When I joined Amazon Vancouver in July 2014, the office was small, with fewer than 200 employees.
When I decided to leave, Amazon Vancouver had offices in multiple buildings and thousands of employees. Both Amazon and I experienced growth at the same time. I left Amazon in 2022 to pursue a new opportunity at Meta.
It’s difficult to make general statements about a large company like Amazon. Factors like managers, coworkers, projects, etc. can have a significant positive or negative impact on your career, so these factors are not necessarily relevant to Amazon as a whole, nor can they be generalized to Amazon as a whole.
I joined Amazon during one of its darkest periods, when the workplace culture was at its worst, but the company was already making changes to improve it.
I joined in 2014 as a Junior Engineer and left as a Senior Engineer, and during my time there I was never indifferent to the company, I either loved it or hated it.
What I like about Amazon
Working at Amazon has had positive aspects that have helped my personal and professional growth.
Ultimate Ownership
I liked that at Amazon I was never assigned tasks to follow blindly.
Instead, they were often responsible for owning a project from start to finish, sometimes given only vague descriptions of the work that needed to be done, such as integrating Microsoft business software with Amazon systems.
We researched the issues, prepared solutions, and crowdsourced revisions to the plan until we reached a consensus on the design. We also had to ship and monitor the feature.
Amazon felt like an engineer-led company, rather than engineers managing entire projects and non-technical managers assigning smaller tasks. I liked this about the company because it led to better design decisions and more autonomy.
Engineering Excellence
Many of Amazon Web Services’ (AWS) services are pay-as-you-go rather than subscription or one-time payment, which means that if the systems don’t run reliably, AWS loses revenue. The same is true for retail websites: automation systems must be professionally designed or the company will lose money.
As a development engineer, I loved working at this high level: every feature release required sufficient code coverage, reliable tests, proper metrics and alarms, effective dashboards, and detailed runbooks to reduce the chance of potential issues.
Although it was time-consuming for our junior engineers, it was training them to improve their code quality and engineering approach in the long run, and it also meant fewer pesky bugs to fix later in the process.
There were lots of learning resources
There is a wide range of learning materials available within Amazon that helped me get up to speed quickly and solve almost any problem I could think of in a short space of time.
For example, there was a YouTube-like channel for instructional videos collected and created in-house, a Stack Overflow-type website where engineers could ask for help from their peers, a wiki, email, and an efficient search system to find anything in the code.
Your technical skills will be heard regardless of your position.
In engineering discussions, what was said mattered more than the level. As a senior engineer, I delivered training on “customer obsession,” one of the core “leadership principles” that define Amazon employees.
I encouraged new employees to always challenge the decisions of others, especially when clear, rational reasons were not apparent.
I’ve been in so many meetings where junior employees are asking challenging questions of more senior employees, and senior employees at Amazon have to give meaningful answers, never answers that they assume are correct simply because of seniority.
What can you change on Amazon?
While Amazon has some great initiatives, I think some aspects could be improved or changed for the better, especially when it comes to creating a more efficient and happier workforce.
There has always been something against leadership principles.
While many companies stick to a few values to define their culture, Amazon has a broader set of leadership principles. These are the values that guide how we evaluate our employees.
When I joined Amazon, we had 12 principles; now we have 16. These principles are part of Amazonians’ daily communication, whether they want to praise or criticize someone. It’s common to hear phrases like, “Show more action” or “Thank you for showing action.”
With so many principles, managers may end up using them in contradictory ways. For example, there may be clear limitations to features delivered within very tight deadlines. One manager may praise “delivering results” and “being biased towards action”, while another may argue that the principle “insisting on the highest standards” needs to be improved.
Managers can easily manipulate their employees to criticize them, and if they want to give you a bad review, they have plenty of options to find something to do.
Promotion wasn’t easy
At Amazon, to get promoted you needed an example of an experience or “story” that advanced each leadership principle, and each story had to be validated by an employee at least one level above you.
In my experience, promotion at Amazon wasn’t about how well you did your job, but about finding the right team and project that met the promotion criteria. Playing the “promotion game” isn’t unique to Amazon, but it was evident there.
If you’re lucky, a great story will develop naturally if you’re in the right environment, but in most cases, you’ll need to plan well in advance of your promotion date to ensure you complete the necessary elements of your promotion.
If your boss is new, your coworkers are junior, or your team’s projects aren’t impactful enough, it’s much harder to get promoted.
On-call shifts at Amazon were frustrating and exhausting
At Amazon, most product decisions were based on the customer.
When dealing with tickets, the first thing we did was look for issues with the customer. If a customer wasn’t happy, employees were often blamed.
Being on-call (when an engineer is on standby to fix a bug) can be especially frustrating – you get paged in at any time during your shift and have to solve a problem. At Amazon, it was hard to find a team that didn’t have frequent on-call shifts.
Engineers would work through the night on operational issues without any extra compensation, and top talent would quit due to the frustration of being on-call. These on-call shifts meant I couldn’t travel, I was called out for a friend’s birthday or dinner at a restaurant and had to leave to solve a problem.
I remember once my phone rang at 2 a.m. and again at 4 a.m. I woke up at 4 a.m. to work on a problem and started shaking so badly I had to wrap myself in a blanket for 15 minutes before opening my laptop.
I once asked a VP about the possibility of being paid overtime if I was on-call for longer than my assigned shift, and they responded, “If you do your on-calls perfectly, Amazon’s stock price will go up and you’ll benefit,” which seemed like a weak justification for unfair treatment.
Amazon encouraged people to work very hard and fast.
When I joined Amazon, I had one week to complete the bootcamp and launch process, and the second week I was given a real job. It was fun to get hands-on as quickly as possible.
However, new hires often struggled to keep up with the company’s pace, which affected the quality of their work. When I joined the Alexa team, my teammates told me to “drink from the hose,” which meant I had to learn a lot and fast. I wanted to prove myself, but I didn’t have enough experience to work fast, which stressed me out.
Once they were settled in, managers had to report the names of the bottom 10% of performers to HR every quarter. Low performers were often placed into mentoring programs or more serious performance plans similar to PIPs. Unfortunately, I have seen many new hires enter one of these plans within their first few months and leave the company extremely stressed.
Mentorship programs come with high risks, which has led to many employees not performing to their full potential and pushing themselves to their limits.
I was once tasked with helping a colleague with an improvement program. He was extremely stressed and desperately asked me to add some coding tasks to the project to meet the program requirements. I assigned him to write test code, even though I had more urgent tasks that needed my help. A few months later, he moved to another company, even though he took a pay cut.
Even managers can be affected by a fast-paced environment. I’ve seen employees leave Amazon, even though managers have tried to alleviate some of the pressure they feel. New or inexperienced managers often feel the most stress because they have to deal with pressure from engineers and senior managers.
Final thoughts
In short, Amazon is a great engineering company with many high-impact, technically challenging projects, which allows employees to learn first-class concepts quickly.
But it comes at a cost. If you don’t manage stress properly, it can affect your health and your relationships with loved ones. I felt a lot of pressure and frustration while working at Amazon. I even went through two breakups while I was working there.
Editor’s note: When reached for comment on the allegations in this article, an Amazon spokesperson said they couldn’t verify the author’s testimony. “Based on the information shared with us, it appears there are a number of inaccuracies about what it’s like to work at Amazon today. We care deeply about our employees’ well-being, including supporting their professional and personal growth through a range of benefits, resources, and ad-hoc support. To suggest otherwise based on a single anonymous, years-old testimony is misleading and inaccurate,” the spokesperson said. They did not elaborate on which parts of the article they believe are inaccurate.
