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My Amazon Burnout Experience

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Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#41

Post by DannyBee »

shrineOfLies wrote: post #5
therobot24 wrote: post #2

TLDR; expects "purist meritocracy", gets upset when there's corporate politics

Over generalized and inane comment. He/She clearly states that their progress was objective and benefitted the company. Every knows that in any workplace, corporate politics is expected, but not to an extent where someone gets sick, or frustrated after contributing so much. There is a reason meritocracy is needed, and amazon is an extreme case where meritocracy is not present, and will lead to its own collapse if not…

"He/She clearly states that their progress was objective and benefitted the company."

Objective? By what standard?

"benefitted the company"

By whose measure? By their own?

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#42

Post by fsloth »

Great text for all the green geeks moving into corporate world: not prioritizing the things your boss wants to prioritize is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's not evil, it's called building trust and trust is the key glue in all orgs.

Like in any relationship, first one needs to prove that one is trustworthy. Then, if there are these great projects they need to be sold to ones boss before moving forward.

While I appreciate the fact that Amazon might not have the best employer culture I think the OP would have been burnt at any big corp.

It's great to have vision and initiative - but the thing is, either you do those on your own time or then get management backing first.

I have the highest sympathies for burning out - it sucks. Perhaps there should be a "How to live in a corporate culture for dummies" book somewhere.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#43

Post by kps »

legitster wrote: post #7

I'm familiar with a high-level executive assistant at Amazon, and they are well aware of the "burnouts". It's very intentional. Amazon is acquiring young talent, extracting as much value from them, and making no efforts to retain them. Among the local tech scene in Seattle, there's a quiet view that Amazon is kind of a boot camp where young workers get experience then move on.

  > and making no efforts to retain them.
If you retain them, their RSUs will start to vest, and they might even approach the ‘total compensation’ dangled in front of them when they were hired.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#44

Post by x0x0 »

adekok wrote: post #20
x0x0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

author also wrote I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. [...] I had to directly refuse to work on a VP escalation So basically, (s)he w…

Or to put a positive spin on it, this person was hired to do a job, was good at it, but was prevented from doing so by internal corporate politics. I've worked at companies where meeting major customer deliverables fell through the cracks. The managers simply didn't notice, and didn't care that the software was late and/or non-functional. What is an engineer to do? a) say he knows better, and get called "difficult to…

yeah, difficult people always scream politics

after reading that post, my prob that the author is a very difficult person is 0.995. Or maybe higher.

And the managers at amazon appear not to be running the company into the ground by, say, measures like company success.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#45

Post by fapjacks »

buckbova wrote: post #29
dmourati wrote: post #17

"Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths" That is a damning statement that unfortunately has the ring of truth to me.

To me this also rings of "I'm too morally superior to engage in corporate politics." Suck it up and kiss ass, suppress information when necessary, make allegiances, and whatever else is if you want to move up in that structure. If all this is beneath you, then time to work for yourself.

... Which perhaps is a big part of what's wrong with that structure, culture, and way of life. Not the least of which is that it consists of sociopaths.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#46

Post by dragontamer »

adekok wrote: post #20
x0x0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

author also wrote I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. [...] I had to directly refuse to work on a VP escalation So basically, (s)he w…

Or to put a positive spin on it, this person was hired to do a job, was good at it, but was prevented from doing so by internal corporate politics. I've worked at companies where meeting major customer deliverables fell through the cracks. The managers simply didn't notice, and didn't care that the software was late and/or non-functional. What is an engineer to do? a) say he knows better, and get called "difficult to…

a) is certainly wrong. Not only are you "difficult to manage", but no engineer that follows you will be able to work with your "toxic" code.

The politics are important. If the politics are wrong... you've got to fix the politics. Otherwise any technical change will be washed away within the next 6 months or so.

In the best case, you do the correct work behind everyone's back and the wrong managers get the wrong promotions due to your hard work that went unrecognized. Everyone worth a damn starts hopping off the toxic boat using your case as an example. Things get degenerate very quickly... and you don't want to be the "last sane person" steering the ship.

b) is much better, especially since "giving up" is not nearly as bad as it looks. You can transfer to another manager within the company. You can transfer to another company all together, or pivot elsewhere.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#47

Post by wisty »

therobot24 wrote: post #6
shrineOfLies wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over generalized and inane comment. He/She clearly states that their progress was objective and benefitted the company. Every knows that in any workplace, corporate politics is expected, but not to an extent where someone gets sick, or frustrated after contributing so much. There is a reason meritocracy is needed, and amazon is an extreme case where meritocracy is not present, and will lead to its own collapse if not…

>> "I accomplished my goals, but I didn't gain peer support...partly because in order to accomplish my yearly goals I had to alienate my peers. I had to tear down their pet projects that were inhibiting progress, I had to inform them of misinterpretations of data that they held dear, and I had to make specific types of failures as obvious and clear as possible, whether that was with a bug report or a published analys…

Without specifics, it's hard to tell.

It could be "I was working with dangerously incompetent buffoons, and they got upset when I demonstrated that their projects where bug-ridden / physically impossible".

Or the OP is nuts.

Or it's somewhere in between, the OP had reasonable points but the managers struggled to understand them (or the OP had trouble getting them across). In this case, there's a fair bit of management / communications incompetence on both sides.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#48

Post by shoyer »

adekok wrote: post #13

FTA: I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. i.e. the managers goals are not in line with Amazons goals. If we believe the OP. this disso…

As a lower level employee, you often lack the context to understand what the most important priority is. Even if you do have that context, you need to be able to convince management. Simply doing "what you think is right" is not a path to success in any company. So I'm not surprised that this turned out poorly for the OP.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#49

Post by slunk »

tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

I stopped reading a few paragraphs in when all the author had managed to convey was how great they are. I also find it strange that someone so competent who wants to remain anonymous would reveal so much information about their situation in the company. What little I read seems like it would be enough to pinpoint them within the organization.
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