rate, and in some pockets of the company we lost this perspective and imported Day 2 cultures from Microsoft and other places. This is not intended to be an insult to Microsoft but it's true. Day 2 meant politics, empire building, serving ourselves instead of customers, and PMs... Lots and lots of PMs. This ruined several orgs at Amazon, and you'll hear about this in the Amazon forum here a lot. Retail was totally wrecked and is now doing open heart surgery to fix it. Prime Now, Fresh, advertising, total dumpster fires. Day 2 sucks. The normal Amazon stack ranking, top grading and forced removal of the bottom 10% or so would have handled this, but as we grew and newcomers from other companies clashed with the Day 1 culture, they all complained to the NY Times and soon we had that big article about our "bruising workplace." Amazon responded in part by softening some of our corrective mechanisms and dismantling others, and that meant no more removing of the bottom X%, allowing people to move to another team if they were underperforming (and thus remain), etc. Now we were really screwed. Amazon is trying to get back to Day 1, but we've got a mess. The current company is a blend of Day 1 teams and Day 2 teams, and those don't mix well. Some people hate the older style and some people hate the new orgs dominated by politics and small armies of 20-something PMs Fresh from "B school" who have never delivered anything in their lives. The old culture could burn you out, but the new crap destroys your soul. And there is a battle going on right now for Amazon's soul. So there are a variety of reasons why people might not be happy here, but in my estimation many of them simply don't belong here. We need deep cuts in the Day 2 orgs, primarily of PMs. We need to let doers do and builders build and thinkers think, like we used to when every great new thing was created (.com, Kindle, AWS, Alexa, etc). You should want to work here but only on a Day 1 team. We still have a lot of these, and one year on such a team will grow you in ways you can't imagine at most companies. You will work hard but you'll start thinking like an owner, you'll grow and you'll emerge a leader, and that will stay with you. And that's the story with Amazon.