HR is the main root cause

Should you escalate to Amazon HR? That's exactly what I did and here’s what happened.

My boss was abusive and drove off 70% of the team. He lied to me many times, so I started documenting it.

I went to HR about it, trying to get support so I could transfer out to a team in another department, where I knew the manager and he had already offered me a job.

My department’s HR business partner assured me that every detail that I told her would be kept confidential. She insisted I tell her about my boss and why I wanted to leave. She lied. After I did tell her some details, she immediately turned around and told my boss all of it. After she told everything to my boss, the two of them started coming up with suddenly new complaints about my performance.

This should show Amazon HR to be the organization that is a main root cause of Amazon’s problems. 

Jeff Bezos says we should talk to him or HR. All he does in these circumstances is pass any complaint on to HR, so it would have been the same result in the end.

You win at Amazon by playing politics, not by being good at your job.

You might ask why I was stupid enough to go to HR? Before Amazon, I worked mostly for startups, so Amazon was my first job at a big company. I honestly thought that HR would do their job and protect employees because that protects the company. HR is supposed to be about mediation and conflict resolution with integrity and trustworthiness. Amazon HR couldn’t be a more polar opposite from that ideal.