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Everytime I hear these stories, there are 2 things that go through my mind. 1) I'm never going to work at Amazon 2) If you're judging a company based on the e

• randall 10y ago
  This seems the most nuanced explanation. Most Big Companies™ I've worked with (AOL, CNET when it was a public co) have a lot of layers, which without proper objective alignment, creates a natural 'broken-ness' feeling. Contrast that with startups where the lack of resources and increasing growth makes it feel broken. Also if you're growing headcount very quickly, culture doesn't always get transmitted and you can end up with factions fighting against each other. "Life is pain. Anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something." You do, however, get to pick your pain. Pain from growing too quickly feels much different from organizational disfunction. In Amazon's case they might have both (!) because of how fast they grow and how big they are.
• shados 10y ago
  Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones. Sometimes, the people part of the bad ones wake up and start bitching, then you get this. Google has great reviews, but it has its share of bad departments. It also has a lot of koolaid drinkers, so the people who work in those just bitch about it a lot to their friends and it never goes any further than that... Eventually someone will post a NYT article about it and make Google sounds totally horrible because of those localized issues, just like Amazon. Or maybe they'll just keep drinking the koolaid. Who knows!
  • spriggan3 10y ago
    > Amazon is large company. A really large company. Like all large companies, there are good/great departments and bad ones. Companies have processes and policies, I don't buy the "bad department" excuse. Of course, some have it better than others, but often bad working conditions are the result of policies put in place by the upper management.
    • nevir 10y ago
      A really large company also has trouble _consistently_ enforcing said policies. Different organizations interpret them in different ways.
  • rdtsc 10y ago
    Funny because I haven't seen this level "bitching" from Google, Facebook, Microsoft and other companies. We are not talking about a single person here. There is a systemic issue it seems.
    • 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
      I have worked at Amazon and Microsoft. At Amazon the culture was abusive. At Microsoft I saw arrogance and incompetence and various other irritating things- what you get at any big company. But it's not malicious. Amazon is highly political and set up to be effectively malicious. (The other large companies I've worked for were more like Microsoft.) The Amazon issue isn't just that they are large. IT's their culture, which is employee hostile.
  • johnward 10y ago
    > there are good/great departments and bad ones. I find this to be true of the megacorps I've worked for but the problem at amazon seems to be the entire culture starting with Bezos.
    • InclinedPlane 10y ago
      There are definitely good/great teams at Amazon. However, a big problem is that the overarching corporate culture, corporate leadership, and corporate policies are toxic and corrosive to job satisfaction and healthy working environments. That means the good teams are much less numerous and also constantly under threat. It also means, as an individual, there aren't corporate level resources (HR, etc.) who are in any way invested in helping you advance your career or improve your work experience.
• manyxcxi 10y ago
  Having spent a number of years in Seattle working with ex employees, having friends that work there, and even having a very cool project with Amazon that I'll probably never be able to talk about- I can tell you it is 100% about the team or group you are in that determines whether you live one of these horror stories or not. I have no doubt about the accuracy of anyone's story when they're saying how screwed over they got by Amazon, but I'm also not surprised when I hear someone say they love it. There seems to be hot-spot groups that seem to originate a majority of the complaints, and they're not the tech teams we think about first when we're on HN reading these stories- a lot of the horrors happen on the 'non-tech' side. With all that, I'd still never work there. It's generally a very tough place to work and I've heard of all kinds of funny ways those big bonuses have a way of disappearing/shrinking. As I tell the recruiters every two weeks when they inevitably call or email- I appreciate the tools they've built for me to run my company, I'm a Prime subscriber, and Alexa basically runs my house, but I want nothing to do with stepping foot in that campus as an employee.
  • jdc0589 10y ago
    I interviewed there a year or so ago. One of the guys in the 90000000 different in person interview sessions was extremely frank with me. He saw that I enjoyed working on open-source projects in my free time, and felt that there were some relevant Amazon policies (which I won't get in to) the he wished he had known about before he went to work there. Anyway, this guy was frank enough with me about that stuff, that I actually believe him when he said that all those bad articles about amazon's culture (which had just come out weeks prior at that point) were probably accurate for some parts of the company, but he had never encountered it. I didn't end up getting an offer from them ( I wouldn't have hired me based on the tech interviews either. Every single applied programming problem was some form a tree traversal, which I don't use regularly anymore) and was a little relieved that I wouldn't end up working there.
    • kyrra 10y ago
      I don't know Amazon's policy, but many companies have you sign something when you start saying that they own anything and everything you work on, even if it's in your free time. Most of these companies also will provide you forms you can fill out explaining the projects you work on (or own) that will give you control/ownership of it rather than the company. I've filled out the same paperwork for all 4 companies I've worked at during my career. If you have something new you want to work on, you normally need to contact your company's legal or HR team and get signoff that you are allowed to work on it (and that you can maintain ownership of it).
• johnward 10y ago
  This just reaffirms that I don't want to work with any company in the 3's. My current company is a 3.3 but if you read their subreddit you would think they were going to murder your dog.
  • OtterCoder 10y ago
    I don't know what this means. 3 of what?
    • elevenE 10y ago
      I think he meant the Glassdoor rating.
    • dpark 10y ago
      The grandparent post was about Glassdoor. Amazon has a 3ish out of 5 rating, while other big tech companies tend to be around 4ish.
