A Nine Year Darwinian Nightmare

I worked at Amazon just shy of 9 years, in various departments.  I really wanted to work at Amazon because I grew up in the area, and Amazon had a good reputation as an exciting, challenging and prestigious IT environment.  As a young IT professional, this is where I wanted to be.

The first few years were very good.  I really believed in the product, and thanks to Amazon, I learned lots of valuable skills, got to live abroad for a year in Europe, and had a bright future.  I was one of the lucky ones compared to younger generation Amazon employs today.

What began to sour my experience at Amazon was the ever-increasing bar.  The bar was more reasonable in the early years, but each year management was under pressure to promote their own engineers, and each engineer was pitted against other engineers in the department, forcing a kind of Darwinian environment where each engineer had to outdo other engineers.  Never mind my personal accomplishments, or cost savings I provided to the company by improving efficiency, I didn't shine like some other manager's engineers did (whether it was true or not).

Further, it was getting harder and harder to hire engineers from the outside because the requirements had gotten unrealistically strenuous.  The motto "prospective engineers should be better than 50% of the existing engineers at that level" just made it harder year after year to hire engineers.  I once challenged my manager stating that eventually no one would be able to meet the bar.  He kind of nervously laughed it off, but sure enough we hired one additional engineer in a year, when our project list required 4 more headcount.

But the bar for internal candidates kept getting higher and higher every year too.  This wasn't limited to system engineers, but even people in the warehouses too.  Sure, the warehouse associates pulled together and had a great Q4, but guess what?  Management has decided to raise the bar next year!  In a way, I felt bad for managers because if they didn't, someone else would and they would get pushed out.  But the end-employees (engineers, associates, etc) suffered the most under the weight of all that pressure.

In my final years, I watched as younger, upcoming engineers with no kids, and plenty of time to spare quickly shoot up the ranks, while seasoned and accomplished engineers like myself with a demonstrated track-record of improving the operational excellence of an environment were forced to either step-up their game or get out.  Managers never said anything directly (and personally I had some very good, personable managers), but that was the hidden message.  It wasn't their fault because they were under the same pressure.

Ultimately it came down to sacrificing my life to get that promotion that I didn't want anyway (but managers insisted I should get) or find a more family-friendly IT environment.  I chose the latter.  One year later, I'm much happier now, and would never consider working at Amazon again, even for a higher salary.

The early years of Amazon and its startup culture were good to me and a lot of old-timers, but the Amazon that I left is something I can no longer recognize.