Ask HN: Amazon software engineers, how is the work culture now?

I've been with Amazon for coming up on 5 years.

I love it here, and have for the entirety of the time I've been here. There are some minor changes I would make if I could wave a magic wand, but I can't imagine any workplace is perfect, and when I say minor, I really mean it.

I don't really have a lot to say about things as they relate to the New York Times article, because the workplace described in said article was never even remotely close to the experiences I've had.

I work on a fantastic team, and I work with some amazing teams. Some of the smartest people I've ever met. I don't see myself leaving the company any time soon.

I can try. :)

The industry this was in was moderately high pressure, but by no means a grind like you might see in games, etc. We painstakingly avoided bs deadlines, for example.

To a first order approximation, five years by 200 engineers is a thousand engineer years. So naively, that'd be two PIPs per thousand engineers per year. Of course, you can argue that this isn't true since the performance of an individual from one year to the next is correlated. But this was a very rapidly changing organisation where people move between departments regularly and there's a lot of growth. The latter means that you get a lot of new people that might turn out to be a poor fit. So I actually think the original approximation of quite conservative: 2 out of 1000 engineers being disagreeable about their performance assessment sounds like a total luxury for managers!

But you're right to point out that that's only the bad cases. Our company had a(n HR imposed) rule that anyone receiving sub par ratings (needs improvement) for two consecutive quarters had to go on a PIP.

In a growing organisation, complexity keeps increasing: more coordination overhead. More things all going on at the same time, more scaling challenges, etc. So naturally, performance that was just about alright last year just about DOESN'T cut it this year. This means that in my experience, it would be a sign of rating inflation or managers that avoid difficult conversations if the fraction of "needs improvement" in any given quarter was less than ~5 percent. That's a number I just pulled out of thin air, but in the right ballpark in my experience. And there you go: you get several times as many PIPs as the "bad" ones discussed above.

That could well be the case at your employer.

However, the reason why I wrote the lengthy post you're replying to is that this is by no means universal. This means that if every employee starts with the assumption that it's just a firing tool, the chance to succeed drops dramatically. That's because instead of heeding the warning and pulling oneself together, one might disengage, become cynical, and give up.

So please, before anyone checks out in that situation, pay close attention to what's been happening in the department, and be careful about simply throwing away the career one might have had in that company just because of someone else's claims.

Or put differently: that situation is one best served WITHOUT cynicism, but indeed rational caution.

I don’t consider myself to be on an hourly wage. I’m on a salary. If I need to work more hours I work more hours, if that’s what it takes to get the job done.

It is most definitely not a wise choice. Just ask yourself this question: If you _did_ get that google job you were after, would all of your problems end, would you be happy? Chances are you'll still be struggling with depressive thoughts and coming up with ways to make yourself unhappy. You've done some cool stuff already and have a resume most others would kill for, I promise (pretty much everyone coming out of bootcamps). I think you just need some professional help and someone to talk to. You are so much more than the job you have and the code you write.