• InclinedPlane 10y ago
  > 2) If you're judging a company based on the experiences of those who are dissatisfied, isn't that always going to be heavily biased? I've worked there myself and have a ton of friends who have spent time there. Some folks have even enjoyed working there. Overwhelmingly the evidence is that Amazon is a very bad place to work at, on average. You might get lucky and find a good team (amazon is incredibly federated as an organization) but you might also get unlucky and get an extra bad team. Also, unlike a lot of other tech companies of similar size (such as Microsoft or Amazon) there's basically no "love" at the corporate level for individual employees. At other companies reaching that "full-time employee" status level means something, and the company is willing to invest in you. You have the ability to move around to different teams, you have the ability to change your role. You have a wide range of options in terms of training to take. Working as an FTE at Amazon feels like working as a contractor anywhere else. It's very dysfunctional, though there are enough devs who mostly know what they're doing who stick around for a long time to keep things running. Additionally, the service oriented architecture of the system makes it a lot easier to cycle through lots and lots of devs. Of all of the folks I've known who have worked there most left after a short period of time because they hated it.
  • beastcoast 10y ago
    This is my perspective as well. Beyond our slightly cultish tenets/leadership principles (seriously, they quote Jeff like he's our holy leader), Amazon's really just a federation of loosely coupled teams. You and your team are literally at the mercy of your VP/director/Sr. Manager. That said, I have generally positive things to say, but I've also witnessed an entire team of 6 SDEs quit under an especially bull-headed SDM. I've also seen managers making ridiculous promises to upper management without vetting them first. Thankfully the bad SDM found another job, but he's still working in another department in the company.
    • 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
      Amazon was one of two companies that had the cultish "magical phrases" thing in my career. (Eg "Its day one!" And crap like that.) They are also the two companies that were the most abusive of employees. I have come to associate the cult like culture with employee hostility at the management level (and I believe that company culture comes from the Founder/CEO)
• lamontcg 10y ago
  Using just one rating is a bit flawed. You'll probably find a lot of people who would give the corporate culture one star but would give it 5 stars for the fact that they got to work with emerging technology -- which is the legitimate draw of working for Amazon. But that inflates the single rating that you give the company to a 3 where otherwise you might have given it a 1 for the culture being shitty. And the fact that Amazon is as big and healthy of a company as it is and the fact that it loses an entire point compared to Google and Facebook in ratings means that the culture must be really bad. And when you consider that the lowest of the companies in Glassdoor are not only shitty culture but businesses that are fundamentally swirling down the toilet bowl as well -- and Amazon for all its success can only eek out an 'Average' rating? That means the culture must be pretty bad. (And based on my working there for 5 years, I know the culture is pretty bad -- but if you asked me to rate it, I'd probably rate it a 3 overall -- good place to spend a year or two to learn some cutting edge technology to get on your resume, but then you should escape before you stay there too long...)
• CyberDildonics 10y ago
  There is also survivor bias as people who know better would leave quickly and would be less likely to write a review.
• pascalxus 10y ago
  And you gotta remember the star rating given by the reviewer isn't always accurate according to their own review. I've seen several reviews where they gave amazon 3 stars, despite the fact that they said there was an abusive working environment with stack ranking, politics, 80 hour work weeks and backstabbing. If that's 3 stars, that's awful.
• 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
  First off, Glassdoor is not objective. Employers can "object" to reviews that are derogatory and Glassdoor has so many "requirements" for reviews and a fear of getting sued that they just remove the bad ones on the rationalization that the negative review is not supportable, rather than deal with the irate HR department. Remember who pays Glassdoor. It's the companies, not the ex-emplyoees. I have experienced HR departments who actively groom the reviews there to ensure nothing too bad sticks around. Amazon is an okay to great place to work if you have low standards and low self respect/esteem. Many engineers are this way without realizing it even. (Because we can see all the flaws in ourselves and our systems and don't realize that this isn't objective, so when we're mistreated we figure it's more legitimate than it is.) Of the people at amazon who were happy there when I was there, it was mostly people with low requiremetns- they figured if they got their paycheck every month they were happy. They weren't bothered by their bosses abusing them verbally, or the other nonsense that others have talked about.
  • carc 10y ago
    I live in the Seattle area too. I don't know a single person who work/worked at Amazon who disliked it or had any experience like what the NYTimes article described. I like how you just make a blanket statement like "It is okay or great if you have low standards and low self respect/esteem". Way to play the superiority card. I know guys who went from Amazon to Google and say they liked Amazon way more. Our experiences are obviously both anecdotal.. but only one of us is making condescending value judgments of others.
    • 20yrs_no_equity 10y ago
      I was responding to the general assertion that people who are unhappy should be discounted because they are the ones who are going to complain. That's a value judgement. I wasn't being condescending. There are a lot of engineers who have low self esteem (that's not a value judgement- too high self esteem is bad, as is too low, but "low" means "Lower than their value as a person", eg: they under value themselves. I'm not devaluing them.) And there are a lot of people who just aren't too picky about their workplace. I think that many of them are people early in their careers who don't know that they're being mistreated as poorly as they are. Before I worked at Amazon I heard many stories from people who worked there about how terrible it was. I foolishly discounted them, and went to work there anyway, in large part because I undervalued myself, (eg: low self esteem effectively) and I was not being as picky as I should have been. Just because people made the same mistake I did and might have felt the company was ok, because thy didn't have the alternative experiences I did, doesn't mean I'm wrong. I consider you to have turned my comments about the topic to the person, by making a condescending characterization of me that was unwarranted by my comments.
• marssaxman 10y ago
  I don't need to read stories like this to know I will never work at Amazon; having lived in Seattle since the dot-com era, I've heard enough of them from friends and acquaintances. But it's not just the unhappy, dissatisfied former employees who make the place sound bad: I've had a number of friends stick around for years, some of whom even claimed to enjoy it, and their stories still make Amazon sound like a soulless, dystopian meat-grinder. It's the same in that glassdoor thread you linked: even the people who are trying to recommend Amazon as a good place to work end up making its culture sound aggressive, cutthroat, and inflexible. Not my cup of tea.