Horrible place to work if you’re already established in your career, have a family, or enjoy unplugging from work long enough to enjoy your evenings, weekends, holidays or vacations. Amazon is not a family friendly company, despite what they say to the contrary. You’re penalized for working from home even if there is a legitimate reason even if you’re more productive there than at the office.
Amazon also holds onto the delusion that they are a start-up going after the big players in the market. They’re not. They are a mature “big player” company pretending to be start-up. All of the tools and data are home-grown; that translates into lots of bugs, inconsistent data, lack of a clear owner or desire by owners to maintain or fix their software/data, and catalog data that is lacking on details or consistency. This last point is important. If you’re the kind of person that loves making up data to suit your hypothesis, this is the place for you. If, however, you’re bugged by the inconsistencies you see from the same data sets but with different interpretations, you will be plagued with indecision and lack of confidence on a daily basis.
Be prepared during your tenure to have your self-confidence and self-esteem battered on a daily basis. The position you’re applying for now will not be the same one you’ll be performing on a daily basis. You will be doing menial tasks daily, predominantly data entry, data validation, report generation and ticket resolution (and that’s if you’re a business owner like a vendor manager or product manager). In any given week, you’ll have about 8 hours total that you’ll be able to devote to your actual job, though you can easily do 40 hours a week if you work evenings and weekends.
Amazon’s strategy for attracting the best and the brightest is to hire in the cream of the crop from colleges around the country, suck the creative juices and ideas out of their employees, then toss them aside with no clear path to career succession while they go ply the universities for other unsuspecting candidates. Their restricted stock plan is designed in such a way that you get trivially small amounts of stock in your first two years before it balloons for another two years. They do this because most people that go to Amazon leave or get fired between the first and second year.
Competition is fierce at Amazon. Not just between Amazon and the outside world, or between the various Amazon teams, but within your own team. You will be forced to compete in terms of your effectiveness or production rate with your co-workers and you will be publically called out for not achieving arbitrary goals. The definition of “productive” is also a very arbitrary term at Amazon. You can have someone that does the bare minimum, who gets others to fix the problems they cause and who claim credit for work others did get called an “effective leader” and get promoted. You also get folks that work hard, long hours, usually 10 or 12 hours a day, late into the night, on weekends and holidays, who don’t take vacation, who then get fired within their first year because they weren’t “productive” enough.
Amazon is highly fractured internally, with each group given a set of goals to achieve that are not aligned at the corporate level. The result is that you have groups duplicating the work of others, building solutions that solve their immediate need but create more work or disrupt business processes for others, and management groups often make poor business decisions because the mid-tier managers tend to only talk about the wins, not about the blockers or issues. Amazon, as a whole, is highly dis-functional whose mandate of becoming the largest online seller of “stuff” in the world has certainly made them successful externally, but has created a huge list of issues and process misses internally. Unless major amounts of resources are devoted to resolving the business processes and data integrity issues within the next few years, Amazon will see an increase in employee satisfaction, and higher costs of doing business (due to hiring in people to maintain antiquated data schemas and coding band-aid solutions rather than scraping the entire system for something much more scalable and less prone to bug defects).
If you do get hired, you will have a significant ramp-up period on the order of six to nine months. Nothing is well documented at Amazon, despite their assertion that the Wiki has the information you need (which was true when they created the page two years ago but doesn’t reflect the actual state of affairs today), so you will have to train yourself on how to use the tools or from your co-workers if you’re lucky enough they can pull themselves away from their data processing long enough to help you.
