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Will wear you down with time

Senior Software Engineering Manager
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 4 years
May 13, 2019
3.0
Doesn't RecommendPositive OutlookApproves of CEO
Pros

Smart, highly motivated people. Exceptional pay due to stock performance. Huge economic and societal impact. The company is still trusted by customers more than most other tech companies.

Cons

Pressure-cooker environment. Highly process-based with little trust placed on individuals. No institutional emphasis on employee well-being built into leadership principles or manager reviews.

High re-org churn and burnout rate means there's no point to develop interpersonal relationships with peers.

Flat org structure and huge leaps in pay and responsibilities between levels makes promotions nearly impossible past a certain level, highly political, and competitive. A culture of "over-ownership" makes everyone appear to be working very hard and putting in long hours, but for questionable actual benefit.

Advice to Management

It's a goals-oriented culture, and there is nothing in the goals about creating healthy teams and ensuring employee well-being.

Your burn rate among engineers in the US is exceptionally high, forcing you to increasingly rely on cheaper overseas engineers. This leads to even higher burnout as people routinely put in 14-hour days to make meetings with people halfway around the world.

Ownership is a good leadership principle in theory, but you have legions of people whose only job seems to be "owning" an issue and then immediately delegating every aspect of it. This spawns redundant processes that then waste time and burn people out.

Many of your highly-paid engineers are embarrassed of how badly we treat warehouse workers.

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