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I've worked at Amazon a little over 6 years now. I have not found it toxic. I had the good fortune of joining Amazon working under a director who had been my ma

I've worked at Amazon a little over 6 years now. I have not found it toxic. I had the good fortune of joining Amazon working under a director who had been my manager at a previous company, so I knew what he was like going in, and when I decided to switch teams I worked for someone else I already knew from around Amazon. I think it's like joining any other company - as the team interviews you, you also want to be interviewing the people for the team you'll be joining to see if it's what you want. Different pockets of the company have different trade-offs and incentives. The on-call burden on some teams is higher. When I've seen this happen under good management, the managers work to do different things to relieve the burden (such as spending time working on tech debt, improving test automation, and so on). Some of the aspects of Amazon's culture that I hear criticized often come with unfair comparisons. No one likes getting paged at 1:00 AM, and that's a thing that can happen to you at Amazon. In my personal experience though, I got paged at weird hours much more often working at start-ups. Amazon at least (again, generally, in the parts of the company I've worked) has a healthy culture around continuing to improve operations, preparing people for on-call, and to address any page events so that particular reason for getting paged doesn't happen again. (I'm just offering my own opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity.)

ianai 4y ago
I think it’s time to fight back against the anecdotes against whatever point. There’ve just been too much bad faith and misdeeds done in service of internet misinformation. As you said, your anecdote isn’t worth much. Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum. With how job descriptions can be unilaterally rewritten by corporations at will even having a stance of remote work in a job description shouldn’t be taken as solid, unshakable truth. Edit-trust that corporations will use you exactly as far as it benefits them and in the most exploitive nature they want.
- jkingsbery 4y ago
  > Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum. I mean, I don't make it that hard for people to figure out who I am if that's a thing they care to do. But I think you're right about the larger part - it's hard to trust Corporations. As I said in my case, and what I advise others to do, is rather than trusting a company (big or small), try to find individuals there you can trust (either, early in your time there, or ideally find someone that you already trust that happens to be there).
CSMastermind 4y ago
I think the more even-handed criticism of Amazon would be this: they're a highly process driven company. Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills. Highly motivated people who always go the extra mile get exploited and burnt out. Kind people get their kindness taken advantage of and it sours their view of the world. At least that's what I've seen from the outside. The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them. Empathy is actually a disadvantage in this type of role and it selects for all sorts of what I would consider adverse behaviors among managers. The "leadership" principals relate to actual leadership as a jellyfish relates to Smucker's. Look up Google's project oxygen findings if you want a comparison. I personally doubt I'll ever hire someone who learned engineering management at Amazon unless they've been sufficiently detoxified in a different company.
- candiddevmike 4y ago
  I can't help but read your first paragraph and think of the show Severance. Convert everyone to simple worker bees without any agency.
  - Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
    Digressing here, but... That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting. I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
  - zwkrt 4y ago
    It was difficult for me to watch severance because so many of the interactions among the employees reminded me of my time Amazon. I actually cried a little bit when the boss threw a coffee cup and then blamed her report for it.
no_wizard 4y ago
Until UnRegretted Attrition (re: stack ranking) is gone, it'll always be a place to avoid. Nobody likes to work with that hanging over their head. I think this is the #1 thing that will always hurt Amazon recruiting, everyone knows about it now.
- robocat 4y ago
  > UnRegretted Attrition Article with links to further information on UnRegretted Attrition (URA) rate: https://archive.ph/dI92l https://archive.ph/dI92l
VectorLock 4y ago
Can you share a little bit about how Amazon handles on-call? Do they make their dev teams be on-call for their product areas, do they have first line responders/SRE, and things like that?
- masterof0 4y ago
  You are oncall on your team's services. No matter how old those are. The frequency depends on your team size, and the level of tickets/incidents depend on the quality of the codebase. I have seen everything from one high sev ticket every 2,3 months to constant paging (3am, etc...)
- jkingsbery 4y ago
  What counts as "first line" depends on your situation. On my first team, we managed internal tools. Our customers were other people at Amazon, they submitted tickets to us directly. For some teams at Amazon, there is at least a filter through some sort of customer support to handle certain kinds of issues. You are still on-call, but it's not like you are interacting with customers directly. Also, since teams at Amazon tend to be small, the amount of things you are on-call for tends to be however much your team handles on its own. I know of other companies in which the oncall covers areas in other team's code bases - this is not the typical setup at Amazon. Generally, we don't have SREs. Software engineers usually understand best how their software works, so we get faster mitigations, and they are also incentivized better to not write buggy software.
masterof0 4y ago
That depends on the team/org you are, if you are in some cosy team in CDO, that just maintain a couple of services that other internal services use, that aren't really that important, then of course is not toxic. Talk to the folks at EC2, VPC teams.
dieselgate 4y ago
Im not sure people are always referring to the tech sector of Amazon when they call it toxic - unless explicitly stated as “planned attrition” etc. I’ve heard great things about AWS, for example. My opinion is people refer to the company as toxic as a whole because of how warehouse workers’ conditions are or the disruption of communities around Amazon warehouses.
flictonic 4y ago
Counterpoint to your anecdote. I didn't find Amazon all that toxic for my first 2 years until I had a baby. First, the parental leave is significantly worse than competitors. I took 3 weeks when my son was born and another 5 to help my wife transition back to work herself (only 6 were paid by Amazon). There was a 10 week period in between leaves where I was stressed, anxious, and feeling overworked and burned out. My performance suffered. I received no extra help from my manager but also received no negative feedback during that time. Welp, came back from the 2nd half of my leave and was immediately put on a pip (technically called 'focus'). Worse, there was absolutely zero empathy from this manager during the focus. Maybe Amazon can be a good place to work if you're ALWAYS able to be a solid performer but god forbid you're going through something in your personal life that temporarily impacts your ability to deliver.

