Amazon reviews

Very direct communication style is refreshing if the people you work with are nice people - but if you work with difficult people then they can use being direct as a way to vent their negative character traits with impunity. There are a minority of alpha managers who act in an aggressive and controlling manner when provoked, and this results in a stressful work environment. The Amazonian way can feel a bit cult-like at first (e.g. when you first join, you have to listen to a video of Jeff Bezos laughing). We are a customer obsessed company but the tech mentality can be elitist and if you work on interfaces, you soon lose sight of what it's like to be an end user. Limited support for study. You get shallow quick training given in house, and then you are supposed to learn everything on the job. If structured learning helps you add value you have to pay for it all yourself and managers ignore it. For all the talk about International Women's Day, most of the tech managers are male especially in engineering. Women are almost all filtered out by L6 and L7. The company makes little data on gender equality available but in this data-driven company if you don't have the data the initiative goes nowhere and we can only speculate as to what is going on. There is noticeable under representation for other groups too: older people, BAME groups. Not an open workplace on mental health despite evidence of burnout among employees. High company turnover. Having skilled people leave, especially when most of the tech is proprietary, seems like a poor business strategy. High costs to teams in churn and productivity. Can be a very confusing work environment - documentation doesn't keep up with reality. You'll never get to a point where you understand fully what is going on so you have to develop strategies to get the essential understanding which is akin to solving the "how do I know what I don't know" conundrum. Even if you think yourself quite confident, resilient, stressful times at Amazon can wear these away.

The review process ranks employees against each other and is not based on your performance but based on the fact of, does your manager like you. A lot of young managers that do not know how to be managers and will ruin a person's reputation and career to make themselves look good. You can be a hard worker however the rewards go to those who can manipulate the data and backstab their colleagues. Any conversation you have with someone you can trust they will use it as a weapon against you later on and change your words.