I always heard it was a rough/tough environment to work, long hours and it all comes down on your annual review. Equity is great though.
Roles are for devops, that's what interests me outside a general SDE role.
Yes, the equity is great ... if you survive to collect it. AIUI a larger than normal share of it is deferred, and a lot of people find their work situation getting sharply worse right before the big vesting event. Heard too many of those stories to believe it's coincidence. If collecting lots of equity is your thing, and I don't fault you for that, my impression is that any of the other FAANGs would be better.
You heard all of this at restaurants?
Also: how did I know they were Amazon employees? Well, mostly it was the badges, which they tended to wear even outside the office. Terrible idea actually (at FB we were explicitly told not to do that) but still common. Even without that, it doesn't take too many product/facility names or bits of internal jargon to figure out what company someone works for. I could probably pass as an Amazon or Google employee in many contexts based only on those markers, even though I never worked at either.
> I heard them planning their political moves and their plans to screw partners.
Which you said are restaurant conversations, sounds like pure fiction.
This is subject to empirical proof BTW. Try it. Go to Brave Horse (for example) and sit there through happy hour a few times. Unless you're the sort of person who's totally oblivious to their surroundings, you can hardly help but overhear all sorts of inappropriate work conversations. Don't accuse people of fictionalizing just because you personally haven't experienced what they have (or because it conflicts with what you would prefer to believe / have others believe). It's a noxious habit.
I hear MS also has a very toxic environment but I have no close friends who work there.
But I'll hedge just a little and say "never say never." If I were unemployed and destitute and desperate for any job in order to pay the rent and buy food, I'd probably do it. But that's a pretty extreme case...
If your alternatives are working for companies that nobody has ever heard of making less money than Amazon would pay, then yeah I'd jump at the opportunity to work for Amazon. You'll learn a lot and improve your resume, even if it doesn't end up being a long-term fit for you.
The amount I see their people having to work, and even how their leadership treats them (with me present) makes me never want to work there.
I have friends who are total workaholics, and they love it there.
If you love to work to live, skip it. If you love to live to work, you'll probably succeed.
Just do your homework and know what you're going into with eyes open.
Is the equity still backloaded for the last two vesting years? Ask why.
https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/aws-compensation-explaine...
Look at the culture. Yes there is bad press about work-life balance issues and bad management, but you'll find that at some extent in any large company. Go deeper and look at the values.
Amazon is quite public about their values system, and there's lots more from current and former employees. Read about their values and how they put them into practice. For all the criticism I have for Amazon, they do have a strong culture, and that's both impressive at their and likely very beneficial.
If you fit their values (and don't mind the morals) then you'll fit in well, even if it's hard work. If you don't fit with their values, you'll hate it. Thankfully they are strong and clear enough about their values that figuring this out in advance is pretty easy.
A big reason not to work for Amazon is that they make their employees sign non-competes. Thankfully those are unenforceable in California, but I still find it a reprehensible practice, even if it wouldn't apply to me. It's shitty when it's enforced (and they have done that), but it's still shitty even when it's not as it creates a chilling effect. Even the threat of enforcing a non-compete (even if that threat is 100% implied) is enough to hurt post-Amazon employment opportunities. I don't want to support that.
There's also being associated with their warehouse conditions and low pay (relative to similar companies), but others have covered that elsewhere.
That's not all, though. It's only a matter of time (how long? that's up for debate) until antitrust - be it real action, or merely the rumored specter thereof - results in some degree of upheaval internally. While I admit this is purely theoretical at the moment, it's certainly not outside the realm of reason to have concerns that said equity may wind up severely reduced in value if you get screwed by the timing of getting that equity vs. antitrust related events.
If I were in your shoes, unless I had no job at all and was desperate for the very first thing that came along, I'd give Amazon a hard pass for every possible role, bar none.
There's degrees here, and Amazon treats vulnerable people with a very high degree of hostility and abuse. That fact alone tells me everything I need to know about the people running that organization. They're not about mutual benefit - the real reason for capitalism - they're about exploitation, and they'll do it to anyone and everyone they can as long as they can get away with it.
Besides, you ever bought computer part, chip, etc. that was made entirely ethically in a first-world country paying good wages to skilled labor with rights, benefits, pensions, healthcare and so on, where the company and all its officers were entirely free of moral flaws? No you haven't, you know why? Because there aren't any and there never have been.
So compounding your error in logic here is the inescapable fact that no alternatives exist, which just further demonstrates the impotence of your combative argument and intent.
