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Politics Over Skills, Poor Training

Software Development Engineer II
Current Employee
Has worked at Amazon for 6 years
July 12, 2020
Seattle, Washington
2.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral Outlook
Pros
  • Some pockets of teams have excellent environments.
  • Benefits of a large company.
  • Internal tooling.
  • Learning events and resources (if you can find them).
Cons

Promotions to senior levels are still largely driven by org politics.

Managers are poorly trained, with little data-driven resources or support.

Standards are slipping for new employees, with very little formal training support.

There is a lot of bloat and growth in middle management.

Slowdowns result from too much separation into cross-team "coop-tetion" and "analysis paralysis" from a lack of common behavioral data or metrics tooling.

There is increased siloing and a lack of investment in common platform or tool standards.

There is a decrease in standards and deprecation of past reliable tools for ones with prettier UX but less functionality.

Advice to Management

The Day 2 malaise is sinking in, and all the penalties and costs are coming due for not robustly investing in common AWS-wide platforms and standards, as Retail Amazon did a decade-plus ago.

Also, crucially, invest in bottom-up, metrics-driven management training and coaching, as Google did. Connections survey questions should be democratically shared, like the internal Tech Survey.

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