Abnormal attrition

I worked at Amazon for more than a year. Having Amazon on your resume can enhance your career opportunities after you survive this sh*thole.

The attrition rate is ridiculous. The people who were at your welcome lunch for you most like won't be the same ones at your farewell lunch, even though it's only a matter of months. 50% leave within the first year, 80% within the second. Those are the common numbers. From my experience, I'd say it's even more than that.

"Working backwards" is one process the company encourages. While it sounds good, what happens is you write a 10 page design document, then spend 10 hours reviewing it, then rewrite your document several times because your manager doesn't like the intro paragraph. Then later at some point when you think you'll actually get to work on your idea, someone says "the navigation flow is not clear to me" and the whole thing is thrown away. 

Instead of real engineering work, you spend most of your time writing emails, doing operational work and playing political games to get a promotion. And then you'll probably get screwed anyway because the manager you sucked up to that can vouch for your promotion is gone or you're forced to change teams because of a reorg.

Everyone is treated like an easily replaceable cog and that is the main reason for the high attrition rate. Don't pretend that's normal just because you hire smart people. Google and Facebook don't have this same problem.