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Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scr

Piggy-backing on the top-most-voted comment for those that will only read this one and not go to page 2 or onward. Drama gets heavily upvoted. If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person (or OP's), who have a good work life balance, solve challenging tasks, and think this is the best job they've ever had. I'm one of those people. I've been at Amazon for almost 10 years, worked on a half dozen teams. Sure, there were outliers and a couple bad managers I've worked with, and some folks who left the company on bad terms. But by and large, the experiences I had in 2 different countries on 2 different continents were mostly positive. Yes, my job is tough. Yes, the oncall can be challenging sometimes too. But I've also never stopped growing in the last decade, and have achieved bigger things than I ever thought possible. Every single product and feature I've shipped have been immensely successful because of Amazon's deeply ingrained "Working backwards from the customer culture". And since that's what drives me - shipping cool stuff and having users on Twitter go crazy for it, I have never been more fulfilled. Amazon is huge. There are now >60,000 Software Development Engineers worldwide. I'm not in Seattle but I'm in one of the largest offices outside of it. So I'm sure every single horror story is true. But even so, they are a minute exception, and not most people's rule.

andreilys 5y ago
Why is it that amongst all the tech Co's, Amazon seems to have the highest proportion of horror stories? It's almost a meme at this point. I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture. Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit". No other Tech CEO has said that. So perhaps your story is the anomaly?
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  I find it easy to believe that Amazon is a shit place to work (as a SWE) and that Amazon is a massive company with different bits being different. But I also find it easy to believe that a meme could just be wrong. It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer. If everyone at Google is convinced at orientation that Google is some great company with great engineering then that can create a brand outside the company by the force of the size of their workforce. Maybe Amazon just has a different employer brand. Don’t Netflix also hire relatively many employees also? Perhaps I’m just misremembering. And wasn’t stack ranking and the like quite popular say 20 years ago? It isn’t obvious that the Google or Facebook of Apple or Amazon way is the best way to manage a business. Lots of people online have complaints about each. And I’m not even particularly put off by your Jeff Bezos quote: it doesn’t need to be a bad thing for someone to have an incentive to quit something they are not suited to as they could then go on to something they are better suited to, and it’s true that a lot of people (even well-paid with alternatives) will spend a long time going to a job they dislike because it is easier to stay with the status quo than to leap. I still feel like the hire-to-fire stories are directionally right (and so are eg stories about shipping new products being the only way to get promotions at Google leading to warped incentives)
  - andreilys 5y ago
    It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer To be fair there is a website dedicated to all the things killed by Google - https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com No other tech co has a website like that, partly because it's incredibly difficult to get promoted at Google so you get a bunch of competing products that get spun up.
    - Clewza313 5y ago
      https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
    - 1123581321 5y ago
      You have the cause and effect backwards. Memes motivate people to make websites. Also, other large tech companies have shutdown websites as the meme has spread from Google.
- amzn-throw 5y ago
  Even in my charitable view of my company, Amazon is INTENSE. We set extremely ambitious goals, and orgs are only expected to meet 70-80% of them. It's an environment that indexes extremely high on autonomy and flexibility for each person and each team. It is without a doubt a sink-or-swim environment. But, by and large, the ability to swim is based on individual merit.
salil999 5y ago
Totally agree. My experience is my own and definitely not reflective of everyone else who works at Amazon. They employ tens of thousands of engineers and many of them are happy. I just wanted to share my story - not trying to generalize this for all of Amazon. But I wouldn't say it's a minute exception with so much of it being revealed. For every story that's revealed you can assume that there are others in a similar situation who do not publicly share their story.
deeviant 5y ago
> If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person So I read this comment some time ago then scrolled quite far down the comments. I have to report that there were very few people not expressing similar experiences than OP. It seems it is predominately resentment from people claiming to have worked for Amazon all the way down.
northern-lights 5y ago
It's called Survivorship bias. Before coming here, I too thought the same. That the stories were exaggerated, that those experiences were outliers and a minority. But then I saw my team's L6 SDE get put on Focus within a year of joining and leave. If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. But no such thing. This place puts you in the middle of the ocean when you don't know how to swim. You either sink or swim.
- amzn-throw 5y ago
  > If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. That's not the metric for success or failure. It's delivering results.
  - northern-lights 5y ago
    Except there are 14 LPs and nobody says any one LP is superior to the rest. If you need to consider "Deliver Results" supreme irrespective of anything else, then it needs to be made clear. Just do away with the rest of the LPs.

