Amazon reviews

Work from home pay is very low, with no benefits. Most positions are seasonal assignments and you won't know if they will keep you until the end of your assignment, which can range from 3-6 months. Work from home training is short, only two weeks, and then you are basically thrown into the job. Also, Amazon expects you to look for all of your answers independently, so if you are the type of employee who expects a supervisor to give you the answers right away when you ask, this job is not for you. The Team Leads will guide you in the right direction, but they will rarely give you a direct answer, and this can be frustrating in the beginning. Also performance is based on customers responding to a survey and it feels unfair when you work hard to help a customer, only to know they may not respond to the survey at all. Also career path for a work from home employee is not well defined, unclear how to advance in the company in this position.

This review applies to the office in Vancouver, Canada. Unbelievably cheap office, furnished like a sweat-shop, with worse furniture than found in student dorms. It is possible to undergo an ergonomic evaluation and get slightly better furniture, but this generally requires a minimum wait of 2-3 months because expense approvals take forever. In the name of high density, workspaces are packed to the limit, leading to very high noise and distraction, never enough conference rooms, and never enough washrooms. That's right, long waits for washrooms is the norm, and employees are sometimes encouraged to use nearby cafes to attend nature's urgent calls. Developers are forced to write code in slow virtualized environments because the underlying platform is obsolete and no longer supported by current hardware. Development tools are abysmal. There's no on-site recruiter, and near non-existent human resources staff. On-site security consists mainly of a grumpy elderly man who prowls the office and threatens the company's own employees for not wearing their badges visibly enough.