ianai 4y ago

I think it’s time to fight back against the anecdotes against whatever point. There’ve just been too much bad faith and misdeeds done in service of internet misinformation. As you said, your anecdote isn’t worth much. Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum. With how job descriptions can be unilaterally rewritten by corporations at will even having a stance of remote work in a job description shouldn’t be taken as solid, unshakable truth. Edit-trust that corporations will use you exactly as far as it benefits them and in the most exploitive nature they want.

jkingsbery 4y ago
> Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum. I mean, I don't make it that hard for people to figure out who I am if that's a thing they care to do. But I think you're right about the larger part - it's hard to trust Corporations. As I said in my case, and what I advise others to do, is rather than trusting a company (big or small), try to find individuals there you can trust (either, early in your time there, or ideally find someone that you already trust that happens to be there).

CSMastermind 4y ago

I think the more even-handed criticism of Amazon would be this: they're a highly process driven company. Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills. Highly motivated people who always go the extra mile get exploited and burnt out. Kind people get their kindness taken advantage of and it sours their view of the world. At least that's what I've seen from the outside. The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them. Empathy is actually a disadvantage in this type of role and it selects for all sorts of what I would consider adverse behaviors among managers. The "leadership" principals relate to actual leadership as a jellyfish relates to Smucker's. Look up Google's project oxygen findings if you want a comparison. I personally doubt I'll ever hire someone who learned engineering management at Amazon unless they've been sufficiently detoxified in a different company.

candiddevmike 4y ago
I can't help but read your first paragraph and think of the show Severance. Convert everyone to simple worker bees without any agency.
- Sohcahtoa82 4y ago
  Digressing here, but... That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting. I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
- zwkrt 4y ago
  It was difficult for me to watch severance because so many of the interactions among the employees reminded me of my time Amazon. I actually cried a little bit when the boss threw a coffee cup and then blamed her report for it.

no_wizard 4y ago

Until UnRegretted Attrition (re: stack ranking) is gone, it'll always be a place to avoid. Nobody likes to work with that hanging over their head. I think this is the #1 thing that will always hurt Amazon recruiting, everyone knows about it now.

robocat 4y ago
> UnRegretted Attrition Article with links to further information on UnRegretted Attrition (URA) rate: https://archive.ph/dI92l https://archive.ph/dI92l

VectorLock 4y ago

Can you share a little bit about how Amazon handles on-call? Do they make their dev teams be on-call for their product areas, do they have first line responders/SRE, and things like that?

masterof0 4y ago
You are oncall on your team's services. No matter how old those are. The frequency depends on your team size, and the level of tickets/incidents depend on the quality of the codebase. I have seen everything from one high sev ticket every 2,3 months to constant paging (3am, etc...)
jkingsbery 4y ago
What counts as "first line" depends on your situation. On my first team, we managed internal tools. Our customers were other people at Amazon, they submitted tickets to us directly. For some teams at Amazon, there is at least a filter through some sort of customer support to handle certain kinds of issues. You are still on-call, but it's not like you are interacting with customers directly. Also, since teams at Amazon tend to be small, the amount of things you are on-call for tends to be however much your team handles on its own. I know of other companies in which the oncall covers areas in other team's code bases - this is not the typical setup at Amazon. Generally, we don't have SREs. Software engineers usually understand best how their software works, so we get faster mitigations, and they are also incentivized better to not write buggy software.

masterof0 4y ago

That depends on the team/org you are, if you are in some cosy team in CDO, that just maintain a couple of services that other internal services use, that aren't really that important, then of course is not toxic. Talk to the folks at EC2, VPC teams.

dieselgate 4y ago

Im not sure people are always referring to the tech sector of Amazon when they call it toxic - unless explicitly stated as “planned attrition” etc. I’ve heard great things about AWS, for example. My opinion is people refer to the company as toxic as a whole because of how warehouse workers’ conditions are or the disruption of communities around Amazon warehouses.

flictonic 4y ago

Counterpoint to your anecdote. I didn't find Amazon all that toxic for my first 2 years until I had a baby. First, the parental leave is significantly worse than competitors. I took 3 weeks when my son was born and another 5 to help my wife transition back to work herself (only 6 were paid by Amazon). There was a 10 week period in between leaves where I was stressed, anxious, and feeling overworked and burned out. My performance suffered. I received no extra help from my manager but also received no negative feedback during that time. Welp, came back from the 2nd half of my leave and was immediately put on a pip (technically called 'focus'). Worse, there was absolutely zero empathy from this manager during the focus. Maybe Amazon can be a good place to work if you're ALWAYS able to be a solid performer but god forbid you're going through something in your personal life that temporarily impacts your ability to deliver.