I do something like this as a first pass, but prune based on Values. I wouldn’t ever consider Amazon… but at $1MM… that’s kinda “change your values” type money.
I guess then, yes. My ethics are flexible, depending. I have also followed the two second rule, even though I find eating food off of the floor abhorrent =(
Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.
Last I heard, he was giving middle managers a hard time for perpetuating the sorts of bad behaviors that give Amazon its bad reputation as an employer.
Maybe Amazon is a lost cause, maybe it isn't, but you won't know if you can fix it unless you try. </two-cents>
[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/
But it’s important to remember that there are a ton of extremely happy people at Amazon (or at least AWS, where I worked) they just aren’t as vocal online - management, scope and culture were incredible in my experience (it’s a huge company where managers have a lot of flexibility, YMMV). And some of the biggest day-to-day issues you hear about like crappy offices or excessive frugality were a thing of the past when I was there. And in terms of PIP, I only had one experience with it - having a mechanism for identifying and getting rid of the people who are a drain on everyone else was very nice.
I did ask every person I met "How many hours, on average, do you work in a week?"
Ever single person gave me a non-answer that tried to change the topic. My favorite response to the question was "We are super flexible on where you work, like sometimes I like to work from a cafe". If that had been the only person I asked, I might have thought he misheard me. Since a pattern had been established at this point, I just moved on.
I know every team in a big company is going to be different, but my experience is that they churn and burn fresh coders and let the more ruthless, politic-y type rise up.
I went through the loop and made it to final round, despite my reservations just to see what it would be like. Of the 6 people I spoke to, I only had 1 positive experience. Everyone else was either being aggressive for no reason, or they were regurgitating words and had no value in the org. Hell, the “bar raiser” was the worst and asked follow up questions that were answered in the questions prior. On the design interview, another interviewer bragged about winning some AI award and was adamant that Kafka was the optimal solution for real-time doc editing- not my proposed web sockets… he was just downright rude about it.
Anyway, Amazon sucks for many reasons, but the biggest reason is that they are so successful brainwashing people inside and outside. You can see their success in all this by observing how quick we forget that their policies force employees to piss in bottles, die working in a tornado, and unethically hold a beauty contest to siphon tax payer dollars from the lowest bidder
Asking questions for follow up meant you were missing some core piece of the ‘Amazonian’ way of tackling the problem.
Not being able to take the hints or criticism and thinking about it for years is probably evidence that Amazon would not have been a good place for you. That’s not always a bad thing.
The ability to fit in isn’t rigid. Many people don’t examine data, the impact to their customers, or actually explore a problem. Hearing people’s work history is often a series of assumptions made with little to no care for alternatives.