Amazon

I worked for Amazon recently and resigned.

I have survived 5 years in tech at Amazon, where it is normal to have an entire development team – including manager – with less than one year at the company. Amazon does provide equal pay for the same role at the same level, but women and underrepresented groups are typically assigned one or two levels below where their performance indicates they should be. The promotion process is a joke – the easiest way to get a promotion at Amazon is to leave the company and come back after a year at a higher level. Burnout is not just common but *expected*. I work WITH amazingly brilliant people, and we work on interesting things, but the people we work FOR don’t care how their crazy demands impact people as long as the arbitrary deadlines are met.

They pay about as much or slightly higher than fast food or walmart, it is very hard work, if you have to get accommodations then you will likely be fired, they are 3 strikes you are out on being late or calling out, they have insurance but it’s bare minimum with a 2000 dollar deductible, part time or flex time don’t get the option of insurance, some school benefits but it’s a limited amount that doesn’t match the cost of school but they do work every well with college students, and it’s not a horrible place to work but at the end of the day if you aren’t in the higher upper end of Amazon it’s just a factory job

It claims to be the most customer centric company – and it might be- but it is at the cost of the employees.
The ground level employees are sweet and caring but as you rise through the ranks you start to realise that only the worst personality traits survive. I watched intelligent caring and resourceful managers become blank eyed and evasive within a year of working there.

I can honestly say I would not recommend to my worst enemy to work for Amazon.

Although- it is a learning experience – I learned more about bad management there than at any other company I worked in. I learned how to handle being bullied and what really matters in life – to stop trying to get ahead and just work on being happy.

I can’t honestly say if they pay was equal but it was extremely low for similar roles in other companies.

I have worked nine times as a contractor for Amazon from 2010 – 2015. I have had several great managers and a couple of terrible managers. I think the biggest problems Amazon has are burnout, high turnover and artificial competition, and the people who survive to become senior managers, in general, have terrible personalities. They create a lot of issues for everyone underneath.

As a contractor, I was mostly protected from the politics and backstabbing senior managers. Amazon is a good company for a contractor, because of the high turnover, everyone is new and I never felt like the new kid on the block and I never felt out of place. They also gave me a chance in a new career change from Mechanical Engineering to Technical Writing.

I’ve been told that I am too nice to work for Amazon, and I think that’s true. I generally get along with my coworkers, I recognize bullying from my personal experience in 6th grade and I know how to circumvent that, and I want everyone to succeed. These are skills Amazon does not want in their employees.

I have had three excellent managers who’s senior management entirely destroyed them. One manager left after seven years at Amazon, because he was working seven days a weeks and leading three different teams for a year as a “temporary” manager. Another was mysteriously fired, probably for speaking her mind, after nine years. The last one, was a highly experience legal editor, who had just started at Amazon, and she made great plans for her team of contractors to make us more efficient. Then suddenly her managers took all of us away from her and lumped us with a larger group that was doing similar work. Except this group was poorly trained to do their work and we ended up fixing their mistakes.

Regarding turnover, I was told by a software engineer that the average software developer last nine months there. He was already burnt out by six. He said, he worked about 65 – 80 hours a week. My coworkers, who were hired directly by Amazon, generally left at 2 years; that was the minimum to keep their stocks. The biggest issue about the high turnover is that whole departments forget how to do something important. If you don’t put how to do your job in the company wiki page, it will be forgotten. Even if you take to the time to put that information in the wiki, it will probably be forgotten. One of my contracts was just to figure out how to do a task that was forgotten, because the employee who did it had left the team and wasn’t talking to us and the contractor who knew had left the company. While I was figuring out the task, a department that sent information for this task forgot how to do this. This task was one of those little things that was important to Amazon. I don’t understand why upper management believes that people leaving after nine months is a good thing to have, but they encourage it.

I’m glad I worked at Amazon as a contractor, but I wouldn’t has an employee. They do have a fair amount of female managers. My coworkers who were hired directly, were paid equally. There’s definitely male and female jobs, and people hired people who looked or acted like them. There’s definitely a lack of diversity of races and certainly nobody with obvious disabilities. There’s no on-site childcare. They do have breast pumping rooms and allow dogs.

