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Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

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Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#251

Post by aledalgrande »

ignoramous wrote: post #199
ladyattis wrote: post #10

I always have to wonder at what point does this just result in lower productivity if you know you're going to have to leave a company within a few years to another company and go through the whole process again? I understand that some folks don't learn or catchup all that much but at some point GOOD ENOUGH should be GOOD ENOUGH. Instead, we have entire corporations who predicate their HR culture on the idea of consta…

> It's this kind of stuff that I think makes it suck to work in software anymore. Good news is Amazon's management practices aren't representative of the rest of the tech industry. Bad news is, of late, a lot of Amazon execs (frustrated with lower compensation) have joined SV start-ups, which relatively are (were?) known to be more Google- or Facebook-esque than Amazon- or Microsoft-esque.

Which ones for example?

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#252

Post by 01100011 »

bob33212 wrote: post #164
plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

I interviewed and got the feeling that people were not especially happy there. When I asked what they liked about AWS, 3 said "the stock price going up"

When I interviewed with the AWS team I definitely did not get the impression that they were a happy bunch. Then again, periodically being on-call with a 6 minute response time for critical emergencies can do that to you.

Hell, Amazon doesn't even give its employees free Prime accounts.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#253

Post by pedrosorio »

rejectedandsad wrote: post #201
maybelsyrup wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, correct, but he isn't -- and I'm sure he knows he can leave to some other firm. He isn't leaving to the point of being hospitalized. Which is unbelievable to me!

If I didn’t have so many distractions that could be me, honestly, but not for the same reasons - for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class and that hurts like hell.

> for me Amazon is just evidence that I’m innately intellectually inferior and will forever be a lower social class

Wait, what?

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#254

Post by throw8881 »

int_19h wrote: post #245
throw8881 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here. Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic. Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles wher…

FWIW, I know quite a few people from FAANG and associated companies, and those coming from Amazon are consistently the most unhappy about work there. So, while this may not be universal inside the company, Amazon definitely does have a problem compared to the industry at large.

I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company.

Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon.

I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce.

Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them.

All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%.

Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#255

Post by minsc__and__boo »

tmp60beb0ed wrote: post #127
JMTQp8lwXL wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can make great money working in tech without subjecting myself to a work environment where 6% of my colleagues will be forced out. So, in a competitive market where tech talent has its choice in the best employer... why Amazon? I've seen more articles written about Amazon being a dog-eat-dog place than any other large tech company.

I have worked at startups as well as at Amazon. I would choose Amazon over most startups. In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy. I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained. Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but al…

Comparing an 800,000 employee company with 1,000 employee companies doesn't really match up. This comment feels a little like gaslighting.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#256

Post by spamizbad »

plank_time wrote: post #55

When the stock goes from 200 to 3500 in 10 years, and consistently goes up and to the right, you won’t find too many of the workers complaining no matter how bad the job conditions are. I have a friend up in Seattle who is suffering, to the point of being hospitalized for mental health issues, but refuses to leave. So HR and leadership believe that their system “works” but it’s really that their employees are willing…

I always worry that companies that run like this will rapidly implode as soon as the crazy growth and market dominance begins to be threatened. As soon as you're no longer king of the hill - what happens? Seems like you would rapidly shed talent.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#257

Post by throw172643 »

throw8881 wrote: post #217
ferdowsi wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still can't believe that Amazon measures performance by "numbers of commits" and "SLOC". Pure insanity.

Current engineer at Amazon. Maybe a particular bad manager is doing this, but there's no institutional mechanism where management or executives literally count people's commits. Worst case, you're on a team who's late on deadlines and you have 0 commits in the past several months. Yeah, there are going to be questions about where people's time is being spent and are those the right priorities. Aside from that, people…

I had relative number of commits mentioned as part of my negative performance evaluation. I was working on a project involving a long information gathering phase and a long design process for the architecture, but that wasn't considered an excuse. It 100% depends on your manager, though. I think managers might feel forced to make a comparisons and put an otherwise acceptable engineer on the bottom of the stack. Lines of code and commit count is a pretty low-thought way of doing that.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#258

Post by SkyPuncher »

int_19h wrote: post #245
throw8881 wrote: post #228

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an engineer now at Amazon and have bounced around a few organizations in the years I've been here. Maybe the particular team you interviewed with wasn't happy, but I don't think this is systemic. Often times, people will jump ship to another team or another org because they have brand new, greenfield projects, or something that the person is more passionate about. You typically don't see people stay in roles wher…

FWIW, I know quite a few people from FAANG and associated companies, and those coming from Amazon are consistently the most unhappy about work there. So, while this may not be universal inside the company, Amazon definitely does have a problem compared to the industry at large.

To be fair, most employees leaving their company are _likely_ to be unhappier than average.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#259

Post by VRay »

throw8881 wrote: post #226
kevstev wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? I interviewed there about 4.5 years ago, and I didn't know any of this, and while there were a few red flags, they seemed mostly around their recruiting process and not with the job itself- at least until my onsite where my interview became almost outright combative and hostile…

>I feel like most of these stories are just coming out recently, in the last year or so. Maybe things hit a tipping point during the pandemic? Current Amazon engineer here. People have been complaining working at Amazon for a long while. At least in my organization, leadership pays close attention to whether folks are happy or unhappy in their roles. I posted this earlier, but we have a massive workforce of engineers…

I got a glowing performance review at Amazon one year, and then with the exact same job/productivity level/attitude I got a bad review the year after. I did some digging, and it turned out that from the VP level down everyone in the org got a big "F U" from management as part of an effort to reduce the size of the org. I was wondering why all my teammates with more experience were jumping ship before that, and I learned the hard way.

What a fucking scam. You should quit peddling conspiracy theories and actually talk to people with a lot of experience in the industry. I just hope that you figure out how reality works the easy way (by listening to anyone in this thread).

After Amazon stabbed me in the back, I swore that I'd never again put work first over my own interests/family/health, and I haven't regretted that decision once in the 6+ years since then.

Re: Internal Amazon documents shed light on how company pressures out office workers

#260

Post by throw172643 »

lakevieew wrote: post #111

I had joined Amazon as my first job out of school. I was super excited and would not mind working the long hours as the project was interesting. I enjoyed working with my team and manager. Just near the end of the year, my manager quit. The new manager ran my performance review and assessed that my performance didn’t meet expectations. I was not put on PIP. Instead, there would be a development plan that I had to com…

I had a similar experience. I had a great manager on a very insulated, experimental team working fast and delivering results. Our Program Manager changed teams, soon our Product Manager changed teams, and we got merged into another team with new managers. I was told by my old managers I was on track to promotion and found out at the end of that cycle that I had a negative performance review and it was going to be even longer. I was delivering during this, but so was the whole team.

I swapped teams hoping that a new manager for an old colleague's team would be better and things didn't really improve. I stayed for a year before quitting due to my mental health. I think it can be hard to find the right team at a big tech company and even if you do, there's no guarantee of how long it will stay that way.

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