I found Amazon's culture - in particular the relentless obsession with solving actual customer needs - to be a perfect fit for my own engineering training from day one. I was not "molded" to fit it. As I see it, as an engineer I have expertise my customer can't truly know or measure. They really have to trust me. I earn that trust by taking on their problem as if it were my own. That's how I've worked my entire career, and that's what I love about the parts of Amazon I have actually observed.
It is interesting to me that the tens of thousands of people that work at Amazon with their obsession of solving customer needs are not worried about solving the problem of customers not being able to trust where the goods are being sourced from.
Leaving aside the efficiencies of commingling inventory, even the simple filter option to only show sold and shipped by Amazon.com search results was deemed not to be a customer need. In fact, it was removed. Quite a puzzling “culture” of solving customer’s needs.
> I found Amazon's culture - in particular the relentless obsession with solving actual customer needs - to be a perfect fit for my own engineering training from day one.
So... Where's the "Report counterfeit" button again?
Oh yeah. That's right. There isn't one. Intentionally.
I don't think most of us want to go for the lottery.
Also:
Majority of amazon alumni I've had experience with (to be fair it's not a lot) has been extremely toxic and a they've been a jerk. I don't blame the individuals. They are probably required to be a jerk to survive at Amazon and unlearning that is hard as fuck.
That report is nonsense. For one thing, hiring takes a lot of work. No manager is going to invest the time in hiring someone just to have an expendable on the team to sacrifice. No manager is going to accept the drag on the team that arises by having a below-standards person on the team. Everyone here is clear that we'd rather do without than have a low-performing co-worker. Finally, even if some misguided manager did want to do this, each Amazon hiring loop has an independent person to enforce the policy that each new hire be better than half the people in a similar role.
It's true that some people leave, and sometimes you're not sorry to see them go. This is true in every line of work.
Amazon trains its employees to be back stabbers. I'm at the point where if I see a long stint Amazon on your resume, I count that as a point against you, because if we work together, you're probably gonna try to give me the runaround and/or fuck me over.
I doubt anything I say could convince you otherwise, but I've had no experience at all in 8 years at being "stabbed" in the back. Nor have I any way to prove I am not an evil one. Amazon is large, you may be judging on a small sample size.
Curious: have you ever worked elsewhere, particularly anywhere that is generally praised? It's possible that your experience has genuinely been wholly positive or it's possible that what you tolerate as a normal working environment is entirely unhealthy compared to other companies.
By definition, your experience is a small sample size.
I won't say my sample size (about 5 people who worked there and 10 people that have interviewed) is massive either, but mine is 100% negative. Yes, all IT people, so I'm not even dealing with the poor line workers.
Their turnover numbers IMO validate the negative views of Amazon. The ass-covering and lying during their downtimes over holiday also show a degrading culture.
Their UIs also show a poorly managed IT staff. I can understand warts, but why not gradual improvement? The biggest sign was their awful redesign of the console, which was demonstrably worse and has not improved.
"You're not supposed to use the UI in AWS"
Well OK, their APIs are not well documented. When you have a command with literally 100 options, you need a LOT of examples. The documentation of their error codes is basically "stackoverflow", and change over releases with no warning. And this is for their most used services, who knows what the various other crap is like. And they only show examples of invocations, they almost never show the OUTPUT format.
This is something that should be actively improved for the leading cloud provided that will probably hit 100 billion in revenue in 2022. You can't invest .0001% of your revenue to better documentation and tooling? Like that HASN'T cost you 1000x that in services and revenue already with people unable to get their prototypes off the ground or fix problems to scale more quickly?
They show management, they show low worker motivation, their marketing and press is so bad that Walmart seems like a good corporate citizen in comparison.
All of their policies can be glossed over with growth.
Unfortunately, AWS isn't a startup company anymore, it is a utility, an important core component in the foundation of the internet. Their culture and hiring and communication show that their growth HR policies are going to backfire in the coming decades as all their systems are likely on the their third or fourth "generation" of people being responsible for it.
Consider getting a software job at Amazon: likely you're getting shunted onto some "legacy" (you know, written 4 years ago, 2 employee generations ago) and are expected to know a big complicated messy codebase with no docummentation and no organizational memory, and then you get saddled with ridiculous expectations.
You either get to greenfield redevelop it (if you have a nice manager) which is risky, or you are utterly fucked from an advancement perspective and you are just meat to chew.
every single manager i've had whose sole managerial experience was Amazon/AWS before i encountered them was a raging turdwaffle, and having 20+ years of experience i've seen my share of shitty managers to compare them to.
please, any readers, i beg of you: think three times before diving in that swamp.
