One time golden boy confirms awful toxic culture

I joined early when stock was low and left when it was high. I made a fortune but at what cost? 7 and half years was my sentence. First year, I got the best performance review possible and stock options and more money than I could believe. I was set up for life. I was the perfect Amazon employee. I was promoted. This continued for years. The last two, my attitude changed as I saw what was happening to the not so lucky friends. Things were awful. 

Here's a few stories about how bad everything is:

I had a director say to me and the team without any hint of irony: let's figure out how to make it possible to download the entire Amazon catalog onto the iPad so they can browse and purchase “off line” and it'll be fast. Think about that for a minute. It doesn't take a genius to know the catalog is huge. Terabytes of data not to mention changing prices etc. The sheer idea is absurd and he stood by it and reiterated on it and doubled down. There were many meetings on this special assignment. He was eventually fired but the damage that guy did was amazing. Everyone else I told laughed but in this org it was considered a worthwhile idea to explore. Yes, seriously.

Another tech director said that HTML is fine and we should be making our own custom hardware instead of fixing the site to run faster. 

Another director spent hours giving feedback on a test plan, commenting on the fonts the sizes, the descriptions and how it was missing lots of stuff. The poor qa spent days on a worthless idiotic piece of paper that not one person would read or follow. It was all ridiculous. He was a QA manager in his past life at Microsoft and had not quite grown into the director of engineering position. How did he get the job? 

The site HTML is terrible, just do a view source in the browser. OMG, it's a disaster. Inline CSS and javascript errors and just garbage on top of garbage. Years of cruft and short sighted idiotic poor management. You can't fix it because the code is so poorly put together, you can't decide which of the 48 if statements will break prod and cause a sev one which you will be raked across the coals for. There's no tests. You have no time. It's impossible to test because the internal test site dev doesn't work. Never has. 

Their mobile site for the longest time was just scraping the html page but did not include choking hazard warnings or other legally required things to have a retail site in european countries. The prices were inconsistent and the business was a mess. They could have been shut down for lacking critical information on certain items. This was known by the higher ups but covered up. 

The platform is so old and badly put together. All but one of the original platform team quit in protest. That one guy gets paid so much money it's crazy. The platform is slow and leaks memory like a sieve. They worked out that it's easier to restart the process than to fix the memory leaks. They literally have thousands of machines running to support the traffic. It's an exercise in how not to build a website. It's amazing any of it works. The VP of platform said one day it'll stop working and his fear was nobody will be able to fix it. 

Deployments take hours as you have to copy megabytes of crappy perl code to each host. It's a joke. Technically, it's a disaster. If you break it, you have to explain why in a very hostile root cause meeting. Something that was out of stock yesterday is now suddenly in stock and it's causing a problem. But there's no way to test that. The same story copied down in each root cause but not actually fixed just recorded to use as leverage.

During a crisis meeting when there were fears there was not a enough hardware to meet christmas traffic demands, which seemed to be a yearly event, the VP says I wonder if the detail page would look better with a grey background. Someone had to explain the cost of changing all the photos to have the same background. My favorite quote after the meeting from a developer "is she f**king stupid?" She’s the VP. And yes, she’s a moron of epic proportions.

Why does this matter? Because it makes the job very hard for those poor newbies stuck doing the grunt work. Once graduated from this, you never have to deal with these low level details. And those who have to work on it will never be empowered to fix it. So it’s really a hard slog for most to do the even the most basic stuff. It's really not great engineering at all. You lasted 2 years? Well done. Most don’t last 12 months. 

Managers hire their friend(s) from microsoft (other terrible failing company) who are middle management and completely non technical. They shuffled papers and were completely lost in technical meetings and keep mentioning how great C# is and how it takes care of all this for you. We hired a distinguished engineer from microsoft who had no internet experience and his ideas were laughable. He could not explain nor follow how a html page is rendered from the server. He wanted to invent his own way of doing this by only sending the up deltas but of course had no idea on how to actually implement this. He had no respect even from junior developers. He had the worst personal hygiene imaginable. He was not bright or thoughtful at all.

A principal developer in a meeting got angry at a very respected tech person when they suggested the element could be Ajax'd into the page. He said "what's Ajax?" He took the shocked silence as we didn't know and so he followed it up with "if you don't know and can't explain it to me then bring someone technical to the next meeting!" in an angry voice. Anyone who is reasonably web experienced knows what Ajax is. To be a Principal and not know this is embarrassing. To be mean about it, it is outrageous. Status slaps in meetings were the norm by a***oles.

If you join a bad team and there are many, you are locked in for 12 months. I know very smart devs from good companies like google, facebook and microsoft who got stuck on terrible teams and they just slept in their office and worked on their side projects startup ideas instead of looking at things they were not interested in. While those with no reputation were under the microscope, those who had friends were free to do very little.

Hostile teams were a nightmare for me, I had to mentor them as part of a my way up the chain. I heard so many stories and horrific tales of managers doing things that clearly were in violation of the rules. I had to learn that HR was useless and the best advice was to leave the team. Oh wait, you can't for 12 months. Oh, I see you have a stomach ulcer and you are 21 years old and don't drink or smoke. Oh, you are on anti depressants and feel stuck paying the bills and can't leave this hostile situation. Wow, welcome to the tech industry you poor bastard. 

Everyone is sad, everyone hates it, not in secret, it's the topic at every lunchtime. "Guess what stupid things my manager said today" types of conversations. People bond over horrible treatment. It's a weird strange feeling as the sociopaths who lack the ability to have feelings gravitate to the top and the thoughtful kind and hard working are stepped on. It's not fair. But no one will ever claim it is. Not even top brass. 

I signed paperwork so I can't talk about some of the stories. Not to mention one blatant racism case. But it would make the front page of the new york times if I divulged it. My good friend in HR laughed and said that's nothing compared to the stories she herself lived through in her short time in Amazon HR. She said it's going to all come out one day and they'll look bad but they have good lawyers and the liability is all covered unfortunately because the employees are rarely in a position to have leverage over the company. 

I left and I'm happy. I made enough money. I learned some things. I feel bad for those I left behind.