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This isn't all. Sometimes, even when you're not a _fire-worthy employee_ (for lack of a better term), just to fuck you up, the manager could choose to mark you as "least effective" in the year-end / mid-year review and not really put you up for a PIP... Now... even though you performed good enough, there's no jury to appeal to. What happens next is that the manager could then systematically deprive you of quality work and come year-end / mid-year review, s/he has a solid case to PIP you and throw you out. Note that, being marked "least effective" essentially means that one can't transfer internally to other teams unless someone wayy higher up the management chain approves of the transfer.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't see this seemingly happen with multiple people across multiple Amazon development centers.

This place is toxic and puts way too much power in the hands of the managers, and the net result is that the managers have their favourites, and that the engineers are nothing but puppets, and that engineers are busy back-biting each other, and the managers enjoy the shit show from the sidelines. Despite not having any moral high-ground, all managers in an org review every reportee in that org with absolutely zero fairness, there's no integrity whatsoever, from what I've heard.

And I'd be lying if I said this _thinking_ didn't take it roots right at the very top of the management hierarchy (...according to employees I've spoken to).

>Note that, being marked "least effective" essentially means that one can't transfer internally to other teams unless someone wayy higher up the management chain approves of the transfer.

What a hilariously counterproductive policy, obviously people that just barely exceed the incompetent-enough-to-fire low water mark are going to be given glowing reviews, then pawned off on some other team.

Why do you stay?

> I'd be lying if I said I didn't see this seemingly happen with multiple people across multiple Amazon development centers.

I've asked this question to multiple Amazonians who have worked there for 4 years or more, and I've yet to hear a decent answer. There are many companies that have sub-40hr work weeks that will pay you as much as Amazon (plus stock grants), but yet most won't make the time for an interview.

All the people I know at Amazon in Seattle consistently get home after 7pm most nights, and a handful of those people come in on the weekends for 10 to 12hrs to fix mundane bugs that aren't in need of immediate fixing. Amazon's high pressure work culture encourages this terrible practice of burning the candle from both ends, but Amazon definitely doesn't create quality products on the first try in part due to this.

I've noticed across education and work systems, there are some areas that have an extremely high barrier to entry, and treat you well if you make it, and others where the barrier to entry isn't as high, and getting in doesn't mean you've made it.

I've always had an atypical (read: not traditionally competitive) background, both for schools and jobs. As a result, I've found universities and firms that are willing to take a chance on me the best. They are great for me because the tacit agreement is "I know I don't meet the traditional standards, but I'll work hard to prove I'm worth it. And if I'm not, I know you'll fire me." No one ever says it, but it's the strategic system that underlies this.

In short, Amazon offered me a job and a salary no other tech company would have. Not even close. I've had to work nights and weekends not on Amazon, but just on teaching myself the tech to do my job (I'm a data scientist who could barely code when I started). And I'm not doing bad. I'm not a genius, but I'm valuable enough. Once I get all my stock and a promotion, I might look at a 40-hour type company. On the other hand, my team is pretty fun, so I don't know.

>All the people I know at Amazon in Seattle consistently get home after 7pm most nights, and a handful of those people come in on the weekends for 10 to 12hrs to fix mundane bugs that aren't in need of immediate fixing.

I can't speak on everyone at the company, but the campus is basically empty at the times I leave at 7-8 (which isn't often and usually happens when I show up at 11-12). My own building is 95% cleared out by 6pm on a daily basis.

Not saying what you hear isn't true, but it's definitely appears to be the exception rather than the rule from my experience.

Payments and Alexa don't appear to be that way from what I've seen.

This isn't a great answer, but especially in tech, the barrier of finding another job (i.e. the interview process) is so high, that it's not worth the additional stress + time commitment to really look for place that has equivalent pay.

When your stressed out by work, interviewing just piles on the stress and can decrease performance.

I've been a developer at Amazon for about 3 years, and I've stayed for the following reasons:

- Reasonable work-life balance. In my 3 years here, there have only been a few "crunch times" the whole team has had to work weekends. We viewed it as a failure in planning and conducted a post-mortem to understand what went wrong.

- Nice people. Honestly, I've never experienced poor treatment like that which was highlighted in this article and the NYT exposé. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but in my experience, Amazon has no singular culture. It's more like a federation of start-ups with distinct cultures; if one team isn't a good fit for you, it's pretty easy to switch.

- Competitive pay. This is partly due to timing (the coincidental soaring of the stock price when I joined), but in general, my experience has been that Amazon offers strong stock compensation.

- Fascinating, hard problems. Pick _any_ specialty within software engineering or data science, and there's a team within Amazon at the forefront. I'm always learning, and I never feel like the smartest guy in a room. I get to work on "moonshot" projects that few other companies would have the resources to finance or the risk tolerance to stomach.

I'm not writing this comment to brag or imply my experience is representative of everyone at Amazon. This is just one perspective to even out the chorus of voicing saying it's a terrible place to work. In my experience, it's the polar opposite.

I don't see how this is relevant to the article or the parrent comment. You are just hijacking a popular thread to plug a praise for your employer.

All the things he said are pretty cookie cutter responses you'll hear echoed time and time again from Amazonians. They aren't original thoughts, and I wouldn't expect that this poster would respond 100% honestly if he did have concerns about his job as his profile easily links him to a real id, and Amazon doesn't take kindly to criticisms from NDA'd employees. For more context there's usually a training involved to be able to post online about Amazon, and it is explicit in not voicing criticisms.

