Amazon reviews

It will quickly become evident that Amazon's a great place to excel if you can literally devote all your time to it. So it's great if you are in your 20s and have not commitments, or if you have a stay-at-home partner holding down the fort. For pretty much everyone else, and that means for most women over 30, it's not a friendly place. But I would think everyone knows that by now. Another issue that I experienced during my time there (which was little over a year) is the company's incredibly messy and convoluted internal systems for conducting basic day-to-day business tasks like processing a PO or getting expenses paid or having a computer glitch sorted out. I've never seen anything like it at other companies -- the time wasted by senior-level employees dealing with the lowest order tasks out of sheer necessity because there are no assistants and troubleshooting anything takes so incredibly long. To say it's labyrinthine is an understatement. As a marketer, getting even the simplest marketing task accomplished involved dealing with a constant stream of blockers like endless calls with legal, dealing with an insanely slow system to get any outside vendors paid in time, and battling "computer says no" at every turn. It's a complete paradox as on the one hand the company is all about thinking big, but on a fundamental level they make it difficult for even very senior people to get out of the weeds of dealing with everyday minutiae. This is why you end up needing to work such long hours as well -- because you're expected to not only deliver on your goals at an executive level, you're also expected to be your own staff handling every little menial chore that someone many levels below you should really be doing. I can appreciate the ideal of such a non-hierarchical and self-sufficient vision but in actual practice it just doesn't work. Anybody with a better job offer will of course leave that kind of situation. It doesn't help anyone to be creative or feel they're using their time wisely.

People churn and burn out of team or org at a lightning pace. One day, you would be discussing the opportunities with a smart employee, next day you would know they left last evening! Disturbing politics@work. Managers can be really mean and screw your dream to last long. Not all are lucky. Some end up in really bad teams and can have a nightmare of a work life!