Audible reviews

I had competing offers between Audible & Blackrock, and decided on Audible, though the pay-band was much lower, because I was told by my recruiter that hybrid work was here to stay. I wanted work life balance, since I have two small children who my wife and I don't send to daycare because we desperately want to spend the next few years with them before they head to school. I was lied to, I have watched other benefits being rapidly cut over the last year. Whatever this company was before Amazon, it is no longer that. The culture has become efficiency, frugality, and exploitation.

It is a very chaotic and siloed organization. The actual work onboarding was very poor. The org seems designed to be as unwelcoming to new hires as possible. Many teams have secret code names that give no indication of what they're responsible for, and the team names change regularly. The majority of the people I needed to collaborate with had generic titles of Product Manager or Software Development Engineer in the employee directory so it was impossible to figure out who was responsible for what product area. The wikis are hopelessly messy to navigate and contain a ridiculous amount of outdated information that is never removed. I was left to navigate all of that without much support. The culture is not friendly. Few people were outright UNfriendly, although there were a handful who were condescending and hostile on a regular basis. But I was mostly shocked at how few people seemed to enjoy their work. I'm used to laughing, joking around, and/or enjoying the company of my coworkers. I found Audible to be a cold and inhospitable place. There were a few gems who were genuinely sweet and helpful people, but on the whole it's a culture of "I'm not responsible for that, good luck figuring it out on your own, here's a link to a wiki with 500 pages to read through." One of the mantras is "move fast to make it real." There are of course benefits to trying new things and failing (and learning) fast. But too often "moving fast" at Audible means "doing absolutely zero due diligence and plowing forward with a half-baked plan that will ultimately waste time and effort." There are many Amazon-proprietary tools and frameworks that you have to learn. That's fine if you plan on a long tenure at Audible or Amazon.  But if not, you will spend a lot of energy learning what will ultimately become non-transferrable job skills.