> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers."
This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends.
In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of people who have stuck around on a single hand.
Look into Amazon's employee attrition rate. Eye-opening. Hell, if you can, go to one of the company all-hands, where at some point they encourage new employees to stand up (hired in the last quarter)... that's not company growth, that's replenishment.
Amazon has consistently one of the worst retention rates, if not the very worst out of all the tech "majors". The problematic management is incredibly pervasive, and I'd argue that the islands of sound management are the exception, not the rule.
Where the hell are all of you people working? I'm about 18 months in, and on my team or any of the other teams I've worked with I haven't seen any of the horror stories people here are describing.
I was in Ops, but I knew people in RCX, Customer Service, Data Warehouse, Search, Fraud, Identity, and a bunch of other places who were absolutely miserable (and have since left).
I lasted 24 months. Management was mediocre for the first 18 months, accelerating very quickly downwards in the final 6 months after repeated re-orgs.
The seeds were planted early though - one of the major reasons I left was the constant death-marches due to the high attrition rate, and some boneheaded desire to "maximize engineering utilization" by instituting a hiring freeze in the middle of 2010, despite the fact that we already had more work than we could do in 3 lifetimes. It took a little while for the full impact of this to materialize.
Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)
It's weird how many isolated anecdotes from different people, each one passionately vitriolic about the company, that we run into everywhere in the software engineering community.
It's also pretty weird how many ex-Amazon employees I know who would never, ever go back, regardless of the size of the paycheck.
Either there's an organized hit job against Amazon as an employer, and myself and nirvana (among many, many others) are all shills.
Or perhaps the notion that Amazon, as a whole, is a heavily mismanaged company, has some merit ;) Food for thought.
Why is it when someone talks about a bad experience they had, then they are biased? Why do you feel the need to minimize my experience? "Slighted"? No, I was slighted by microsoft thru an unintentional sequence of events. I'd still say "Congratulations" to any friend who was excited about a job he got there.
I was abused by amazon, lied to, and when I attempted to resolve the issue, my trust was betrayed by HR, and my ability to transfer to a better job with a non-abusive manager within the company was blocked.
This was not being slighted, this was a systematically broken system.
But still, since what happened to me doesn't portray amazon in the best light, then I must be "vitriolic" in all my anger and thus not actually telling the truth....while you, whose only been there 18 months, is the beacon of objectivity, because you're saying nothing bad, right?
This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends.
In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of people who have stuck around on a single hand.
Look into Amazon's employee attrition rate. Eye-opening. Hell, if you can, go to one of the company all-hands, where at some point they encourage new employees to stand up (hired in the last quarter)... that's not company growth, that's replenishment.
Amazon has consistently one of the worst retention rates, if not the very worst out of all the tech "majors". The problematic management is incredibly pervasive, and I'd argue that the islands of sound management are the exception, not the rule.
Be very, very, very wary of working for Amazon.