Amazon lifers are not normal

After a few boring jobs in the corporate IT world, I took my job at Amazon because I was going through a difficult time and I thought that a challenging job would be what I needed. I quickly discovered this was not the case. Amazon does not exist to challenge you in any way that helps you grow. Instead, it exists to burn you to the ground and use you up as much as possible before spitting you out.

A normal person works hard to get something done. The people who are lifers at Amazon are not normal people. They work hard to show others are bad workers so that someone else gets fired instead of them. That's it, it's survival of the "fittest", but where the "fittest" are the ones attacking others instead of actually doing a good job.

When someone actually pulled me aside and told me that I was wasting my time writing good quality code which would actually deliver a good experience to our customers, I thought they were insane. Looking back, I can now see that they were completely right because nowhere in my performance review did anyone look at my code quality and productivity being better than my peers. Nowhere did it say that my code had the least bugs before launch and the least bugs after launch in production. Nowhere did it say that my code reviews were the best because I wrote the most elegant code and faster than anyone else to boot. Nope, instead, it was a bunch of BS about how I didn't live up to the leadership principles as well as my peers who were role models and getting promoted.

Where were the managers in all of this? The managers were either apathetic, ignorant, or biased. I choose to believe that they couldn't be that ignorant. That being the case, they either didn't care that I was being maligned or they were part of the problem in biasing everything towards their friends. This was when I decided I had to go. When there is a a job to do, apathy is something that I can't deal with, let alone bias.

In summary, Amazon is a wonderful place to work if you are apathetic to others and unethical about biasing the process for the benefit of your friends. Amazon does not respect their employees. They chew them up and spit them out.