Good Bad and Ugly

Amazon has some good parts, some bad parts, and some really ugly parts.

First, the good: the pay is good for this type of work. There are lots of great benefits. The 401k and company stocks (RSUs) are good. The time off is usually pretty good if it's not abused by your manager.

Second, the bad: the work is repetitive so it can get boring. It can get really hard if you end up with some jobs since you will have to focus the whole shift on the same type of thing over and over. It can get mind-numbing.

Last and worst, the really ugly: management is very disorganized and is terrible about coordinating with each other and with communicating. Many Area Managers do not utilize their teams well enough. Even though the company hires college grads for AMs, they don't let them use their brain to increase productivity. Instead, they have to follow the stupid process defined by someone else and work their people to the point of exhaustion and then fire and replace them. Lots of employees want cross-training but they can't get it because their managers do not have enough training allowance. We see newbies come in every other week to new hire training, but no one interested in cross-training is allowed to join the training for any area with the newbies. The way managers talk about their employees, it's like they are refusing to be trained. They were begging for training but they can't get it. Also, they really need to stop assigning people to the same stations between breaks because it disrupts workflow and productivity. Sometimes, some people feel obligated to take the Voluntary Time Off after this because they get tired of waiting to get a station and don't want to get in trouble. And once you get an action plan from your AM, you can almost surely expect a second warning at the beginning of your next shift when a different AM takes over the floor because the AMs don't care enough to update each other on what's going on. You get reprimanded all over again after not even having a chance to redeeming yourself yet. This is crazy and is not exactly a realistic way to improve employee performance. This happens all the time and no one seems to listen when we tell them about it.