Amazon reviews

This isn't a con, just a challenge you will always have. Amazon can be an ambiguous work environment. If you want hand holding or need micro managing, this company will force you to learn to be self sufficient and independent. Create solutions on your own and find your ideas on your own. If ambiguity scares you, this may not be the place for you.

- Lack of empathy for employees or sense of mission for doing good for the world. This has been a core cultural value from the start, as I learned from "The Everything Store" and other histories of Amazon (e.g., Steve Yegge's blog posts) - Lots of small, employee antagonistic policies--non-competes (I've seen INTERNS have to sign 18 month non-competes), clawing back 2/3 of that year's 401K match when you leave (and it's already an industry low 2%), 5-15-40-40 vesting schedule with the 40s vesting as 20 per 6 months...compare this to the standard 25-25-25-25 vesting schedule with monthly vesting after the first year. - Rather stingy/subpar benefits compared to other big tech companies - Inadequate investment in onboarding. Google and Facebook have 4-6 week bootcamps for new engineers. Amazon...has either a 1 day orientation in Seattle (which sometimes they'll fly out people from other offices, sometimes not), or a subpar wiki you follow on your own. - Lots of janky internal tooling that the company has not invested enough in. Again, I hear about the internal tooling at FB/Google and drool a bit. The downside of a tech company not run by engineers, though the upside is speed and business/product decisions are more emphasized so you can learn more about that. - Frugality Leadership Principle means inane things like paying interns six figure annualized salaries but not paying $25 for a single checked bag on their flights or Lyfts to the airport, no free food but okay with highly paid engineers spending a long time going out to get lunch, sometimes subpar backpacks, stingy $100 annual employee discount only after you spend $1000 on items shipped and sold from Amazon (which is less than half), no free Prime, etc. - Warehouse Employees are treated horribly (just Google it), and the little antagonistic policies make it clear they'd treat us engineers like that if they could. Dystopian when Jeff Bezos is the world's richest man - Corporate and bureaucratic at larger offices - Kool aid/cult-like obsession with Leadership Principles which end up weaponizing them, since multiple LPs oppose each other ("Dive Deep" vs "Bias for Action") so just about anything can be justified or opposed via the LPs. Not as bad as the cult around, say, consulting companies like McKinsey but still kinda bad. - Very inconsistent experiences across teams and orgs. Some teams I was on were absolutely wonderful and amazing, others were miserable. This is true to some extent in all big companies but much more so at Amazon. It really is roulette.