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I worked at Amazon for three years, 2010-2013. My experience was better than most of my coworkers', but I watched a lot of people including some friends go thro
by aturek 11y ago
I worked at Amazon for three years, 2010-2013. My experience was better than most of my coworkers', but I watched a lot of people including some friends go through exactly what is described in the NYTimes article. There's an old team that I'll see about once a year at somebody's house. People tell me that our conversations sound like we all have PTSD from our time there.
I have a friend still at Amazon, on a particular Kindle team. I got him an interview there, and felt a lot of guilt about that for awhile. I've been relieved (and quite surprised) that he's still happy there; the team he describes is quite different from any team I worked on or saw first-hand.
You can find a place in the company that isn't totally insane. But most of the many Amazon folks I keep in contact with are either looking outside for different jobs, or switching teams rapidly to try to find something better.
- fweespeech 11y agoJust out of curiosity... It seems to me much of the "mess" in Amazon's culture is on the MWS/eCommerce side of the house + any physical products they sell [e.g. Kindle]. AWS seems to be far more relaxed environment wise. Would you agree with that? The reason I ask is the OP is AWS and I've only seen people on the AWS side post rebuttals to the various articles about Amazon's culture.
- bhouston 11y agoI think there is something to that. Product marketing is really hard. I heard about the culture at Proctor and Gamble and it being really hard as well - a lot of burn outs but also a lot of people saying that the challenging culture taught them a lot that was useful later on. But AWS is a tech place and not really expose to the same type of pressures.
- fweespeech 11y agoThanks :)
- rule110 11y agoI worked at AWS for a little while and would agree with that. My experience matches up with this article, but while working there I did hear plenty of horror stories, mostly coming from the retail side.
- aturek 11y agoI think people, including Amazon employees, try to put things down to some difference between AWS and retail. With the amount of cross-pollination between those two giant sides of Amazon, I doubt there's any significant macro difference in culture. I know people who have been dissatisfied on both sides.
- simonebrunozzi 11y agoAWS is for sure different; I would not call it more relaxed. (disclaimer: former AWS employee from 2008 to 2014).