DYSTOPIAN HELLSCAPE

Dystopian Hellscape Creation For Dummies

"How to build the perfect corporate hellscape to drain every drop of blood and hope from humanity. Forget The Matrix, Amazon is the ideal template to enslave those meat bags!"

Whilst this story has an injection of some poor attempt at humor to make it more palatable, do not mistake it for hyperbole. I read this website when I first started 4 years ago and wondered how much exaggeration there was, or whether these were all merely disgruntled employees, or perhaps the software engineers would have it nicer. Amazon is without a doubt the worst company I have ever worked for. As you go higher in any org, the managers get more and more sociopathic. Although European employment laws partially protect you, Amazon takes the worst parts of all the big US companies and packages them together to create a sprawling monstrous abomination, sucking the life out of every employee it consumes. In addition, Europe tends to get the side projects, so you'll be lucky if you find interesting work and it won't be long before the US bring it back to the homeland. For customers, Amazon is fantastic. But that benefit comes with a terrible cost. 4 years later I finally couldn't take anymore and my last day was one of the happiest moments of my life.

Step 1 - Corporate Values

"Every company needs values to enforce drone-like consistency in all their workers. Make sure you have plenty, otherwise end of year appraisals can become an awkward situation where a worker may have actually achieved something and require praise and a monetary reward. Having conflicting values is an added bonus to ratchet up the anxiety - you can market them as a "healthy tension" should anyone question it."

Amazon has 14 leadership principles. Whilst at face value they might seem reasonable, in reality you can use them to justify absolutely anything and management will continually abuse them to turn the tables on you, whether that be knocking you down or validating their nonsensical actions. Didn't deliver fast enough? Not enough Bias For Action. Moved too fast? Not enough Insist On The Highest Standards. Manager isn't doing their job? You're failing to take Ownership of a problem you've spotted. In many companies you can usually acknowledge the values and then move swiftly on and just get the job done. Here, failure to talk about the leadership principles will get noticed very quickly. When you first join you'll get to take the Peculiar training - "How to fit into a cult" didn't have the same ring to it.

Pro tip: Talk about leadership principles all the time, management love it. As long as your statements vaguely make sense, it will rarely get questioned. Doing this for your full tenure is achievable, just don't start thinking anyone in management actually cares about your opinions.

Step 2 - Instill Fear

"You can't get the best out of your workers unless they are absolutely terrified they will lose their jobs on a daily basis. Make sure to pit team members against one another to crush any collusion or unionization. Continually fire people to set an example."

Amazon does ruthless stack ranking. Their official line is they don't, but they absolutely do. It's easy to think it's just the bad people that get disappeared, but I've personally seen it happen to good engineers too and that's because it's a simple numbers game. Someone on your team has to be scapegoated every year. If there are enough scapegoats across your department, your team may remain unscathed, but you likely won't be able to get away with no losses for long. I have not seen an ounce of humanity in upper management. People moving from other countries on VISAs have been targeted because they've started slow compared to native speakers, making them easy targets. The system has even become gamified to the point where some unscrupulous managers will deliberately hire people so they can make up the firing quota. I do not blame the managers themselves - should your manager choose to continually protect your team, it's likely they'll end up on the chopping block for not meeting the quota.

Pro tip: This one takes a massive toll on your soul. Just make sure you're never anywhere near the lower half of your team and you can at least save your own skin. Protecting other people is extremely hard and co-workers are usually great, making the whole thing even sadder. If you are one of the lucky few to have a good manager and they leave, you should immediately start to worry if you get an internal transfer - start putting backup plans in place.

Step 3 - Fresh Meat

"If your soul-crushing is running at maximum efficiency, you will churn through your workforce at a high rate. You need an efficient recruitment process to lure in the suckers."

Whilst releasing features at Amazon is unbelievably slow, their recruitment process is reasonably time efficient for both candidates and interviewers. It is your standard FAANG nonsense, but that's not unexpected of course. Any feedback you give on the process will be ignored should you be foolish enough to think that anyone cares about your opinion. Requests to even understand recruitment's decisions when things change will be met with a wall of silence. Amazon's tactic is to throw people at problems, and it has optimized here. You will rarely see engineering improvements - why bother when you can just add more meat. The pay is generally pretty reasonable for the first couple of years to tempt you in.

