Amazon recruits heavily along fresh CS grads, so there's always more flesh for the fire.
As an intern, I worked on a team that was rapidly spinning apart. We were resource constrained, one of the team members was in Ireland (and he always seemed to need help from somebody else on the team), and the manager... I don't even know.
The first day I was there, he told me to write a tech spec for a new version of one of the team's projects. The examples he showed me were all pithy high-level algorithm overviews for small features, which had 0 relevance to my project. I spent a week and a half groping in the dark for what he wanted.
About 4-5 weeks in to the internship, I asked him how he thought I was doing. He told me to think about the Amazon leadership principals and to tell him how I thought I was doing next week during the one on one. What kind of manager doesn't give feedback, even when the employee asks directly?
The business owner was a tall guy with slicked-back hair. I was supposed to meet with him in the first week. He blew off four meetings with me over the first month before I stopped trying to schedule them. When he finally deigned to meet with me (7 weeks in), it was to tell me he wanted a feature that not only didn't exist, but was so far away from what was possible that I didn't even know what to make of it. He would also do this shit where he would try to take other people's food, which seemed to me like an aggressive display of dominance.
My mentor, a senior engineer, was the only one who was really helpful. It was he who read my code reviews, he who told me that he was impressed with how quickly I had learned the framework, and he who was actually setting goals for me that made sense. He said he had my back for the hiring meeting, which put me at ease.
I didn't end up getting hired. I read and reread the feedback document I got, trying to make sense of what had happened. I hit all of my deliverable dates, I know my code was clear and concise, I went to the social events and talked to people from all over the org... What could I have done better?
The answer I've arrived at is I should have sucked up. I should have tried to identify the people with real power, and done my best to make them happy. The business owner was in the hiring meeting, and if I had gotten him on my side, I could have written 12 loc total and still gotten a job. Amazon had been pretending to the new hires and interns that there wasn't any office politics, but I've never worked anywhere more political.
A friend of mine from university got a job in a different org inside of Amazon, and he told me that he looked at my employee feedback on the internal website and said that it didn't say anything concrete about why I hadn't hired, just stuff like "obviously skilled, but not a good fit." Maybe that's the truth. I've just started working for a company whose namesake was just nominated for CEO of the year, and I already feel more at home there than I ever did at Amazon.