Abusive Culture

I've been at Amazon for more than 8 years and am currently a senior manager. Your work here is with smart people on exciting projects. It can be rewarding when you accomplish great things. The diversity of the potential work and innovation can be very alluring. I've often called Amazon my "Sexy Mistress". She's emotionally abusive, but she's so sexy that I go back for more punishment ;)

That said, the management process is definitely abusive (and I'm currently a manager after starting here as an SDE). I've seen too much "going on behind the curtain" and hate how our individual performers can be treated. You are forced to ride people and stack rank employees. I've been forced to give good employees bad overall ratings which they definitely didn't deserve only because of politics and stack ranking.

Our s-team needs to stop pretending that the NY Times article and stories on this site are all "isolated incidents". The culture IS abusive and it WILL backfire once stock value starts to drop. I'm an 8 year veteran and I no longer recommend anyone I know to interview with Amazon.