Still hurting

I know that I should just forget about my awful experience working at Amazon, but it's hard to shake the pain when Amazon is so prominent in my life. I use EC2 and RDS at work, and at home I'm like most people, ordering one or two packages a week. I'm realistic enough to accept that I can't boycott Amazon because they are ubiquitous, but I'm having a really hard time recovering from the emotional punch in the gut every time I hear about this company.

After several months of abuse, I had left my group at Amazon. It was the first time in my career that I ever filed an HR complaint, and only because my mentor there encouraged me to do it. The NYT article came out almost one month after I finally quit Amazon, and it was such a relief to know that I wasn't singled out or just crazy. A few months after I left, a former co-worker who was about to leave Amazon herself told me that the talk around my old office was that I had 'PTSD'. I had to laugh a little because I couldn't figure out if they meant that I took PTSD to my job at Amazon, or left with it.

At Amazon I got hired into a development team that thought they needed someone with my background and experience, but when I arrived there I found a lot of squabbling and sparring like I had never seen anywhere. My team went through three different managers in 10 months. The last one was a guy just out of an MBA program on his first management job.

I'll be the first to admit that I was the wrong person for the job, in temperament, experience, education, and in almost every other way. The problem was that I couldn't pay back my signing bonus, having spent it on my kid's college tuition that September. They weren't going to fire me either, so we all got locked into this situation where they were going to abuse and harass me until I left, but I had to hang in there long enough to minimize the amount I had to pay back until I could get a new employer to help offset the remainder of the bonus I owed Amazon.

I couldn't believe what was happening to me - the amount of abuse my manager was handing me in person, in writing, and in email cc's to his manager. He was dogging me at every turn, when I came in late, when I left early, when I misspoke, when I didn't answer a question to his satisfaction. On the surface he comes across as a pretty nice guy, but he's also a spiteful and ambitious person who was given the authority to force me out, and happened to be very good at it. He used to talk about taking his shotgun out on the weekends to shoot deer, and I think that harassing to quit me was just a bit of office blood sport.

HR was useless, of course. All they really cared about was making sure that I wasn't about to sue them. I told them not to pursue my complaint as I already had another job and just wanted to put that nightmare behind me. After the NYT article was published, however, HR sprang into action, following their procedures which involved interviewing everyone in my old team. I was no longer there to defend myself, and I heard from friends there that the whole HR process was pretty ugly and confusing for them. My former manager basically put the blame on me for being incompetent, untrainable, and ungrateful. It is true that he was my advocate for the first couple months, even trying to help me transfer before my first year was up, but when the transfer failed, he did a complete 180 on me. My friends testified that my training had been insufficient and in private told me they believed that my manager had been put up to the task of harassing me out of the company by his manager. One of the strangest things for them to understand is that my mentor had been a founder member of the team, yet wasn't able to mediate in this situation but instead encouraged the HR complaint in the first place. Something was very suspicious, in their opinion. She and all the other women from my team left within months after my departure. While they are still pretty happy at Amazon, they got away from that team as soon as they could following my departure.

All in all it was a very ugly and painful experience. I'm two years into a wonderful job and I shouldn't be looking back at this incident in my life, but it hurts still. I don't know what I have to gain by writing this except maybe just to know that it's normal to feel this way, and that I'm not alone.