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Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I worked at Amazon

… I worked at Amazon. Twice. In total about a decade as a Principal Engineer. I left voluntarily a few months ago. I have zero regrets about my time at Amazon. I learned lots, worked with some incredible people, and had fun doing it. And the culture? It was life changing for me, especially when I first joined. In all the best ways. And Amazon today? All I’ll say is that at their size, maintaining solid culture is damn hard. The hiring spree peri-Covid definitely added unimaginable stress to maintaining the culture the company was built on. They’re a big company, and thus a big target. It’s easy, cheap, and even lazy to kick them with stuff like this. The truth is that while it’s changed a lot over time, anyone fortunate enough to work there should embrace it.

Original discussionToday is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout654 source comments · at import
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ST

Seriously. I don’t know any half way decent engineer that would ever work there twice.

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PR

I gotta be candid with you: "anyone fortunate enough to work there" is exactly the kind of arrogance that rubs job candidates the wrong way. A lot of people don't see it the way you do, and you would do well to take a moment of honest self reflection and consider the reason why. Before you reflexively jump to "Amazon is just not for everybody", it's only fair to warn you that a lot of people around here have heard this phrase and don't buy it. My former landlord said the same thing at least 9 times in the 8 times I've interacted with him face to face... right up until he got fired. Management conveniently put him on a PIP 4 months before a vesting cliff on his 2-year RSU vesting schedule. Yeah, Amazon is not for everybody- just the kind of people who either perpetrate or fall victim to pyramid schemes.

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FO

I don't know you or your life. > anyone fortunate enough to work there strikes me as an insane thing to say based on the people I do know who have worked there. Horrible work life balance, mobbing, being hired to be fired by a manager who wanted to keep their team but had to stack ranking. Every one of them has described the culture as a cult, and reading comments like this one makes me think even moreso that they're right.

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