Amazon reviews

Job Description : The job is named as ‘cloud support engineer’ which should be named as ‘cloud customer support engineer’ as the job involves in providing support by taking customer calls and customer chat requests and handover the customer requests to backend support operations team. A simple no brainer handoff is sufficient rather than working on the issue itself. Recruitment process / Job Interview : A typical telephone screening involved in asking questions about all possible things that are not at all related to the job itself. One same question is ‘what is a multi-threaded processor?’ and I was not sure whether I was interviewed for an IT job or for a VLSA job?. There is no syllabus for this telephone screening and they could ask anything that pops up in their mind. After the successful telephone screening, you will receive an invitation for face-to-face interview which is a 6 hour long exhaustive and torturous interviews involving questions about all HR related stuff rather then subject matter expert questions. All the interviewers are nice and behave well so that they try their best to boast about the company, work culture, technology etc… and they make sure that the victim is ready to sacrifice himself after taking the job. Compensation: The compensation is not that great when compared to the existing market conditions and Amazon tries to lure the victim in the name of fancy sing-on bonus and employee stock options. Please remember that this is the last time that you will have a chance to negotiate about your salary as once you are in, they know how say no to your repeated requests about your pay reviews in the name of low customer ratings. Training : This is the first step in to the hell is going through the training which is generally taught by the existing guys inside various teams and unfortunately most of them does not have proper education background to teach the stuff and are also forced by the management to train people (if you don’t train, you can’t even show your face to the management while requesting for a pay hike at the end of the fiscal year). As a result the training multiplies your anxiety and you will have sleepless nights with weird dreams about various training sessions that are not organized well and also during the training they clearly inform you that you might need to provide support in case if there are nobody around. As an experienced IT guy, one will definitely think whether it is really possible to support Networking, Storage, CDN, ELB, RDS, EC2 with just 20 mins of Video training and an hour of worthless talk? If it is really possible then it will be easy for a person to come up with another Public Cloud Service like AWS in a matter of days, lol.. The trainings are not well organized and often the advanced stuff is taught before the beginner and intermediate stuff causing lot of anxiety and bad feeling about the job. It is real easy to get demotivated during the training phase itself because of lot of unnecessary information flow and also the trainings are scheduled around lunch time and they don’t even care about your lunch time instead they rudely tell you to take the pain of having lunch during training which does not allow you to concentrate well on training. As a whole the HR, Training people and the immediate manager start showing their autocracy form day one of training itself and expect that it is going to be multiplied with the time. Nature of the job : This job is meant for fresh out of the college guys and people having 1 to 2 years of experience, but not for the one who has proven experience in the field for more than 5 years. The job involves in taking customer calls and chat requests and do some sugar coating while responding back to the customer. Please do remember that if you are not a native english language speaker or do not have prior call center experience, the chances of burning your hands or pretty high. The job security purely relies on customer ratings but not on how effective and studious you are in providing the support to the customer. If the customer is pissed off with Amazon, then the only way to vent his/her frustration is by awarding a single star for you which will screw your job security by big time. Also most of the end customers are from SMBs and 90% of the time they don’t have good knowledge about the IT concepts and thus you are expected to take a tutorial class for them about computer science 101. Often the customers expectations are really high even though they are paying minuscule amounts and expecting for a lexus quality and experience. There are not enough people in the support team and thus the calls / chat requests are piled up causing huge delays and the customers are irritated and end up giving negative ratings on the customer reps which are working hard to provide support at their best. Also one should have good english literature writing experience to shine at this job because that would help a lot in providing feedback to the customer in an obscure way to avoid negative ratings. Intact I came across a guy in database profile who is really good at this and he always concentrates on language rather than presenting the facts to the customer. PLEASE DO NOT EXPECT ANY HANDS ON EXPERIENCE IN THIS JOB and YOU ARE SUPPORTING a PUBLIC CLOUD PRODUCT(s) THAT IS USED BY ONLY SOME PEOPLE IN THE MARKET and thus ONCE YOU LEAVE THIS PLACE, THE CHANCES OF GETTING ANOTHER JOB (mostly hands-on in nature in present day market) is nearly IMPOSSIBLE. Work environment : This is the worst work environment I ever came across during my 10+ years of IT experience. It is a poisonous pit and I have not even seen a smiling face on the floor as every one is tensed and pissed off with customer support calls. This is a typical call center environment and often your immediate manager talks about amount the cases and customer ratings and even the all hands meetings are also like this. You will be surrounded by a bunch of people wearing headsets and taking to the customer and if you are not accustomed to call center environment before, you would feel quite demotivated. The telephone calls are often lengthy mixed with various emotions and it is not strange to hear your colleague banging the headset with lot of frustration and despair using ‘f’ and ‘d’ words after an exhaustive customer call. You are surrounded by constant chatter and noise and this is not the better place for the people with heavy migraine. You are expected to work on Sundays and also during long weekends making it really hard to balance work and personal life balance. In fact there is ZERO work to personal life balance. If you are married and with kids, then this is not a better job for you as you don’t have time for your spouse and kid to take care of their needs. In a typical corporate company, one can expect at least 9 - 10 company holidays where as in this company you get only 5 - 6 holidays and even during that time you are expected to work based on necessity. Management : You can come across the worst managers in your life at this place. Some of the mangers started their life in one of the fulfillment centers and subsequently transferred to mange the IT professionals. Unfortunately they try to exercise the similar management practices that were used during their tenure at fulfillment center. They don’t know how to respect and motivate a resource. They are always skeptical about a resource and try to micro-manage by exercising excessive control over resources which results in negativity and demotivation. It seems that the HR and top management is aware of the situation and in turn nurture weird management practices. An experienced IT professional with proven track record does not need forceful motivation from his manager in the name of yelling and showing bad gestures. I came across a manager whose slogans are “you are sleeping”, “you spent 15 minutes in the break room on so and so day”, “your lunch breaks are so and so minutes on so and so day” etc…. Unfortunately the list is endless. But still I see that guy is considered as a good manager even after repeated complains to HR. As a whole the environment is NEGATIVE, REMORSEFUL, HORRIFYING, and REMORSEFUL. If you are moving to Amazon from a good company where people are very optimistic, happy and enthusiastic then this is not the place to continue your career. Career advancement : AWS is NOT an UNIVERSAL technology and is used by few SMBs in the vast IT market which forced you to limit your skill set rather than expanding. Also the immediate managers are really worst and they won’t even guide you or pay attention to your career advancement. PLEASE DO NOT EXPECT ANY HANDS ON EXPERIENCE IN THIS JOB and YOU ARE SUPPORTING a PUBLIC CLOUD PRODUCT(s) THAT IS USED BY ONLY SOME PEOPLE IN THE MARKET and thus ONCE YOU LEAVE THIS PLACE, THE CHANCES OF GETTING ANOTHER JOB (mostly hands-on in nature in present day market) is nearly IMPOSSIBLE.