You will spend lots of time interviewing to replace all the people continually fleeing or being fired each year. Most orgs are continually expanding but the high churn rate makes it difficult to hold onto anyone and no one in upper management cares about retention.

Pro tip: Ask about the interviewer's manager. Warning flags to look for are not having a manager (project probably sucks depending on age of team) and long tenured (> ~4 years) internal transfer (likely a sociopath). New external hires might be ok (won't be brainwashed yet). Shorter tenured managers can be fine too but there's probably a high chance of them leaving around year 4, so bear that in mind if you're aiming for promotion. If you're coming over on a VISA, be very very careful, you'll likely be trapped. Also, ask about the oncall load - you do not get paid for call-outs (because you are expendable and Frugality) so avoid any team with significant issues.

Step 4 - Quicksand

"Smart workers will tend to see through the subterfuge. Make sure to add paperwork, roadblocks and other delaying factors wherever possible to keep the worker's thoughts occupied. Doing so will allow you siphon out the last vestiges of hope before your workers even realise how long it has been."

Do not mistake Amazon for an agile engineering company. Yes, most teams do scrum and can pull it off reasonably well, but an organization needs to be agile from the top down. It takes months to release anything even remotely useful. If you're in Europe you will probably end up doing plenty of work in other team's codebases (Away Team work), usually with half-assed onboarding processes, draconian feature request intakes, Sisyphean service release checklists and you'll waste plenty of time wrestling with poor internal tooling.

The compensation scheme is also designed to slow you down. The initial 1-2 years are generally quite lucrative due to your joining bonus, so you'll likely stay for at least that, once you've committed. After that disappears, don't expect anything even remotely resembling a base pay rise. Amazon uses the increasing share price as an excuse to give you below inflationary pay rises. Your joining shares will mostly vest in years 3 and 4, keeping you hooked for a little while longer. You will get some top up shares, but they're on a 2-year vest and you'll likely be gone before you really care about these.

Promotion is slow. You have an almost zero chance of getting promoted in the first 2 years, so factor this in. Remember that being good isn't the only factor, it's being "Amazonian", and that's much harder.

Pro tip: In your interview ask how much away team work there is. They can't really lie to you about this. If it's a large percentage of the work, run like hell. If you already made the mistake of joining, have an exit plan ready to run with for year 4 (if you can even last that long). Do not count on getting promoted quickly, regardless of how good you are. The move to senior engineer is very difficult due to the half-assed projects and glacial pace, and the move to principal engineer is almost impossible. Some people just join to get the name on their CV, which is a reasonable if dangerous plan, just remember to get out quick.

5 - Propaganda

"If you spin enough lies, even the smartest people will start to wonder what's real and what's not. Keep them guessing eternally and deny everything."

Amazon prides itself for hiring smart engineers and I've worked with a lot of good people. However, it treats them like total idiots. The internal propaganda is just as bad and hard to swallow as the stuff they spin to the media. I'm utterly ashamed of how Amazon treat their workforce. You are a resource to be mined and discarded, nothing more.

Pro tip: Where there's smoke, there's usually a fire. If anything, the media are underreporting the problems.

Epilogue

Some of the above you may brush off as "big company problems", but Amazon takes it to the extreme and I have worked for other big corporations that were far better. Occasionally you will see more positive posts on this site. Since the company is enormous, you will find pockets of resistance where a person had a good team, a good manager, and interesting work. Make no mistake, these are anomalies and they will be quashed over time, either through poor management decisions or fast attrition. Betting on landing in one of these ideal situations by chance is foolish and it's unlikely you'll divine this from your questions posed to the interviewers. Use your network as much as possible to work out where the safe areas are if you truly wish to run the gauntlet. I was lucky to join with people I trusted and respected, which is why I managed to last so long. Bit by bit the essence was drained and now mostly empty husks remain. I consider myself a tough person, but working here has scarred me deeply.