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I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that

I work for Amazon, and my management line all the way up to Jeff is sensible, comprehensible, and human; I have good work-life balance and am able to offer that to my reports; my compensation is fair; and I would escalate immediately if I ever saw anyone abused, mistreated, or cheated. Amazon's a big company and I'm sure there's terrible managers out there and true harrowing stories. And there are problems, here and there, and things I'd love to change. But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now.

candiodari 10y ago
Do you think those articles about conditions in the warehouses are lying ? If so, why ? What I mean to say is, the odds of those conditions being either unintentional or just local aberrations seems rather small given the widespread articles about it from around the world. Germany, UK, US, ... everywhere workers are complaining about things like sick people getting fired, mandatory unpaid overtime, constant tracking of everything, ...
- felixgallo 10y ago
  I can't speak for any other experience than my own. I suspect some or most of the stories have truth to them; one day I hope to work a shift and find out for myself.
  - candiodari 10y ago
    In your own words, you are a manager at Amazon. I understand it's your job to defend your employer, and that's fine. Just putting in this message to make sure others understand that you're paid by the organisation being criticized here.
OneUnitOfWork 10y ago
Having worked in AWS Data Centres in Australia and India, I'm curious to know why you think the average DC technician leaves after 9 months? Gotta love a work-life balance that forces you to work weekends and public holidays! The culture _IS_ the issue at Amazon - you either learn to put up with the BS metrics your managers push down your throat or you leave for somewhere that treats you like a human being.
- freditup 10y ago
  I'm being a touch quarrelsome, but wouldn't a data center job often inherently require working on weekends and holidays? Curious here about the nature of data center jobs in general and in what specific ways Amazon would be worse than normal (if any).
  - petre 10y ago
    Yes most datacenter work (in general) is 24/7 three shifts with maybe weekends on call and holidays. Depends really on what country you're in, probably France is better because it has laws favouring the employee and a 35 hour work week.
- sdmetacarpus 10y ago
  Having worked in AWS DCO- there's a lot of factors. You were under a shit manager. APAC Regions manager is inept. Dublin was also filled with fucking idiots. DCO's upper management in general is a fuckfest of people who want to play big man but have no idea what metrics ARE. They have no basic grasp of math nor do they know how to find what they need. I'd be shocked if they could tell you what an average value is from a set of numbers. That said- there was a huge fucking technical gulf between the average DT and an engineer. So many DTs wanted to be SDEs or Sysengs, but their real world technical competency is that of a junior sysadmin at best so they saw no real room for promotion. These days, automation removes the learning part of it. AWS back in the day- you could have techs that would qualify as mid level sysadmins at other companies. Today- the scale is so huge and the fleet so automated that it's mostly just throwing motherboards at problems and swapping harddrives. They want to turn the datacenter work into the equivalent of warehouse work so that they can hire any body off the street can do the job. The hilarious irony is that you now get former aws datatechs with it on their resume entering the technical market who have no business doing so. Finally- I think it's an issue of just large companies in general. As the group grows, you inevitably hire assholes who make asshole moves and poison the corporate environment. Amazon grew so fast and hired so fast- there's no way that this could be avoided. DCO just kinda sucked if you were less than a level5.
  - 10y ago
camtarn 10y ago
From what I've seen inside Amazon, upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples, so a bad VP, director or manager could cause a lot of damage to those beneath them. I was lucky enough to work in a really great environment with a management chain who cared deeply about the people under them, but I worked with unpleasant and bullying managers from other divisions, and chatted to people who'd fallen out of favour and had their manager absolutely grind them down until they left. But, overall, I'm not foolish enough to believe that this is particularly unique to Amazon, and I've heard far worse stories from pretty much every other sector of employment.
- kamaal 10y ago
  >>upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples This thing tells me the upper management itself was the bad apples.
ex_amazon_sde 10y ago
> But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now. Ex Amazon SDE here. Did you fail to notice the incredible turnover rate among engineers? Most stay less than 18 months. (I've seen the real numbers from tools that mine employee IDs and join date).
- jhall1468 10y ago
  Actually, average tenure at Amazon is closer to 12 months. Google is pretty close to that. Tech sector is notorious for it's low tenure. It's easier to get paid bt job hopping then promotions.
- felixgallo 10y ago
  I'd be interested in seeing those numbers. Could you post them somewhere? Anecdotally, I haven't seen anything like that in my org.

