Amazon's uniquely bad culture

It's hard to tell from the outside, but there's a lot about Amazon engineering culture which is not common in other tech companies. After being in 4 different cultures, I wanted to warn everyone how bad I've found Amazon to be compared to others.

First, Amazon constantly has to go to new cities to recruit because most candidates won't follow through with the interview process once their friends at Amazon find out they are interviewing and tell them the real deal of how broken the culture is. 

Second, the revolving door of employees leads to tighter and tighter on-call rotations because whenever someone is fired or leaves, the team needs to bring newbies up-to-speed, if they can even find and hire them. These on-call duties mean no outside activities 24/7 for one to two weeks unless you plan to take your laptop every place you go and can limit yourself to full pager and internet covered areas. For this reason, most SDEs don't have a life outside Amazon. Being required to be online and working on a problem within 15 minutes of being paged means you are tethered to your computer for about one-quarter of your life. This is also very political because you will need to respond to "urgent" issues which may actually being meaningless except for the fact that someone in management wants to make a big deal about it.

Third, new employees usually feel great about getting through the lengthy interview process but in a few short months, most realize what they've gotten themselves into. There's lots of turnover. LOTS OF TURNOVER. The worst is in management because so many have little useful management experience and want to prove themselves by being yes-men. They ruin life for good employees simply because of their incompetence at leading people. Other managers are former project managers with no people management skills and also lack sufficient technical skills to be good technical managers. The worst are managers who have been at Amazon for a long time and focus putting on a good show, regardless of actual results. Any employee who dares to challenge their incompetence is immediately declared a failure and fired while being called "good attrition."

Fourth, managers rarely show any appreciation, except to give false credit to engineers who are self-promoting while taking credit for ideas their peers came up with. The more desperate someone incompetent is to keep their job, the more they badmouth co-workers to gullible and incompetent managers. They find it easy to manipulate new managers by being constantly in their offices and making themselves sound knowledgeable and important. It's hard for managers to detect the bulls**t if they don't understand the work they are supposed to be managing. 

All of the above leads to really bad decisions by management, which create outages which then need scapegoats to be fired. Error review meetings become shouting matches trying to place blame. Hours of meetings are devoted to people talking about things they don't really understand, hashing through documents full of irrelevant data, staring at graphs which might not even be accurate. Incompetent managers like to pick on small things, like the verbiage or content of your report which doesn't actually help their customers. They make you want to keep quiet and keep your data to yourself, since it doesn't help them protect their career. 

Why is this worse at Amazon than any other tech company? Because of the constant churn of employees. The average employment is 14 months. Politics are rampant, especially among the lifers. Say the wrong thing to an ambitious manager or his friends and you'll find yourself a target for the next performance firing cycle, if not sooner (like right away).