#AmazonReputation #ToxicWorkEnvironment #SoftwareIndustry
Hey everyone! I’ve been hearing a lot of mixed opinions about working at Amazon, especially in software roles. Some say it’s a high-pressure, toxic environment with unreasonable demands from managers. But how much of this bad reputation is actually true? 🤔
Do any of you currently work at Amazon or have worked there in the past? I’d love to hear about your experiences firsthand. How does the work culture compare to what’s being portrayed online?
Possible solutions could include implementing better work-life balance practices, setting realistic expectations for workload, or improving communication between managers and developers. Let’s share our insights and help each other out! 💬
Yeah it is, particularly in AWS
There are people who *love* working at Amazon. Part of that is their personalities (I don’t mean that in a negative way – people who enjoy things like structure, order, and generally getting things done seem to be happier), and an even bigger part is the team(s) they end up on. Amazon is probably the most team-dependent large company experience you can get.
It is absolutely possible to ask good questions during interviews to assess whether the team you’re talking to will be a good fit for you. *However,* what you need to consider much more than other companies, IMO, is the risk that there will be leadership / organizational changes that upend that environment you were ok with.
Yes it’s crazy. Some people love that. Just like some people like Wall Street or being a doctor.
Team-dependent for sure, though I was on a “good” team and my biggest issues were with Amazon’s corporate culture as a whole. Really felt like a cult and like all the managers were robots. Maybe that’s just FAANG!
The reputation undersells how bad it is.
Amazon is the only place I’ve worked where it was common for people to talk about how the stress of their software job sent them to therapy.
Management lies about everything and will throw anyone they dislike into their PIP quotas. The managers favorite people would get away with yelling at other engineers in team meetings with no repercussions despite multiple complaints. I had one such person spend 40 minutes raising his voice and insulting my and a teammates work in a 15 minute standup about things he was objectively wrong about (yes we went way over the allotted time just for him to do this). Multiple people complained about this behavior and the manager was present for this. Nothing happened to this engineer at all. But after I complained I was suddenly in process for a performance plan without any material concerns about my work. We had literally just gotten emails from the C-suites direct reports praising my work specifically, and there was a literal year of documentation about how I was being pushed towards promotion for my good work.
When I complained that I felt I was being bullied and targeted my boss told me I deserve to be bullied.
I had a coworker go on an extended rant about how women only get the job to fill quotas and none of them earn it because their brains aren’t built for math like men’s. He later ranted about how Mexicans are our biggest problem because they bring all the guns and drugs into the country. He also asked if I was Muslim out of the blue because I was eating bacon with my breakfast. I’m not, and nothing about me would lead anyone to think that I am except that I’m black. Nothing happened to him because he’s the managers friend.
When signing on I was told I wouldn’t have to participate in on call (it was a very special circumstance), then it became once every 11 weeks, then it became once every 3 weeks (so 1 week normal, 1 week as secondary, 1 on call). This meant PTO over a week was basically impossible. When several people raised concerns about the frequency of this high frequency of on call, including myself, we were told we knew what we signed up for and if we didn’t like it we should leave. For context, this was by far the busiest on call I’ve ever experienced. It easily consumed work the entire week where the engineer was on call with various tasks, and middle of the night pages were common place. But management took no excuses for it delaying sprint work. Which meant every 3 weeks we would work about 80 hours, 40 for the on call work and 40 for our sprint tasks.
Whenever anything went wrong it was always a blame game of throwing coworkers under the bus. Whenever anything went well people would downplay your role and play up their own. Even people who literally did nothing.
I attempted to internally transfer and was very candid with the managers on the teams I spoke with about why. Out of over a dozen managers around 80% told me this sort of treatment was incredibly common among transfers they’ve looked into or even their own experiences at Amazon. They tried to help me transfer but my scumbag of a manager actively blocked the process.
My manager had similar complaints from multiple other people, almost all of which he moved to PIP after their complaints. One managed an internal transfer, somehow, and was receiving glowing reviews from his new manger (until that org was disbanded and everyone laid off).
In a single quarter half of my team quit because of my manager. No one higher up, or in HR, cared.
I wound up quitting for a 30% raise at a non-FAANG company. Amazon is a cesspool of toxicity that further breeds toxicity. Good engineers who don’t want to play the snake game often quit very early for other opportunities because they have the skills to do so. Because Amazon openly down levels people (managers will all tell you this it’s not a secret) their pay is often not even better than general large tech companies. Their benefits are pathetic by comparison too under the guise of “frugality.”
I’ve told this story before but a good friend of mine landed a job at Amazon in Seattle he had to relocate for. He worked there for 2 and a half months at which point he was laid off. He got a call from them again a week later offering him his job back at like 60% of the wage he was previously paid. It really seemed like they were baiting people in with high salary expectations and then once they had a lease and obligations set up they were laying them off and then letting them get desperate and then offering them their jobs back at a greatly reduced rate. Not sure if true but definitely on brand for Amazon.
I think the (high) mandatory attrition bar with bad culture means a _lot_ of teams at amazon are just awful. There are a few teams that are good, but I’d say of my friend who work or worked there, it typically ranged from “don’t like job” to “find job horrible”.