I currently started working at the Amazon warehouse, a job that I was looking forward to. I am now tired, stressed out and thinking it was a big mistake. Bare in mind, I work part time and it’s my main source of income. Big mistake. I don’t recommend an Amazon warehouse job as a main source of income because it doesn’t pay enough, sometimes the schedule is unreliable.

They don’t care if you have a second job and will let you know that you will be working an extra hour last minute, day of. I recommend having a backup job if you work at Amazon warehouse especially if the pay is not enough to cover bills. The start pay rate should be $15. I don’t understand with the hours and manual labor we put into it, why it’s not.

They aren’t any benefits until you become permanent, which isn’t a guarantee and some benefits like career choice don’t kick in until after a year. Would I recommend Amazon warehouse jobs? If you want to keep your sanity, only work part time 4 days or less and get a second job on days when you are not working at Amazon.

As far as career development and moving up in the company. Seems very hard, since it seems like managers play favorites and might be more worried about their paychecks than seeing others advance. just my personal opinion. If you want an advance at Amazon, check the job portal yourself every now and then and put in the paperwork to change departments etc.

Warehouse jobs is not a career you want to get stuck in except if you like operations.

I worked as a Program Manager (not a TPM) for 2.5 years. In that time I had 4 different managers, the first being a woman and the manager I felt was interested in developing my growth. (Coincidence? Not sure)

The second manager I had for only 4 months when he rated me as “satisfactory” for my work but “development needed” for my Leadership Principles. This second review barred e from transferring to another team despite the fact that another group reached out to me to recruit me. That was the final step and a few months later I was told that my group was eliminating all Program Management jobs and laid me off. My feeling is that they handled it that way because of my age. 40+ firing for cause sets off alarm bells for age discrimination.

The culture can be pretty toxic. In my case it came in the form of several very negative peer reviews, which my manager had to depend on since he had only worked with me for 3-4 months.
Work/life balance is pretty bad and there is a huge amount of pressure on senior team members to innovate and and be transformational.

Background: I joined as a Technical Product Manger after my MBA internship. I left Amazon after 1.5 years. Married with no kids during my time at Amazon.
Equal Pay: Neutral. Amazon’s pay structure is very equity heavy. For the Class of 2013 MBA recruits, Amazon offered the same package for all and had a take-it-or-leave-it policy. I have no data point on compensations beyond the initial offer.
Career Advancement: Assuming you are smart and competent, advancement is highly correlated with the hours you put in. Amazon has an up or burnout culture. The company expectation can be mapped to the following: 40hrs/week == a below average rating, 60hrs/week == Average.
Supportive Culture: No. You are on your own. Management and HR will all tell you you are responsible for your own career and problems. Management is there to manage the business. HR is there to protect management.
Family Friendly: No. Amazon is your one and only family when you join. Don’t join Amazon expecting work-life balance.

I worked as a non-tech Program Manager on the same team for just over 4 years. The negative stuff that was in the NYT’s article certainly has truth to it, even if the mansplainers attempt to say it was all false.

It was rewarding to be involved in some of the projects, but I have never been more burnt out from a job in my life. (And I worked on Presidential political campaigns before joining Amazon.) For about two years I was working at my desk from 8:30/9 am in the morning until 10 pm or later. I was not once rewarded for the hard work with a promotion, meanwhile my manager took credit for my work (which he himself admitted he didn’t know how I did what I did) and was promoted.

I had to have a conversation with my manager about his unconscious misogyny where he would laugh at a male team member banging his mouse in frustration at his desk because something broke, but I was “angry” or “rage-y” solely because I had an exhausted look on my face. He ended up blocking me from internally transferring by flagging me as development needed. (This is no longer a block from transferring as of April 1st, but I was already on my way out by the time it was announced that hiring managers could offer transfers to anyone regardless of development needed flags.)

Not all teams are like this and I don’t have advice on how you suss out whether a team is a good or bad one during the interview process. If you feel like you’re not advancing after a year on a team though, its definitely a sign you should look for a team that actually will value you and your work.

Read the article in The NY Times if you want to understand what working at Amazon is like. I was berated every week while delivering 320% growth in my business. If I got an email at 3am (yes, often), I got another at 6am asking why I hadn’t answered. I worked 7 days a week, 70-75 hours a week. And that wasn’t enough. Ever.

