Amazon

This is specifically for the Alexa Shopping org.

Amazon is a great company. The peculiar culture is amazing. Alexa Shopping is a great place if you want to work for Amazon, experience retail, and not be in the heat of Alexa or AWS. People do get promoted here, but the culture might not be enjoyable for everyone. The team is growing exponentially.

This is specifically for the Alexa Shopping org.

Amazon is a great company. The peculiar culture is amazing, but Alexa Shopping is not. This org is very top-down. Those in top positions make all the decisions. There is a bunch of leadership who have been working together on previous ventures that failed at Amazon, and they constitute the elite group of people who can make decisions at Alexa Shopping. Product Managers control the organization; Developers don't matter. Decisions are made without any technical input from the engineers. Management wants two-week features, which is very hard to do when you are building something so novel and new from the ground up. Also, any good project that will take longer than two weeks gets discarded, even if it has huge long-term potential.

Basically, leadership is so focused on short-term growth and short-term numbers. We incentivize people to shop by giving away "free money," not by making our experience great. This is why Alexa Shopping will never be inspiring or successful.

Too much politics for promotions. There is an oligarchy of L6+ (Sr. Devs and above) that keep to themselves to discuss "big ideas." They spend weeks arguing, and they never make any decisions or move forward with anything. Also, everyone complicates things in order to get promoted. And devs are scared of change or trying new things.

When you join, you are promised that you will work on Alexa + Natural Language/Machine Learning. The truth is we do very little of that. All we do is do little integrations with retail systems (checkout, order history, search). The work is not that interesting from a technical side, even though it's all new code.

The feedback for the org has been consistent for the past few months without much change. You are going to double or triple in number of engineers you have, but you will do so without actually making an impact in the market, which should be the ultimate goal of this.