My key point here is that Amazon is not a SUSTAINABLE company as it is depleting (not disrupting) the fundamental levers of its business model:
1) It is ERODING PRICES at the expense of its short-term profits and most importantly vendor’s margins. If you are a part of the company, you are also responsible for that consumer paradise bubble. In other words, if you don’t cut down trees in Amazon forest (the one in Latin America), you are still socially responsible.
2) Amazon is DEPLETING TALENT, a key factor to drive company’s success. The retention rate at Amazon is most likely the lowest among all American and global companies. There is no retention policy, well-thought promotion programs, and succession planning. Moreover, the company is constantly hiring people to more senior roles from outside not only to support its double digit growth, but also to close A LOT of vacancies. I witnessed situations when my teammates quietly left on Friday and on Monday we found out that they had quit without saying any word to the rest of the team. It never happened to me at any other company I worked… The key question is when candidates start avoiding Amazon.
The part of talent depletion is also a sexist attitude to women that is actually common among all technology companies. There are very few women in general management roles, including product management. Merchandising/Marketing, HR, design, and administrative assistance are traditional places for relatively few women who work at Amazon. Check it out on Linkedin by typing, for example, “Amazon Marketing”, and compare it with results of “Amazon Product Manager”. I personally joined as Product Manager hoping to develop new innovative products, but for some reason my hiring manager gave me Marketing/Merchandising type of responsibility without any prior consultation with me.
I also felt that if I had children, it would be almost impossible to compete with my teammates, all of whom were married men with housewives taking care of their children. When I started having health issues after all-nighters, 100-hour work week, and stress, I was even punished for taking several hours off to see a doctor/spent time with the 911 team and missing the deadline for submitting a non-critical write-up of a SOP to my manager (same band as me) on Friday night for 15 min (12:15 am instead of 12:00 am)… while being officially on a sick leave... at a hospital. I could not imagine of being a working mother at Amazon and taking time off to attend a school event or staying at home to take care of my kids. It was a definitely the most inhuman, soul crashing experience that I have ever had in my +10 year career.
Depleting talent also means a lack of trained managers. Although there are special trainings for new managers, there is no upward feedback system or evaluation to keep management skills at a certain level. Most of managers hired externally are usually young in their mid, late 20ies or early 30ies, so they don’t come with a lot of management experience. Moreover, the ownership principle relieves manager’s responsibility for subordinate’s failure to some extent, as Amazon’s “ownership” term is individual’s, not team’s attribute.
3) Amazon’s internal operations are INEFFICIENT. The company is well known for counting seconds of associates’ movements and installing cutting edge robots in its warehouses to save pennies, while its internal management reporting system is far behind of company’s current state of development. There are a lot of disintegrated legacy databases and tools that require manual work. Imagine thousands of Amazonians writing the same SQL queries and waiting for hours to get them completed in internal data warehouses, instead of having dashboards with more frequently used queries and preloaded data that is available immediately. The data management system and subsequent decision making are the biggest weakness of Amazon. It is probably why many Amazonians work those crazy hours and where a significant part of Amazon’s profits invisibly drains.
In addition, if you join Amazon, be ready with a lot of manual, routine work regardless of where you are (at a warehouse or at a global headquarters in Seattle) and what level of seniority you are at (associate/analyst or VP).
Finally, Amazon will expect you to have bias for action that is often confused with a lack of prioritization. “Do it now, do it quickly”. As a result, there are less strategic priorities, well thought decisions, and higher probability of mistakes. Those mistakes can be very expensive and they also have a significant indirect impact on the above zero company’s profits.
Finally, Amazon is obsessed with its customers, but it is a one-way street. The company adopted a very reactive approach to communicate with its customers. “We noticed [received one complaint from one single customer] that you overpaid for this item on promotion. Here is your money back”. However, when it comes to testing new product concepts, in other words, to adopt a more proactive communication approach with customers, Amazon fails miserably. It was one of my questions at my job interviews: “How do you test product concepts? Do you run focus groups at all?” I received a negative response. In the best case Amazon runs weblabs to see customers’ reaction to some marketing or merchandising initiatives. However, it does not seem that robust product testing is in place at the ideation stage. The sad stories of Fire Phone and Amazon private-label diapers are good examples to support that observation. Every write-off of such a failed product will have an impact of your illusive long-vesting stock.
To sum up,
1) run away from Amazon if you are working there;
2) reply “Thanks, but no thanks” to your job offer letter or an invitation to a job interview;
3) sleep tight and start imaging a logo of another company on your Linkedin profile, if you are considering to apply to Amazon;
4) spread the word and keep your loved ones away from Amazon so that they can live a happy and long healthy life.
