The right direction

Thanks to the pressure from the media, this website, and union organizers, Amazon is heading in the right direction. It's still a lousy place to work for lots of people, but nowhere near as bad as most of the stories here, which are probably more descriptive of a few years ago.

It's still true that everything depends on your department at Amazon and even more so on your manager. Unfortunately, there's no still way to accurately check these factors before joining a team from the outside. While the culture is getting better throughout the company due to killing of the 'stack rank and yank' process, it still isn't strong enough to clean out the pockets of bad managers which are surviving these process improvements (if not getting promoted if they're also hiding under the lousy VPs who reward politics above results).

So many thousands of highly talented people have left in the past so quickly because of a poor work environment, but it is getting better. Whether we've reached a tipping point where people will actually stay more than 2-3 years before burning out is still yet to be seen...