That said, large workloads and oncall are common in lots of big tech. Not everywhere, or even necessarily on every team in a company, but this alone doesn’t necessarily reflect how bad Amazon’s culture is lol
Amazon in Seattle I think is very high potential to be toxic. I’ve heard terrible things about AWS and I know coworkers who were PIPd in there. Teams outside Seattle I think are quite different. My location in SoCal is super laid back and lots of other SoCal teams seem the same. That said, nobody at Amazon escapes the leaderships gavel. They can decide to be pricks at any time and they’ve done us dirty MANY times. I think Amazon is a place where everyone sacrifices a bit of well being for great money. You might be able to get better money and better work life balance but it’s not easy. I stay cuz it’s still the best pay I’ve ever been offered (in real dollars that is, plenty of startups making ridiculous claims out there)
Yes, but it is team specific, and the teams trend heavily towards miserable.
My company is hiring a senior dev and they’re all Amazon employees who hit the stock cliff at 4 years and want to die inside.
I interviewed at amzn several times. The first few times, all for jobs in amazon robotics. Everyone there seemed to be pretty excited and enthusiastic. Then I interviewed for a job with AWS. Everyone was grumpy and gloomy and one of the interviewers straight up told me they didn’t like their job or their team and I shouldn’t take the job.
Well, I had two managers that were both ex-Amazon and they were the worst bosses I have had in 10 year career and that’s saying a lot. Intense, psychotic and happy to throw ICs under the bus. There’s a reason they have a bad reputation and that’s because they promote the worst people. Oh and they are very happy to throw PIPs around to anyone they don’t like while they let their favorite ICs create buggy messes.
I mean they put their workers in cages, so…. *shrug*
Like has been said in other comments. It’s really team specific. There’s a lot of autonomy between the different departments at Amazon.
Personally, I work for a product that I really enjoy working for and a team that I really enjoy working with. We work really hard to keep our on calls light. And him multiple times stopped. All development work to focus on-call load.
Last year I was even pipped, my own fault, and my manager and I worked through it and I’m even up for promotion this year.
I did 5 years at Amazon and had a lot of fun. I had spent 10 years in the trenches at start ups before so workload and work/life balance weren’t all that bad – or better at Amazon.
I think liking it is really specific to personality. You kind of have to look at their leadership principles and decide if that’s you.
Yes.
Day to day varies from team to team but overall the culture is instilled by high level leadership.
I’ve worked at an Amazon subsidiary for quite a few years, and seeing how much Amazon’s culture seeped into and changed my company’s culture makes me sick.
Rank stacking is real. PIP factory is real. Org politics is real. Anyone who say it isn’t is either lying, ignorant, or benefitting from it. There is absolutely a quote to fire a certain amount of people, even if their performance is fine.
Id say Iif you are someone who doesn’t have a big named company on your resume and Amazon lands on your lap, take it. Work hard for a few years to pad your resume and get the fuck out. That’s what I’m doing.
I can vent about this for hours, about how useless middle management is (why is there SDM II?), or how RTO is not based on any performance metric (Jassy pulled it out of his ass), and many more.
I went from loving every bit of my company for the first half, until Amazon decided to sink their claws into my company and now I am actively depressed and have been struggling with my confidence and mental health for months. Honestly, it’s just not worth it unless you need it as a stepping stone.
It’s kind of toxic for WLB and management, but it’s fantastic for the learning experience and working with skillful people (both technical and soft skills).
I have a friend that works at kuyper as an engineer. Says it’s horrible. He’s made it this long because of the salary and stock. Otherwise, he wants to get the hell out of there. I interviewed quickly with HR. They told me I needed to relocate to Seattle. I told them no thanks. I’ve heard nothing but terrible things about Amazon. I would imagine that the managers are horrible to their staff because they are also being treated like shit from their managers. Constantly under the gun with loads of stress will make you do things you never thought you would do.
I worked at Amazon for almost 9 years and would absolutely work there again. That being said, due to the hierarchical structure, focus on ownership, and strong culture, your experience will be highly variable. It will be more dependent than other companies on the quality of your manager, how well you work with your teammates, how much you like your team’s projects, etc.
Both the best team and worst professional times of my life were at Amazon. And the longer I was there and the more I learned, the better and better things tended to get. I got better at spotting bad teams, managers, and projects and avoiding them and found incredible folks to collaborate with that I kept up with through team changes and now company changes.
So definitely consider Amazon, but ask smart questions of the hiring manager, know your own passions and interests, and be willing to pivot internally if your first team sucks.
team dependent.
internal team supporting kindle? probably 40 hr weeks.
an AWS service with a lot of clients internally and externally? get ready for hell
Perhaps it seems to me, but in the FAANG, but that’s just my opinion.
i was placed on focus as a new hire. as in, 2 months after joining, still not done with the onboarding, new hire. there wasn’t even metrics to measure me on but apparently i still “didn’t meet them”
I have worked for ex-Amazon managers and they are definitely slave drivers. However, some people enjoy the challenge and I am sure some people genuinely enjoy working for Amazon. They will definitely push you beyond your limits. Even for myself, it’s a mixed feeling. I hate the extra work, but I do see the increase in quality.