Atrocious Amazon!

The two odd years that I spent at Amazon better be the darkest years of my life. For it doesn’t usually get gloomier, more depressing and devastating than that. Amazon was a soul crushing experience, to say the least. And looking back, it seems like the biggest mistake of my life. One that I would never forgive myself for.

There are few (hopefully) experiences in life that leave you scarred forever. You become who you don’t want to be, your friends suddenly don’t recognize you, and you lose every ounce of confidence you had in you. You get sucked into the bottomless pit called depression and the only recurrent question on your mind is “What have I done to deserve this?”

The truth is, you have done nothing remotely questionable. You have taken up an offer from the world’s biggest e–commerce company and one that also features in one of those “top 10 companies to work with” lists in business magazines. Well, just goes on to show how flawed those lists are. But let’s keep that for another day.

A year after being at Amazon and putting up with the incredible torture they are known to mete out to their employees (zero work life balance, staying up till 3 am to finish work given that I was part of a launch team, working over weekends, working while being sick and against doctor’s instructions, not taking any leave in 14 months), I was handed a PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).

I had not just met but exceeded all my targets and was single-handedly managing a huge part of the business. Despite all that was promised to me at the time of poaching me from their biggest competitor in the country, I was neither given a team to share the workload with, nor any efficient guidance and other resources to go about my task. Yet, I did everything and more than what was expected of me.

While any other organisation would have considered promoting me (as I was in the past), Amazon, demonstrating its “peculiar” trait that it’s so proud of, handed me a PIP. My boss, the worst I have had in my decade long career, told me that I am not a cultural fit at Amazon (no one gives you the real definition of what Amazon’s culture is all about), and therefore Amazon should not be a long term option for me.

He showed little interest in trying to help me. 

Every single day at Amazon seemed like an insufferable ordeal. My life was straight out of the NY Times expose on Amazon published in August last year. The punishing work place, a sea of sharks for a workplace where you are encouraged to back-stab and belittle people in meetings and a near fatal environment that does everything to ensure you develop a sleeping disorder.

The pressure cooker situation at Amazon coupled with some of the most unbearably atrocious colleagues I have seen in my professional life resulted in a host of lifestyle diseases that I am still battling with. My medical bills were a mile long and it almost seemed like my salary account existed so I could pay my doctor bills.

There are broadly two factors that make Amazon the torture chamber that it is. The first things, as pointed out by several other “Amazon Casualties” is that it’s a place that believes in putting the wrong people in power. About 80% of the leadership don’t deserve to be there. They deserve to be fired! They are not just malicious, inconsiderate, insensitive, uninspiring robot beings, but they also happen to be terrible at their jobs.

Directors such as mine (reporting to one of Jeff’s directs) are insufferable during meetings. She tells her subordinates, “You have exactly two minutes before I ask you to leave” in meetings and makes it a point to continuously intimidate people with her aggressive nature.

Amazon leaders lack the humility to listen to the team even when they have zilch idea/knowledge about the business. It’s appalling to see people of such caliber managing mammoth businesses.

The other problem with Amazon is its utterly dubious leadership principles and the manner in which they are abused and used against your peer to get ahead. If all else fails, use a leadership principle on an unsuspecting colleague to destroy his/her career. Threatened by a super hard working over achieving colleague? Use an LP against him in the 360 feedback because there’s nothing else you can call out.

Many have fallen prey to this method, including yours truly and I thought it’s high time I spoke up.

Amazon doesn’t leave you with much hope; so it’s difficult to see the brighter side of things even when you are out of the system. But I suppose it prepares you for the hardest battles in life. This is a great battlefield to hone your combat skills. For if you have survived here, you will survive in a Nazi camp. And if you haven’t, you are still bloody good.