Mentally exhausting

I feel terrible for the new Amazonians because I've seen you guys come and go again and again during my long career at Amazon. Every year Amazon cans loads of guys like you to make room for a new set of bright-eyed faces. It's mentally exhausting to see this continue to happen every year. Sometimes it's obvious, but most of the time it's not. If people suddenly don't show up one day, they definitely got canned. If they are quitting for "career growth", there is a fairly good chance that they were canned as well. People won't tell you that they are getting fired. Two recent hires got canned from my team recently and I was impressed that even under the circumstances neither realized that the other was also getting canned.

It's very hard to do your job if you know the truth that your team isn't going to cooperate with each other and risk being the one who gets canned. Therefore, there is a huge facade hiding how the performance management system works. You can't win a game in which you don't know the rules. Sometimes the system works correctly and they actually do can the lowest 10%. Most of the time, it's completely political and the most evil people survive at the expense of the hard working innocents. In the long run, it's all a losing game as the company culture continuously degenerates.

If you see internet posts about happy employees at Amazon, they almost certainly have two years or less of tenure. There's a reason for that. I feel that Amazon takes advantage of people's ignorance and this is very much burning me out.