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Comment by ldjkfkdsjnv | Hacker News Reader

I worked for quite a long time at Amazon. All of the horror stories are true. With tenure, you learn that other tenured employees are the most toxic. The longer someone has lasted at Amazon, the more focussed they are on performance documentation, pushing work onto others, blaming others for project failures, and protecting all of their deliverables. Any sort of innovation or quality of work comes second. This is why the company is stagnating. Many many people sitting in the same organization/same level for a decade.

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Importantly, the Amazonians who follow the toxic promotion path know it is morally wrong. They will tell you and explain to you in a few minutes how it is the only way to operate at Amazon. If you want to be an L8 or higher, then you sacrifice yourself and everyone around you. Source: I work there. Also actively searching for new roles.

I honestly thought I'd gotten away with it. Not being immoral, just working at Amazon. Everyone else I knew who had left Amazon was left with some sort of ex-Amazonian PTSD, constantly worried about falling below a performance threshold and being fired, or struggling to rid themselves of Amazon's toxicity (many of them grew increasingly toxic at Amazon, and left because they didn't like feeling that way).

Now, almost four years after leaving my job at AWS, it's finally catching up with me, too -- I'm finding myself with a growing sense that I'm going to be fired out of the blue. It's only two weeks since I had my mid-year review with my manager, where I was told I'm performing fine; and yet, I'm inexplicably and irrationally worried that he was lying and that I'm going to find myself on whatever our equivalent of a PIP is.

There's a reason I caution young engineers to avoid Amazon. Don't get me wrong, Amazon catapulted me from a my job as a one-man IT department to an incredibly comfortable life as a senior engineer -- but it was the only tech company willing to make me an offer back then. If you have other choices, don't choose Amazon.

This rings true for me as well. What I learned there was invaluable. But I paid for it in other ways.

Wholeheartedly agree. Anyone talking about "most loyal employees" having a "bad taste" from Amazon's latest email and RTO policy enforcement, as if that's supposed to mean something, is very much describing the class of employee your comment addresses.

Honestly this sounds like every other large for-profit (and I wouldn't be surprised if you removed the profit qualification) organization. I can't imagine going back to a large company at this point.

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