It was horrible. At the end I threw up every morning and cried every night. I’ve never been so mistreated and miserable in my career. It’s a company of sadistic leaders. The ONLY good thing it did was get me to my next company.

I worked as a Software Developer at Amazon in Seattle for 3.5 years. The experience will entirely depend on your department and your team, but I really enjoyed my time there. For much of it I was the only technical woman on my team, but I never felt held back because of it. I was given challenging problems to solve, leadership opportunities, and recognized for my work. There were occasional gender-related annoyances (people making dumb jokes, assuming I was a recruiter, or defaulting to male pronouns) but those aren’t unique to Amazon and weren’t pervasive.

The culture at Amazon encourages working a lot. What “a lot” means depends on your team and your task, and on your expectations of yourself. Personally I felt compelled to be one of the best people on the team and to make every customer happy. (In my experience, a lot of women put extra pressure on themselves to prove that they belong in male-dominated tech fields.) The rest of my team was already working more than average, so I put in even more hours. Nobody told me I had to, but the culture combined with my own expectations meant that I often worked a full day in the office then worked nights and weekends from home. I’m not sure how I would have handled this if I had a family and was expected to handle the majority of the household work. I think I could have survived at Amazon, but not excelled. This probably explains why there are fewer women at the top of the company hierarchy.

Everything that has been said and written in the press about Amazon of late is spot on – it is incredibly stressful, the work is never ending and it’s high pressure to the extreme. Acknowledging that, however, I don’t feel like there’s any aspect of their culture that’s intentionally malicious towards women. I am sure that some teams and some managers and some business units are more inclusive than others but that can be said of any large company. The fact that Amazon’s high pressure environment may have a disparate impact on women says more about societal inequity and the fact that women still carry more household burdens outside of work than it does about Amazon as an organization. It is universally a place for the young and unencumbered but if your lifestyle enables you to work like an Amazonian and you’re smart, you will progress regardless of gender.

I worked in HR and can vouch for the fact that they have a pretty developed compensation and career path structure. They use broad bands, however, so that allows men who negotiate harder to potentially come out a little ahead…but again, this says as much about our society as the company.

Bottom line – if you are a woman with traditional family responsibilities and a husband who also has a demanding/important career, working at Amazon probably isn’t for you unless you’re lucky enough not to require sleep.

Worked at corporate in Seattle for six months as a temp, which is how they hire most people unless they really want them. After a few cycles through in temp land (years, sometimes) they hire you or don’t. In a bout of misplaced honesty, I told my manager I was going to grad school in a different region (primarily to never have to work at a place like Amazon again); he was supportive, but the week my contract ended offered to one-up me — which thus made me ineligible for unemployment until I found a new gig at grad school. Super.

I’ve worked in a lot of environments, some very high-stress, and Amazon takes the (invisible, because they don’t give you cool perks like at Google and Microsoft) cake. Deadlines were insane and unattainable; guidance from higher-ups nonexistent; no one even seemed to know why we were working on this project or what would happen in the end. Honestly, it seemed like my team’s main purpose was to train an overseas team how to do our jobs for pennies on the dollar to what we made. Weekend hours were mandatory (I mean, yay overtime, but my partner had already relocated to where we were going next and came home on the weekends to pack) and my colleagues, from the other temps to the main manager I worked with, were dour and generally angry. People cried in bathrooms, and I never got over how many bros milled about during lunch hours.

I would not ever go back.

The experience at Amazon truly varies by business unit and by manager. Career advancement is solely based on if your manager is aggressive or not, and if they are aggressive, they will fight with other managers in order to get you a promotion. Many people transfer to other departments in order to start over with a new manager, but set back their career advancement by doing so.

Several employees pride themselves on how they don’t have children. Heavy drinking after work is also pressured as team building. I had an extremely long commute to the Seattle office from the suburbs, so I would arrive at 7AM and leave at 5 or 5:30PM, but would also work from home most nights. I was often judged by peers for “leaving early”.

Some great peers and some awful peers, so there was a mix of supportive culture. Basically, the company is so lean that you are doing 2-3 jobs by yourself, so there isn’t much time to get support because everyone else is so busy too. It is nice to have mostly high-capability co-workers who can get things done.

There was an Amazon Women in Technology group, but it was just an email alias where people complained. No events while I with the company. They also didn’t support non-developers in joining the group, even ones that worked in highly technical roles.

