Amazon Pip Horror Story

Amazon is a shit company with a shit culture and a shitty founder. This company is like a virus. Wherever it goes, it kills off the local business population. Never work for such a company.

Fuck you bezos!

Yeah, vibes with my experience working there. Toxicity beyond pale. Good riddens, they contact me every week to try to get me back. Fuck off Amazon, you have no integrity, you abuse your employees from white collar to blue collar. You literally fired people who emailed Jeff Bezos to report abuses, after you told them to, when the NY Times "crying at desk" expose came out. Bezos instilled this shite culture into Amazon. And his midlet pawns carried out his half-baked decrees like those fucking wet noodle "Leadership Principles" which make no actual sense and aren't principles at all in any sense of the word. Brian Cantrill (of 0x1de computers) gives a great breakdown of how sacrosanct Amazon's leadership principles are: https://youtu.be/9QMGAtxUlAc

Principles are things like Integrity, Honesty, Respect -- not Amazon's fuckwit bulletpoints like "Be right a lot" or "Frugality."

Technologically, AWS is built like a fucking house of cards with spit, tape, and glue. There is no real cohesion or organization, just a bunch of teams doing their own practices and gluing their rando codebase into the Yellow Console. Sorry, but just making the frontend look unified doesn't undo what the backend spaghetti is... That's why the outages of late will continue. It's all bubbling up from the absolute toxicity in lack of basic humanism at the core.

This is a phenomenon common to all low grade/incompetent dev managers: When a dev asks for a team change they view it as a slap in the face because it has happened to them so often in the past and they take it as a personal offence. The fact is they are lousy managers and usually incompetent and nobody wants to work in their team.

So they go on the offensive and try to manage the dev out before senior management realises that yet another dev doesn’t want to work with them.

Is it really so dysfunctional there that if this happens to you (manager puts you on PIP upon being notified you're doing an internal transfer) there's no one to talk to to make this right?

Maybe his manager is a piece of shit, but I can't believe there's no one to report to above him that can see this for what it is and make it right?

Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot?

In the past, I thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that's just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven't really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.

Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it's off the table and all I can do is wonder :).