candiodari 10y ago

Do you think those articles about conditions in the warehouses are lying ? If so, why ? What I mean to say is, the odds of those conditions being either unintentional or just local aberrations seems rather small given the widespread articles about it from around the world. Germany, UK, US, ... everywhere workers are complaining about things like sick people getting fired, mandatory unpaid overtime, constant tracking of everything, ...

felixgallo 10y ago
I can't speak for any other experience than my own. I suspect some or most of the stories have truth to them; one day I hope to work a shift and find out for myself.
- candiodari 10y ago
  In your own words, you are a manager at Amazon. I understand it's your job to defend your employer, and that's fine. Just putting in this message to make sure others understand that you're paid by the organisation being criticized here.

OneUnitOfWork 10y ago

Having worked in AWS Data Centres in Australia and India, I'm curious to know why you think the average DC technician leaves after 9 months? Gotta love a work-life balance that forces you to work weekends and public holidays! The culture _IS_ the issue at Amazon - you either learn to put up with the BS metrics your managers push down your throat or you leave for somewhere that treats you like a human being.

freditup 10y ago
I'm being a touch quarrelsome, but wouldn't a data center job often inherently require working on weekends and holidays? Curious here about the nature of data center jobs in general and in what specific ways Amazon would be worse than normal (if any).
- petre 10y ago
  Yes most datacenter work (in general) is 24/7 three shifts with maybe weekends on call and holidays. Depends really on what country you're in, probably France is better because it has laws favouring the employee and a 35 hour work week.
sdmetacarpus 10y ago
Having worked in AWS DCO- there's a lot of factors. You were under a shit manager. APAC Regions manager is inept. Dublin was also filled with fucking idiots. DCO's upper management in general is a fuckfest of people who want to play big man but have no idea what metrics ARE. They have no basic grasp of math nor do they know how to find what they need. I'd be shocked if they could tell you what an average value is from a set of numbers. That said- there was a huge fucking technical gulf between the average DT and an engineer. So many DTs wanted to be SDEs or Sysengs, but their real world technical competency is that of a junior sysadmin at best so they saw no real room for promotion. These days, automation removes the learning part of it. AWS back in the day- you could have techs that would qualify as mid level sysadmins at other companies. Today- the scale is so huge and the fleet so automated that it's mostly just throwing motherboards at problems and swapping harddrives. They want to turn the datacenter work into the equivalent of warehouse work so that they can hire any body off the street can do the job. The hilarious irony is that you now get former aws datatechs with it on their resume entering the technical market who have no business doing so. Finally- I think it's an issue of just large companies in general. As the group grows, you inevitably hire assholes who make asshole moves and poison the corporate environment. Amazon grew so fast and hired so fast- there's no way that this could be avoided. DCO just kinda sucked if you were less than a level5.
- 10y ago

camtarn 10y ago

From what I've seen inside Amazon, upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples, so a bad VP, director or manager could cause a lot of damage to those beneath them. I was lucky enough to work in a really great environment with a management chain who cared deeply about the people under them, but I worked with unpleasant and bullying managers from other divisions, and chatted to people who'd fallen out of favour and had their manager absolutely grind them down until they left. But, overall, I'm not foolish enough to believe that this is particularly unique to Amazon, and I've heard far worse stories from pretty much every other sector of employment.

kamaal 10y ago
>>upper management was not particularly good at reining in the bad apples This thing tells me the upper management itself was the bad apples.

ex_amazon_sde 10y ago

> But if there was a pervasive, total cultural failure at Amazon, I'd have seen it by now. Ex Amazon SDE here. Did you fail to notice the incredible turnover rate among engineers? Most stay less than 18 months. (I've seen the real numbers from tools that mine employee IDs and join date).

jhall1468 10y ago
Actually, average tenure at Amazon is closer to 12 months. Google is pretty close to that. Tech sector is notorious for it's low tenure. It's easier to get paid bt job hopping then promotions.
felixgallo 10y ago
I'd be interested in seeing those numbers. Could you post them somewhere? Anecdotally, I haven't seen anything like that in my org.