I can’t comment on equal pay, since we weren’t allowed to discuss with one another.

Amazon is great if you’re single and looking to open a lot of doors in the future. They definitely push all your limits- if it’s with workload, competency or within your office, you will leave a stronger person.

Perks are: you’re among the smartest, quirkiest, most innovative people in the world. You will learn more here in 3 months than 4 years of college.

I worked at Amazon UK for 2.5 years and, to start with the positives, they have a good quota of women in senior roles, not a 50/50 split but getting there. They also had a good mix of people from BAME groups and lots of employees from overseas.

However, Amazon expects you to hand over every ounce of your mind, body and soul as soon as you walk through the door, which does not work well for anyone who may have more flexible requirements, due to child care commitments for example.

I had two different line managers who both were away for, then returning from, maternity leave – Amazon made it clear their roles would be open for when they got back to work but they may be moved into different teams without any say in this. (As was the case for one of them.)

Staff are expected to always be able to answer email and to take their laptops home. I once applied for a role in another team and the hiring manager called me at 10am on a Sunday to offer me the interview. He worked constantly.

Amazon runs an extremely tight, cheap ship so it can pass all the cost savings onto its customers – this means hiring one person to do the work of 2-3 in head office. And I won’t even start on the warehouses – you’ve seen the documentaries. I have never seen people move, pick and pack so fast – scared they won’t hit their KPIs for speed and won’t get any more shifts.

Amazon does not have a sexism problem, it’s just generally anti human and has an aggressive, un-compassionate culture.

I found Amazon to be an aggressive culture that valued system over the people. I assumed a customer centric culture translated to taking care of their employees as well as their customers and that was not really the case in my experience.

I met some great people, who were fine with the work environment and didn’t see that simple needs of women were not being met. I was a senior member of the team and found myself on an emergency run for feminine products instead of running a key meeting that had the potential to save millions of dollars a year. There was a backlash for postponing the meeting and it caused a 3 month delay. I felt the penny wise pound foolish culture was pervasive.

I don’t believe there is an intentional bias against diverse groups, rather a culture of, “I work best with people like me and that is who I will support.”

Women will not shatter glass ceilings here. The organizational and team structure is very patriarchal and my female teammates are often referred to as “girls”. The one female leader I respected and worked with was recently demoted so that was disappointing and eye opening. The pay is not equal for women and men doing the same job even with the woman having a college degree. The culture is highly aggressive and combative so I would say this is not a family friendly place to work because it makes you stressed out and expects overtime weekly. Human resources does not do enough to ensure policy adherence or emotional well being and is quite rude to those who raise concerns. If you want a decent paycheck, you will earn that here. If you want career advancement and respect, look elsewhere particularly women of color.

I find the culture very aggressive. You have to be laud and pushy to get any results. Employees always have on their plates more than they can handle, so good prioritization is a key. Quite often you just release MVP version of the product, and never have time to come back to it, because of all the new priorities that came up. Weekend or evening calls from your senior manager are a norm, followed by feedback that he doesn’t think you are stepping in enough. Very few women in technical roles, even less in technical management position, so quite often you are the only woman in the meeting. On the other side a lot of interesting opportunities and unsolved problems, a lot of creative people motivated to always keep improving and inventing. Plenty of learning opportunities (if you find time for them).

I find the culture to be broken from the highest levels down. Fear is the primary motivator of getting people to accomplish tasks. Tasks are done quickly and poorly, and the company values (all of them) are frequently used to browbeat people when the results are not as expected. Junior employees are relegated to the edge of rooms in meetings they are required to attend, and told not to speak unless spoken to. Women are treated poorly by other employees in meetings – example: no eye contact, interaction between male employees even when the male employee is junior to the female employees. As a manager, my employees would call me in the middle of the night crying because of the abusive emails my manager would send, cc-ing the whole team. The fear or retaliation is extreme, and employees trying to move around the company are penalized with poor performance reviews – this happened twice when I tried to hire internal people who had previously had outstanding reviews. Employees are harassed by management and forced on performance plans for over the most trivial of reasons – one bad status report, vocal and facial tics, etc. Very disappointing experience, and when you see VPs screaming at employees and storming out of meetings, you know the problems start at the top.