What is this so called “toxic culture” at amazon ?
Sep 16, 2018
26 Comments
@Amazonians : I have heard this term from a lot of fellow SEs. I have heard stories wherein two employees are pitted against each other wherein a part of feature development is given to both. Whoever develops it faster better is considered better performing. I am considering an offer at amazon for a software engineering role and wanted real insights ! Could you guys please shed some light?
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Also I don't buy you comment on lack of open discussion. I suspect that's you own personal experience.
I also suspect you are not tech since you think "internal tools" means document systems...
Open discussion is not solely personal experience. Internally Facebook employees use FB@Work to discuss about a lot of things internally that can be visible companywide, including calling out C-level executives for things said at all-hands meetings. When is the last time you saw someone very publicly call out any of the C-level execs at Amazon, aside from the filtered question cards that JeffB can selectively choose to answer at Amazon all-hands? There's a reason why Amazonians are so hush hush secretive about their identities in press articles about Amazon culture criticisms, moreso than Google and Facebook.
Also, WLB really just depends on the team and location. Lots of FB employees I know complain about it in MPK but not in SEA (aside from the Identity team in SEA that was working their asses off after Cambridge Analytica)
Plus all the Amazon refugees we hire are super happy.
At a broader level Amazon is something like a constantly evolving ecosystem and it's not uncommon for multiple teams to be competing to solve the same problem. They either end up working together or one wins out.
It's not so much anything planned as it is the result of the level of decentralization at Amazon where teams basically self-propose goals to hit and it just happens that multiple people in different parts of the company independently propose to solve the same problem in different ways.