Incredible early years overshadowed by toxic culture and layoffs
Pros
My first 7 years at Amazon starting in Kindle and moving into the Amazon Publishing org were incredible. My projects were varied, unique, and I was allowed to quickly expand my role from design focused QA to animation, art direction, print production, while working with incredible teams.
Cons
During my last 2 years, the teams became stretched very thin, project deadlines got much tighter with regular resource constriction in both budget and headcount. The doc writing culture that I had found incredible value in during past years became more toxic and seemed to be more valued than the work itself. After Covid allowed most to WFH for multiple years with proven improvements in everything from productivity, quality of life, project efficiency, and communication, leadership decided that everyone would be better off in-office, with effectively no data to support the claim. In past years it had been made clear that all business decisions were made by leadership with data support, and the best that was offered was a 'belief that office culture would improve team cohesion and productivity'. The introduction of LLM's on the HR side became nightmarish and remains so. Then came edicts to continually innovate processes/tasks using LLM's without updated resource documentation, reduction in access to technical knowledge holders, constricted deadlines, untrained teams with critical project workflow function and with tools introduced in Q1 being quietly deprecated by Q3/4. The company has regular continual cycles of mass layoffs, salaries are typically not inline with other major tech companies, frugality is king, and frankly the leadership doesn't support their managers.
