its all about getting promoted

For my first year and a half at Amazon, everything seemed great. I learned lots of new things and met lots of smart people. However, my entire work during that time was very limited to bug fixes and implementing minor customer requests. I saw some weird things like people abruptly leaving (which is apparently a weekly occurrence at Amazon) and people getting chewed out over tiny things. I also saw many teams filled with incompetent people who couldn't even solve the most basic problems. I always thought my team was safe but I was very wrong.

After getting a great first annual review for being the most customer-centric person on the team, I was given the go ahead to start implementing a few new features for customers. Initially, my team was on board, but my project was quickly deprioritized for other work which others needed to get themselves promoted. I then had my second annual review where things went well, but I was told by my manager that for me to be promoted, I had to get my feature launched. I started pushing harder but kept getting blocked at every turn.

I then saw how many of our customer feature requests were getting blocked by my team, which was frustrating our customers. I started to show instances of how we were failing customers and could do better. Soon after I started raising these issues, my PIP came in. There was nothing I could do because every goal on my PIP was to push forward customer facing features and no one would unblock them, so I got fired.

On the bright side after being fired, I got a new job with a competitor with a 40% salary bump. After you work for Amazon, you realize it is full of double speak and politics. The last thing leaders at Amazon care about is putting customers ahead of their own career ambitions. What Amazon is good for is padding your resume and learning as much as you can before moving to somewhere more honest about employee performance and customer service.