91–100 of 525 posts
It's just too big as a company. It cannot be fair. With all those layers of middle managers, talented people are bound to get ignored and fall through the cracks; suppressed by managers whose only interest is maintaining the status quo.
My recommendation is to NEVER leave negative feedback on an employee survey. The BEST outcome I've seen from them is incredibly painful meetings that only seem to make the matter worse. My speculation on this is two fold. The first is that putting things in those surveys is a "permanent record" or at least "yearly review" issue for your manager. So you are (justly or not) harming them, and they will tend to respond t…
This guy I know, we can call him Jim, left a large tech company and was honest in his exit interview about why he was leaving, and it was mostly his manager. He was later asked to apply for a job with a different team after his manager left the company years (and promotions) later. HR blocked the hire because he was "disgruntled" in his exit interview. As far as I know, they did nothing to recognize or fix the proble…
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc. After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated ve…
So mission accomplished from his point of view: "This person is weak, let's just add some adversities to their life, they would quit; my cousin can't wait to join us."
This may seem mean, and feel free to argue with me and prove my statement below wrong. Well, which was it? Was he taking his daughter to therapy or working from home? If his daughter requires additional care, he needs to care for his daughter, but that can't interfere with work. If your kids are not disabled, they may not be interfering with your work, and therefore, when you are working from home - you are, in fact,…
No need to jump to nefarious meaning. Also further he mentions how others in the team were working from home anyways once a week and he was ordered to come and sit at 7am.
I understand the need and curiousity to dissect each and every line but please don't let this 'one potentially, open to clarification' statement take everything else from the author.
I apologize if you didn't mean to, but since this is the top child of current top comment, I felt the need to. Let's not lose the forest for the trees.
Amazon employee here, though I do not speak for the company. At any big company, your management chain is the #1 influence on the quality of your culture. My experience at Amazon has been extremely positive, but then my org head is a great guy, so it's all been in line with my expectations. I've also left critical feedback through the Amazon Connect survey for my immediate manager and not suffered for it. That manage…
That's always been the argument to people who are on the fence about Amazon: "I've heard some bad things, but haven't seen it in my department". Amazon, and the people that work on the "good" teams never seem to be terribly concerned about horrific reports, and I frequently wonder why that is. In companies I've worked for, had I heard about people crying at their desk and being forced to choose between their child's…
By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems.
The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility and the top-down strategic guidance on how and when to tackle different opportunites.
This is also probably the reason why many Amazon acquisitions like Twitch thrive under them. They get integrated into the Amazon ecosystem and get all the efficiencies from the larger machine but they don't get consumed into a strategic vacuum. They're left to figure out all the potential synergies and paths to move forward themselves. They don't need high C-level leadership to help them figure and execute on all the internal collaboration opportunities and increased efficiency. They just do it because the system allows them to do it.
All the data and mechanisms are there. Most impactful innitiatives start with a six-pager that almost anybody can write, and they exist mostly just to unlock budgets. That's basically what Amazon leaderships does: "Someone is saying that we should throw money and resources into this? Should we? Will this make the company stronger? Will this generate more synergies and opportunities?... Yes or no? ...Move on"
So it's not that people don't care. It simply feels too foreign, too abstracted from your own personal reality and day to day. It's almost feels like if those claims were coming from a completey different company that happens to have the same name.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Re: Number 2: This is a common pattern in all big American companies. Hire an H1B, make the employee an indentured slave forever. H1B employées born in India and China have to wait 10+ years for a green card to break free from indentured servitude. While you can switch jobs on an H1B, it's risky and if it screws up, your queue position gets reset. Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work…
> Canada too have similar system called LMIA based Temporary closed work permit for skilled professionals. But the employee's permanent residency is not at the mercy of the employer in this case and it's fast too, in some cases within 4 months ! I have some experience with how LMIA is not perfect, but I was excited when the administration was openly considering copying it ~18 months ago, because it's hard to imagine…
" I left a negative feedback about my manager Uwais Khan in the daily “Amazon Connect” survey. Amazon Connect team sent to me the report showing how my manager can calculate my answer. At our 1:1 meeting, Khan prohibited me to leave feedback in the system. Since then oppression started. Khan asked me to work on weekends. Then he asked HR how to prevent me from immigration benefits (not informing me about that)." "My…
> Holy crap is all I can say, honestly. It sounds bad, but I'd reserve judgement until I heard the other side. There's always the other side, and I for one am tired of the recent rushes to judgement we see in the media recently.
"DAE Amazon is a horrible employer?" is a pretty common circlejerk the commenterati like to jump on.
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc. After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated ve…
Not only was their offer $30,000 below my current income, their deal was I front cash for expenses and submit claims monthly.
Is this standard in the software world?
Because from my perspective there’s only one possible answer to paying expenses out of pocket and having to claim them back: No.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
So mission accomplished from his point of view: "This person is weak, let's just add some adversities to their life, they would quit; my cousin can't wait to join us."
Same thing happened to my wife. A newly promoted VP transferred her out of a great position she loved to work on a special project he invented to make department look innovative, under promise of a promotion once complete. Instead as soon as the project was done he hired a new manager into another newly created position above my wife, only supervising her. He proceeded to have the manager take all her responsibilitie…
Anyway, nothing beats that one German bank that told all employees of a branch on Friday that on Monday they are working at a location 80 miles away and are required to be there as usually.