Amazon reviews

- All those smart, driven people that they’re hiring? Every person who’s hired after you is your direct competition. The theory is that every new hire has to be better than the existing average (thus “raising the bar”), and this combined with high turnover and a stack-ranking employee review process means that the longer you stay, the more endangered your position becomes. Knowing how things work does not outweigh being “good on paper” and a new hire. - Constant employee turnover. Our team lost its entire marketing department within a six-month period. Senior management blamed this on the team and decided to reorganize. And I’ve seen this happen to at least 3 other departments within 2½ years. It lowers employee morale and makes it incredibly difficult to get anything done, since no one has institutional knowledge extending farther than a year or two. - Chaotic, undocumented, ever-changing processes. All that turnover plus an unhealthy insistence on new launches instead of maintenance & upkeep of existing products means that there is little to no documentation, and you’ll be lucky if you can track down someone who knows how the system is built. This means a lot of emergency trouble tickets and on-call drama for some teams, and a lot of headaches and finding workarounds for others. - Managerial scapegoating at all levels. This can happen to entire divisions, as well as to individuals. If you are working here and having trouble fitting in, now is the time to evaluate your exit strategy. - Capricious, poorly communicated, and barely-planned leadership decisions. For a data-driven company, almost all planning decisions seem to originate in the VP’s gut. - No work-life balance. The only people who get ahead are the ones who ruin their health and sanity by spending all their time in the office. Then they burn out and have to take extended leaves of absence. - Almost no promotion potential. Make no mistake -- they’re hiring externally for the higher-level positions. During the last round of reviews, out of a team of 200+ workers, 5 people rose one level. Mostly from level I to level II. Your raise, if you’re lucky, will be about 1%. - Deceptive compensation messaging. You’re told that your “total compensation package” equals $X, but a good third of it is likely in RSUs that only vest after a long time with the company. Remember that employee turnover is such that most people don’t outlast a year or two -- so very few people are going to see the compensation advertised. Despite what they will tell you in the interview, it’s probably a good idea to evaluate the compensation on the base pay, because that’s mostly what you’ll be seeing. (Along with your signing bonus for the honeymoon period.) - Short-term thinking. This is probably the root cause of all the lack of organization, capricious decision-making, and turnover. No one in the upper management is thinking beyond the next feature launch, the next organizational planning document, the next round of employee reviews. This may be standard in the tech world, but it almost certainly means that without some real investment in vision and strategy across the board, Amazon will be taken down by “the next big thing” when it shows up.

Being a manager that has worked here for 4 years I have seen enough managers leave that I have honestly lost count. It is not for the weak of heart. It is very political in a sense that you need to please all parties involved to get promoted. You quickly see your entire management team get replaced with new managers and overtime you gain so much knowledge that you know more than you boss and bosses boss and even your bosses bosses boss. You work 50-60 hour weeks and get paid for 40. You work 80+ hour weeks during peak. As an area manager you have the hardest job in the building and get micromanaged more than you would imagine. People make decisions without asking you and causes frustration. When working on projects there is red tape everywhere. It causes a self fulfilling legacy due to yearly being ranked against your peers which in turn directly reflects on your pay check. You can work months upon months breaking records and "holding down the fort" and not get a thank you.