Amazon

Amazon is a big name and it looks great on your resume.

I joke that the best part about working for Amazon is that it will help you get a better job when you inevitably leave in 2 years.

Ok, where do I begin...

Like most Amazonians, I was very excited to start working here. I loved the company as a consumer and wanted to see how cool it was to work here on the inside. For the first 6 months or so, it was awesome. I felt like I was really going to change the world.

After a few months, my manager left. This is pretty common since turnover happens all the time. I guess I should have been clued in a little bit when, on my first day, I met with my new team of engineers (I was a dev manager) and one of them joked that I was his 5th manager in the past 2 years. It really is rare to see folks who have been at the company for more than 2 years. We were saying goodbye to a team mate at least once a month, but usually it was more like once a week or so.

After a few months, the upper-level management on our team hired a new manager for me and a few others. He was a guy who immediately assumed he was smarter than everyone else (including the Amazon engineers and architects who had built the foundation systems that most of the entire company uses) and micromanaged the team, enforcing mandatory work hours per week and control of all communication between managers and engineers, etc. Within 6 months, over 50% of the team was gone (including long-tenured employees with 10 years at AMZN, etc.). And oh yeah, this new guy put people on PIPs as well.

But I don't put all of the blame on the new manager that came in. I do put the blame on his manager (the person who hired him) and our HRBP, who were well aware of everything going on but did nothing to stop any of this. Of course, team members tried to move teams, but he blocked team transfers, citing performance issues or anything else that he could make up. A few managed to get out though, and they were widely congratulated.

For those of us that left to move on to better jobs (read the pros that I wrote about working for Amazon) where we all got 50-100% raises, etc. (even taking into consideration the massive stock price increase after we left), we all had a history of strong performance at Amazon. The advice from other folks within Amazon was to stick around for a bit because this guy obviously would not last, but none of us felt that a year (or however long it would be before he's driven out) of hell plus poor reviews from this manager would be worth it for our careers.

Sure enough, he's not around anymore...

Build a company culture that is more trusting of employees.

Start a whistleblower program where employees can report bad management behavior (anonymously) for HR to investigate.

By far the #1 reason why people leave Amazon is because of their manager. It only takes one bad manager hire to make long-tenured, valuable employees leave.

Promotions are too politically motivated. Allow third-party objectivity to provide input.

And finally, y'all take the frugality thing a little too far.

• Let employees get a Mac if they want one (BYOM is kind of a joke).
• Get big 30" monitors for all employees.
• Set up a real video conferencing system that is easy to use (no need to book special rooms in advance).

Bezos may say that this is not the company he recognizes, but every company follows a bit of the character and personality of its founder and CEO.

Don't let a culture that turns a blind eye to this kind of behavior ruin all of this hard work.