AWS? If I wasn't running Tarsnap, I would probably be working for them now.
BUT... what I gained from that experience has been valuable in many different ways. Having a recognizable name on your resume is big advantage for one. You'll also get a taste of what a high-stress environment is like and how to avoid it later in your career. You'll start seeing red flags at other companies and anticipate critical problems before your other colleagues can. It was always amusing to see my colleagues label me as "paranoid" when I said "layoffs are coming"; I'd find another opportunity and these poor saps would get blind-sided by the eventual layoffs. You'll know what it's like to be virtually on-call 24/7/365 and the stupidities that come with that.
The advice I would give others around this question is: If you're starting your career, I say go for it. If you're a senior engineer, I would say avoid at all costs.
Like any large company it will vary by team, but I wouldn't dismiss them up front.
So yes, I’d use them. Why is Amazon not even trying to manage their reputation on this front?
Then there’s what they’re doing to commerce, they’re Walmart 2.0. Slowly and methodically choking the life out of every other retailer.
Finally there is Bezos, who whilst not running the show anymore is an incredibly unsettling and dislikable ‘human’.
I recently went through the interview process for a AWS security engineer position and made it through the final round although I was ultimately rejected.
The final 4-5 consecutive interview gauntlet was strange. It was 50% behavioral and seemed SUPER corporate. I was expecting tough technical questions and prepared as such.
I received precisely ZERO feedback, and was told it was corporate policy. Then they turned around and asked for feedback on their interview process. Ridiculous.
The work environment seems extremely unpleasant. Long hours and high stress is how its been described to me by colleagues who work there.
Having said that, I've talked to them twice - once as a general applicant and once as a high level referral for a high level role - and both times the experience was unpleasant (to put it kindly) and ended rather abruptly. I would not apply on my own to any job and would only consider something if I can actually skip their standard process.
Their problem from an outsider's perspective is that the recruiters have to achieve a high volume of inbounds in order to throw them into the interviewing machine such that they can hit their quotas after the machine chews up and discards the people who can't survive their very specific process.
If you don't think you're part of the 6%... I've also had LinkedIn messages from someone who directly works for them, so it feels their approach is quite shotgun, i.e. just hire anyone and if it doesn't work out, that person can be part of the quota.
(It's different to other companies that know training someone to let them go soon after is costly.)
Exhibit A: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/06/15/us/amazon-wor...
Exhibit B: https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I do not shop from Amazon either for similar reasons, nor Whole Foods, and I also don't buy from Walmart, same reason.
I don't see them as substantially different from any other FAANG level company though.
Their recruiters contact me every year or two, and I turn them down when they do. From what I can tell, nothing has changed there, and nothing will until they run out of people to burn through. (See: their policy on marijuana.) Earlier this year, one of their drivers left a bottle of waste on the street in front of my neighbor's house. Why would I want to work for a company that does not give their workers the basic dignity of being able to use the restroom when they need to?
They have a large number of employees now, so they must have found alignment with them.
Also, the messages I get just seem like they're spamming everyone so they can cast the biggest net. I dont take them seriously.
I prefer to think of them as a fallback plan. They hire loosely and fire fast, which is a fine compromise if you _need_ work. But at this point in my career, early retirement is also a fallback plan. A few more years with $curr_emp and even fatFIRE is possible.
That's going to be a no for me dog
https://www.teamblind.com/company/Amazon/
(ex-Amazon)
I feel that, once there, I could make a meaningful change to improve the culture, while maintaining the share price trajectory.
If only recruiters / hiring managers liked hearing that :)
As a user, I have observed product searching and sorting to remain in a nigh-unusable state for decades now. I cannot fathom how such a state could be permitted to persist in any well-managed development team.
As a laborer, I have followed journalism covering treatment of workers, both in warehouses and on delivery routes. This led me to classify Amazon as a sociopathic corporation.
As a software professional, I have been repeatedly pinged by recruiters who seem to have no awareness of my value, or how much of my time Amazon's hiring process proposes to waste. And reports of working conditions seem strongly dependent on a random (to me) assignment to a specific team. Turnover and retention varies wildly.
If money is the most important thing you care about then maybe MANGA is great. But money is pretty easy to make these days.
However, there is one (unrealistic) circumstance in which I would accept a job at even the worst company. That is the scenario in which I am hired into a position that comes with enough decision making power to undo the evil.
TL;DR: I will work for Amazon if they're making me the CEO.