Micromanaged to Hell

As a current Amazonian, I have a few complaints:

1. Every Amazonian is micromanaged to hell and back. Senior leadership puts a tremendous amount of power in the hands of midlevel managers and then forces them to bear a great amount of stress and ownership to produce results. This permeates through every aspect of Amazon‘s culture and contributes to its exhausting cut-throat environment.

2. Amazon management is encouraged to be shameless. Everything the company does is customer-centric and that is a good thing, but it comes at a significant cost to the lower level Amazon employees (warehouse, call center, even engineers) who make the process work. They are treated as completely expendable. Amazon teaches managers to remind workers that it isn’t personal, but just business, that they are not respected or valued. When you’re dealing with people’s lives, this shouldn't be a realistic work philosophy because it isn't that simple.

3. Amazon’s health, dental, and vision benefits are very good, but you definitely earn them and will need them. Other than the political lowlifes who leech off the rest, I have never met another regular employee who doesn’t work extremely hard at their job and this always results in physical and mental health issues, especially stress and anxiety.

4. There is a lot of duplicity with Amazon’s compensation structure. Yes, all workers down to the bottom are offered stock, but the vesting schedule (which is the main reason so many people don’t just leave after a few months) is designed to benefit the company while giving you the illusion that it’s an awesome opportunity. Ultimately, 90%+ leave before they can fully vest their initial 4 year package.

5. Amazon doesn’t inspire internal trust among colleagues. From Connections to Anytime Feedback, they are all glorified snitching mechanisms to encourage employees to stab each other in the back to try to survive longer than average.

6. Escalation is strongly discouraged. There is a not-so-secret message which tells everyone that emailing or calling Jeff Bezos with your company email or phone is the quickest way to get fired, contrary to his requests that people reach out to him internally. (This was especially true with the 2015 email to everyone, which resulted in most people who complained to him getting fired). Even escalating to your own director or VP or HR usually ends with a retaliatory situation that likely results in you losing your job.