Run fast run far
I originally worked for a company which was acquired by Amazon. Prior to the acquisition the company I worked for, while not perfect, was a decent place to work. Sadly Amazon acquired us and turned the place into a sh*t show. I've been in the tech industry for decades and I never wanted to leave a company so fast. I tried to stay a year after the acquisition and I couldn't make it, the writing on the wall was so clear and scary that I wanted no part of it. The pittance of stock given wasn't worth my soul.
Here's a list of how sh*tty Amazon as an employer really is:
- The utmost change was the culture change. We went from a friendly culture to a cult culture. Management would go around quoting Jeff Bezos sayings like he's some infallible supreme leader. But people ate this sh*t up like it was crack. Instead of what would Jesus do it was what would Jeff Bezos do? It was so bad that even someone(not me) put in one of our engineering Slack channels "Amazon puts the cult in culture.".
- Another part of the culture change was when senior management from Seattle tried to convince us that they were just like all the other employees because they capped salaries at around 170k, even for top level execs. Of course this was just a misdirection ploy. In the presentation they failed(so much for hiring the best) to remove the shares granted column of the execs they used as examples. These people had stock grants ranging from 100,000 shares to a million shares. Most regular employees got like 50 shares. Just like one of us, really? Some of those people will make more from their stock than most of us will make in our lifetimes. This pretty much solidified my wanting to leave Amazon.
- We went from 4 core values to 14 core values. At what # do values no longer become "core" values. Of course as employees we were expected to meet and judge others based on all these values. Performance reviews and hiring were all based on these values.
- They changed the vacation policy, which admittedly was already lacking, to even less days. Basically any day Amazon wasn't required by law to give off, they didn't. Such as the day after Thanksgiving, which typically most non-sales based places(if they can afford it) would give to employees. Basically if you want the day off you'd have to burn one of your few vacation days.
- Every work place has politics but it got worse at Amazon as they hired more middle management(which was the majority of the hires) the politics and bullsh*t got way worse. Things went from two decision makers to so many that simple decisions would take months, if at all, to get decided. Teams started siloing themselves and a "not it" kind of mentality started to form when it came to getting product changes implemented. It made collaboration almost impossible.
- Speaking of hiring, Amazon has the worst hiring process I have ever seen. They claim they want to hire the best but that's not true. I don't have a problem with making sure someone is technically capable but the evaluation process of each hire is insane. It's essentially a full days work, after the actual interview, of filling out forms and meetings to discuss a single candidate. They wouldn't even consider candidates that weren't exact matches (but were close) to what they wanted, leaving a very small pool of people to hire from. IMHO I think this was done to enable a reason to hire more H-B1 people and force more Seattle people to be implanted. Basically Amazon wanted to hire mysterious unicorn people that no one could ever find especially in an industry (video) which already has a limited pool of potential candidates. I refused to interview people after going through the process.
- Performance reviews were a joke. For a first time in my career I was rated average as an employee. All my career I've gotten exceeds expectations as part of the review process even from managers who didn't particularly like me. My boss had literally nothing bad to say about my performance but couldn't give a good reason why I was ranked low. Nothing like doing a good job and getting a poor review to motivate your employees.
- Before Amazon our customer base was 90% ground and 10% cloud. Amazon didn't care about our existing ground based customers. They stripped many of the teams of their Sr. level engineers and moved them all to cloud product(s) many which needing complete rewriting or didn't exist because Amazon wanted custom cloud pieces that no one else would use. The end result was all our products suffered. Basically Amazon acted like 90% of our customers were cloud based and anyone using the ground products would just have to deal. Growing the cloud business made sense just not at the expense of customers who literally spent tens of millions a year for the ground product(s) we made. And of course everyone on the cloud teams were being worked to death which made for poor product quality.
I could go on but I think I've written enough. I'll leave you with if Amazon comes a knocking run fast, run far.