Amazon

Despite Amazon's salary being one of the lowest in FAANG, it's still better than the average on the market.

In Amazon’s toxic corporate culture, it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are, what you’ve achieved, or how great a team you’ve built—every manager is forced to fire 5% of their team every year.

HR and leadership show no concern that replacing those employees now takes up to a year. Interviewers often reject candidates without accountability for the outcomes, ignoring critical resource shortages in specific teams.

Despite the constant "high bar" rhetoric, there are countless examples of low performance and mediocrity at both contributor and managerial levels.

The leadership principle “Disagree and Commit” has morphed into “Disagree silently and always commit to what your boss says.” Saying “no,” even with justified reasoning and supportive data, is treated as an “Earn Trust” issue, discouraging critical thinking and honest dialogue.

Rather than fostering a trustworthy and innovative environment, leadership focuses on surviving the corporate world by feeding their teams a steady diet of:

• Hypocrisy: Employees are told they’ll collaborate better by working in the office five days a week, while line managers and skip-level managers work from home.
• The “High Bar” Myth: Despite the presence of talented individuals, I have yet to see a truly "great team." Amazon doesn’t value its people—no one recognises a teammate’s achievements because they fear it will backfire during the year-end talent review.
• Political Games Over Data: Don’t be naive and think solid data will help you overcome a manager’s or leadership’s bias. Decisions are made in an authoritarian manner, where politics always trump facts.
• A Disparity Between Words and Actions: The gap between Jeff Bezos’ visionary statements in interviews and the reality on the ground is vast.
• Leadership Principles as Tools of Oppression: What may have started with good intentions has been reduced to a mechanism for suppressing employees.

To succeed in this environment, employees must focus on earning the favour of upper management by agreeing with everything—even nonsensical ideas. Loudly applauding leadership, no matter how trivial the achievement, guarantees surviving by the end of the year. Making meaningful improvements is seen as secondary.

"Day 1" culture has become a bad joke—in terms of culture Amazon is somewhere between Day 2 and the final day. I’ve encountered L6-L8 managers who are entirely detached from the realities on the ground. I can imagine what is happening above.

Also, employees may forget about base salary annual review; regardless of their impact, it's about a 1-2% raise.

Just get rid of:

• 50% of all managers and foster a culture of increasing levels for individual contributors.
• 90% of HR. Substitute by AI. They currently don't protect business or customer needs but stand on managers/leadership side instead.
• Get rid of the 5% Least Effective policy. It's toxic. If someone is the least effective, a manager will fire them early, before December, without a 'schedule' kindly provided by HR departments.
• Decrease the distance between contributors and leadership.
• Align what leadership says with what managers implement and foster on the middle level.

The decisions are driven by personal convictions and political motives rather than a genuine focus on improving efficiency, addressing customer needs, or aligning with business objectives.

Change the mindset of the HR department. They used to be "leadership support" in escalations matters. They must protect business interests, not leadership.