Amazon reviews

With the explosive growth Amazon has seen, they have promoted too many people who are smart and great individual contributors into management roles. Most managers don't actually know how to lead. Unfortunately, this will continue to get worse as Amazon expands into new areas. Starting at the top, senior managers lead by being dicks.

Terrible retention. I havent seen such high attrition in my entire work life of 12 years. I have been here for less than a year and I can literally count dozens of employees that I know well, who have left, including my boss, her boss, my mentor and a whole lot of others. The place is highly confrontational and critical; every one likes to rat hole the best of the ideas, proposal and deliverable. It is as if the company expects you to be always critical of others. Due to such high attrition and employee movement, nobody knows how the systems work. I have seen projects taking twice the time it takes in other places. You may ask - why do we then see Amazon releasing products so quickly - it just because of the mentality of throwing zilion ideas to the wall and seeing which one sticks. If you are not a software engineer/development manager/technical program manager, you are just going to work here on borrowed time. I have an MBA from top 10 business school and have substantial work experience in my area of work but I still constantly feel that I am doing poorly. You need to be a political, scheming alpha make kind of personality to succeed in this company. The company values the external messaging over actual substance. The average tenure of the employee is 1-2 years.