I work for Amazon, but I don't speak on behalf of Amazon. The social media policy boils down to mostly common sense, don't share confidential information and make it clear you're not speaking for Amazon. No where does it say don't criticize Amazon. Be respectful of each other, our customers, partners, and others (including our competitors). You can criticize with out being disrespectful.

Maybe they're cookie-cutter because they're true.

Amazon is not for everybody, and not everyone figures out how to identify bad teams and avoid them, and they have a bad time.

But if you have decent EQ, some backbone, and good technical skills, you can work on solving really hard problems with awesome peers that disproportionately do the right thing without being asked (because we cluster together).

>> Why do you stay?

> I've stayed for the following reasons:

The parent puts the question before the quote so that might be a bit confusing

One of the biggest problems at Amazon is the lack of accountability for managers. Someone who consistently works their direct reports 60 hours/week but meets deadlines has no incentivize to change. 4 years later, everyone has quit and there's a mountain of tech debt. This becomes the next manager's problem, who is likely more clueless than his/her predecessor.

> It's hard to see why expecting managers to be "more just" is any more reasonable.

The purpose of the stated policy isn't to be "more just" it's to ensure management can control the outcome.

Corporations are anti-democratic by design so having a show trial is something to expect.

Although this seems like a reasonable idea at first, in fact, rule of law and effective courts preceded representative democracy in Europe by several hundred years.

One reason for this is that the big thief at the top -- the king -- benefitted by limiting the take of all the intermediary little thieves. The other reason is that the king had more to tax when the commercial sector was bustling and efficient -- but this meant contracts needed to be honored and private property respected.

Would Bezos benefit from justice at the level of rank and file management? Even if all that resulted was higher retention, then yes. Justice and rule of law doesn't have to extend to every level of an organization to make a difference.

This is something. For a country where certain elements have even called for "bringing democracy" to other countries at the worst or at least being a shining city on the hill at best, the one place democracy has not taken root is where its own people spend most of their life: in the workplace.

If Karl Marx (democracy absolutist) could have you take one thing from his work, it would be your observation. Of course, before the US decided it were the home of democracy, Europe actually was. Marx devoted his life to understanding the challenge of crossing the threshold of the workplace. For everyone interested, I recommend Capital: Volume I.

you can already do this - start a co-operative.

> Since the employee is being fired (deprived of something)

Well, the employee is depriving the employer of something as well. That's why they are in this arrangement: they believe it to be mutually beneficial, and thus agree to deprive themselves of something good, in exchange for something better. The problem this system seems to attempt to solve is where the employer is not aware of what they're getting in return for being deprived of that employee's compensation.

> Well, the employee is depriving the employer of something as well.

Given that the employer is trying to get rid of the employee, this assertion seems questionable.

The whole premise of "right to work" is questionable because the employer and the employee are not equals. All else being equal, the employer has a big upper hand in any negotiation.

The sense in which I meant it was: in the course of a termination, the employee is being deprived, by another person, of something. The latter person sets in motion the process. That's one way to figure out who is the accuser and who is the accused, because in the framework of the law, we are not to deprive another person of rights or possessions without demonstrating they have done wrong.

>because in the framework of the law, we are not to deprive another person of rights or possessions without demonstrating they have done wrong.

Employment is not a right, and a job not the possession of the employee (it's rather the other way around,) and employers in the US can in most cases terminate an employee without demonstrating any cause at all. This isn't a "real" court and jury system, so the rules of that framework don't actually matter here.

The purpose of this is not to find fact and arbitrate fairly, it's to discourage employees from engaging in lawsuits against Amazon.

> Employment is not a right,

Article 23.

(1) Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.

(2) Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.

(3) Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.

(4) Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Fair enough. Employment at any specific business is not a right.

One could use the more generic term "stuff" instead, in this case, because the key thing is, someone wants to deprive someone of something, using a judicial process. (If they didn't want to use a judicial process, it would be different, but Amazon is choosing to use one here.)

> because in the framework of the law, we are not to deprive another person of rights or possessions without demonstrating they have done wrong.

Does the employee have a right to unconditionally (employment law and preexisting agreements notwithstanding) continue depriving the employer of his compensation? That seems, to me, completely unjust. Not only is this unjust to employers, but it is hostile to prospective employees as well: How many companies that you've worked for would hire you if they knew they could never let you go? How many of them would avoid giving raises because they would be expected to continue that scale of compensation until you're dead?

One doesn't have a right to unconditionally do anything; and in this case it is governed by contract. Generally contracts are void if one or the other party fails to deliver.

In this case, Amazon has chosen to implement something modeled on a judicial process, and that's where it's relevant to talk about burden of proof and who is depriving whom of what.

> the employer is not aware of what they're getting in return for being deprived of that employee's compensation.

This would make sense except this article suggests that employees are not given a proper chance to actually present what they do give in return. Rather they spend the whole process defending accusations from their manager.

> She wasn’t invited to watch her boss’s presentation, and he got the last word.

In court, the accused does not get kicked out whenever the accuser is speaking. They should at least have the right to hear what is being said about them and be given the same time to both give a rebuttal and present their achievements and contributions.