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Amazon is a value extraction machine, nothing more

Software Development Engineer
Former Employee
Worked at Amazon for 2 years
December 12, 2019
Seattle, Washington
1.0
Doesn't RecommendNegative OutlookDoesn't Approve of CEO
Pros

My immediate teammates were genuine and caring people who supported each other through some pretty harsh times.

The leadership principles are actually pretty well thought out.

Cons

My team was handed a failing product created by a former team that rushed to ship and quit as soon as they got promoted. We were treated monstrously by leadership, who quite literally yelled at us in closed rooms for being unable to save the failing product.

Hours were long, sometimes 12-14 hours a day. Operational post-mortems were used as punitive threats instead of genuine opportunities for improvement. On-call weeks often reached 10-20 pages a day.

Multiple company-internal tech debt management consultants were brought in to help but gave up after no impact was made. High SDM turnover meant that nobody was available to advocate for the engineers, nobody got promoted, and tribal knowledge was lost.

I could not have had a worse experience. Recruiters email me every few weeks asking if I'll come back. Obviously, other teams are different, but the potential reward is not worth the risk. If you can get a job at Amazon, you can get a job elsewhere where you will be treated better.

Advice to Management

Your employees are actual people. Treat them like it.

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