Amazon reviews

Poor direction from senior management who couldn't decide what they wanted. Bureaucracy. Oh, the bureaucracy. Politics. Woe betide you if you worked in a group or on a project that senior management didn't find sexy. Churn. Despite intensive recruiting, people left faster than they could be replaced. The hiring bar was rightly high, but there were too many ways to fail the interview for spurious and/or arbitrary reasons. The recruitment process may work better in Seattle where Amazon is one of the biggest names in town, but the competition for developers in London is too intense. There are other prestige tech giants, there are big media companies, there are startups, there are banks with deep pockets. In this environment, Amazon can't turn down good people and meet its hiring needs (and indeed, they had to import lots of staff from Seattle to keep the office afloat). On-call. Being woken up in the middle of the night got very old after a while. And finally, the kicker: work-life balance. The company pretty much destroyed a few of my colleagues. Amazon are very good at using guilt to get people to work all the hours God sends, for no particular reward. At the end of one spectacularly hellish project, everyone got -- a T-shirt. Not the best way to make your employees feel valued.

Unfortunately, even though I was paid more than what my position usually commands (a red flag right there I should have noticed), it just wasn't worth it. There are a *lot* of reasons I'd recommend not working here; but the two that stand out are the culture and the hours. You will work a lot of hours in whatever dept. you're in, almost without exception. But the real overriding factor in everything that makes it such a horrible place to work - the one that all the other issues grow from - is its culture. Here's the long and short of it: front-line and middle managers here are really the 'bottom of the barrel' types. No self-respecting manager would try to manage any team in this environment (unless they didn't know anything about it when they were hired - ahem!), and that's because of one corporate-mandated policy that destroys any possibility of teamwork: Top Grading. Let me explain... Top Grading sounds like a good idea when you only look at the 'top' part. What that means is the top 10% of performers on each team get the bulk (or all) of the raises for that team that year. This happens every year (depending on your dept., anywhere from Feb.-May), and is something so pervasive in the company that you really do risk your job if you try to stand up against it (pretty much Bezos's idea - so if your chain answers up to a Sr. VP that answers to him, it's gonna happen). But why stand against it? Well, let's say you have a great team, and everyone's pulling their weight. The problem with this policy is, it also includes what some have called Bottom Grading - appropriately named, as it spells out the rest of the truth of the happily named Top Grading. The full truth is, you have to get rid of the bottom 10% of your team every year - period, end of story, no arguments. Basically, Amazon's 'high bar' with 'bar raisers' in interview loops comes down to little more than an inflexible ideology. So just try and make a team in that kind of environment! Even just trying to be part of one is horrific; after all, you could be next. It's either you or someone else on your team - probably a couple or more. And this includes managers and directors. I'm betting you can guess the result: a highly politicized environment, where everyone's going for the immediate win and doing their best to suck up to their boss at every moment, as once you're clued in, you realize your manager's or director's hands are tied. You walk on glass, and try not to *ever* cross them or give them a reason to put your name in the bottom 10%. So that's it, in a nutshell - ideology 'tinkled down' from above loses to allowing managers to manage their own teams independently. Which pretty much explains why no competent managers would stay there, and why I left. And also why their attrition rate is horrible - 10% must go, combined with no healthy team dynamics whatsoever. It's just a real disaster over there.