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Tech Focus, Dull Culture, Competition

Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 2 years
August 31, 2017
Dublin, Leinster
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros

Working in IT/AWS. Everything revolves around operations and being technical, creating automation, tools, and tools for tools, and yet more scripts and tools, even for very simple tasks. Also, you're told you can do anything you want, but if you don't do well enough with tickets and on-call, your employment may be in danger.

Cons

Often people try to solve non-technical problems by engineering themselves out of them (not an exact situation, but similar to: let's create a tool so we don't have to talk to each other too much).

Don't see people smiling in the office very often.

Culture a bit dull and disappointing, with an emphasis on working hard. People get promoted for working hard and peer feedback instead of competencies, which leads to frustration for those competent.

Not much teamwork, with a great focus on individual contributions, which leads to unhealthy competition.

If someone is frustrating others but delivers results, management usually won't help the situation with others.

Advice to Management

No generic advice. There are thousands of teams, each with their own culture.

For the ones I know, I would advise to micromanage less and make a conscious effort of making good use of people's capabilities, not trying to forcefully fit them to any static role if they can perform better in another.

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