andreilys 5y ago

Why is it that amongst all the tech Co's, Amazon seems to have the highest proportion of horror stories? It's almost a meme at this point. I mean the forced attrition and PIP culture is a known thing (x% of employees must be let go each year). Google/Apple/etc. do not have forced attrition or a known PIP culture. Bezos is on the record for having said "humans are lazy and we need to give them incentives to quit". No other Tech CEO has said that. So perhaps your story is the anomaly?

dan-robertson 5y ago
I find it easy to believe that Amazon is a shit place to work (as a SWE) and that Amazon is a massive company with different bits being different. But I also find it easy to believe that a meme could just be wrong. It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer. If everyone at Google is convinced at orientation that Google is some great company with great engineering then that can create a brand outside the company by the force of the size of their workforce. Maybe Amazon just has a different employer brand. Don’t Netflix also hire relatively many employees also? Perhaps I’m just misremembering. And wasn’t stack ranking and the like quite popular say 20 years ago? It isn’t obvious that the Google or Facebook of Apple or Amazon way is the best way to manage a business. Lots of people online have complaints about each. And I’m not even particularly put off by your Jeff Bezos quote: it doesn’t need to be a bad thing for someone to have an incentive to quit something they are not suited to as they could then go on to something they are better suited to, and it’s true that a lot of people (even well-paid with alternatives) will spend a long time going to a job they dislike because it is easier to stay with the status quo than to leap. I still feel like the hire-to-fire stories are directionally right (and so are eg stories about shipping new products being the only way to get promotions at Google leading to warped incentives)
- andreilys 5y ago
  It’s also a meme that Google has the best engineering and that their products get shut down after a year and that it sucks to be their customer To be fair there is a website dedicated to all the things killed by Google - https://killedbygoogle.com https://killedbygoogle.com No other tech co has a website like that, partly because it's incredibly difficult to get promoted at Google so you get a bunch of competing products that get spun up.
  - Clewza313 5y ago
    https://killedbymicrosoft.info/ https://killedbymicrosoft.info/
  - 1123581321 5y ago
    You have the cause and effect backwards. Memes motivate people to make websites. Also, other large tech companies have shutdown websites as the meme has spread from Google.
amzn-throw 5y ago
Even in my charitable view of my company, Amazon is INTENSE. We set extremely ambitious goals, and orgs are only expected to meet 70-80% of them. It's an environment that indexes extremely high on autonomy and flexibility for each person and each team. It is without a doubt a sink-or-swim environment. But, by and large, the ability to swim is based on individual merit.

salil999 5y ago

Totally agree. My experience is my own and definitely not reflective of everyone else who works at Amazon. They employ tens of thousands of engineers and many of them are happy. I just wanted to share my story - not trying to generalize this for all of Amazon. But I wouldn't say it's a minute exception with so much of it being revealed. For every story that's revealed you can assume that there are others in a similar situation who do not publicly share their story.

deeviant 5y ago

> If you keep scrolling you will find many individuals whose experience did NOT match this person So I read this comment some time ago then scrolled quite far down the comments. I have to report that there were very few people not expressing similar experiences than OP. It seems it is predominately resentment from people claiming to have worked for Amazon all the way down.

northern-lights 5y ago

It's called Survivorship bias. Before coming here, I too thought the same. That the stories were exaggerated, that those experiences were outliers and a minority. But then I saw my team's L6 SDE get put on Focus within a year of joining and leave. If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. But no such thing. This place puts you in the middle of the ocean when you don't know how to swim. You either sink or swim.

amzn-throw 5y ago
> If they had caused Sev1s or broken something critical, then perhaps justified. That's not the metric for success or failure. It's delivering results.
- northern-lights 5y ago
  Except there are 14 LPs and nobody says any one LP is superior to the rest. If you need to consider "Deliver Results" supreme irrespective of anything else, then it needs to be made clear. Just do away with the rest of the LPs.