Amazon is big on its culture. It has set of Leadership principles that every employee is asked to follow
and measured against during performance review. Amazon stresses on taking data driven decisions.
Engineers are given more value than their Managers, because companies strength is its engineers. Performance is based on 360 degrees feedback where engineers give skip level feedback about their managers.
Although above three principles are great, the problem comes in applying these leadership principles and priorities in Indian culture where engineers are not matured, professional or honest compared to US.
Here are the few issues that I have observed.
1. Engineers are mostly fresh out of college, don't have any maturity. But they are given power
to judge whether their manager is good or not.
2. There is a lot of bias and favoritism. Agarwals, Guptas, people from Delihi dominate the company.
3. Yearly reviews are a circus. They make their decision first and then use data to either to ding you or promote you. They make the decision based on other reasons and then make up the data to support it.
4. Quality of work is not great either. Everything is automated. Most of the juicy work is done in Seattle. Your work mostly involves using the tools and frameworks developed in Seattle. Work involves mostly modifying UI widgets and some minor changes in existing services. Nothing to be really proud of.
5. Lots of overhead for managers. You need to spend most of your time "pampering' engineers.
6. If you rate some one in your team as a low performer, team can gang up against you and give you bad rating in 360 review.
