Virtually everything. There was a very detailed article published in August 2015 that accurately describes the work culture. I won't repeat it but I'll highlight some of my own experiences. No work/life balance. Management expected me to consistently work 80 hours per week while dealing with a parent who had cancer. It's a highly disorganized company. It takes a lot of pride in pretending to be a start up but with 150K employees world wide, there needs to be some order. As a result, it's very reactive vs proactive and produces a brutal work culture where most people are paranoid of losing their jobs and habitually throw their colleagues under a bus. Amazon also discriminates against women. I'm a female and I can't count the number of times I've been directly asked a question by male VPs, who then laugh and talk loudly over me while I'm trying to answer. I've gotten to the point where if I shout my answers loudly and long enough, they will stop to listen. However, I then got dinged on my performance review for being too direct with my communication. I was told I needed to put smiley faces in my emails and not be too direct. So you really can't win. No one will listen to you if you are quiet and if you aren't, you are, as a female, considered too forceful. My female colleagues who took maternity leave were working 80+ hours a week as soon as they came back. I could go on and on but, honestly, it would be a repeat of a lot of the other comments on Glassdoor. If you do take a job with Amazon, I hope you don't plan on having children or an ill family member, because you will be expected to work through it all, minimum of 70 hours per week. I also hope you like to be micro-managed. From what I can tell, nearly every manager micro-manages. This is a direct result of Jeff Bezos's micro management and blatant disregard for others. He is involved with every product and teams regularly scramble after "Jeff meetings" and "fire drills". He also posts online videos on Amazon's wiki openly laughing about the fact that his employees could try to tell him "no" but, remember, "he's the boss". In fact, the senior leadership in my org spent a two day retreat entirely on trying to figure out how to tell Jeff B. "no". It's a strange place.
