Looked him up on LinkedIn 6 years later, and he was back at Amazon.
Some people are repulsed by that, others drawn to it and some thrive under these conditions. Heck, I really enjoy my life and job after Amazon. And still I miss the speed, the fast feedback on decisions and actions, the laser focused pursuit of a common goal, ruthlessly focused on efficiency, risk and details. Thought about going back there myself, lucky I didn't. Propably wouod have been equally lucky if I did.
Amazon is a peculiar place.
Something else I learned the very hard way: what constitutes a good or bad leader, or employee, is nost of the time highly subjective.
That being said, realizing Amazon is not a place for you before joining is the best thing you can do. I have seen my fair share of people that realized after being hired, and for them the place was hell. Careerwise, and I explicity talk about white collar folks, Amazon had no negative impact on them. But going through personell hell 50+ hours a week for months until ypu found something else or you are let go during probation is torture. I know, I had the same thing after Amazon once, it sucks and drains you dry.
for myself, and the organizations i worked for, it was about results. these leaders swooped in from other prestigeous organizations, introduced toxic politics to completely disrupt existing cultures and working processes, and in the end, for all that drama, they never delivered
The pettiness, backstabbing, political games and kingdom building that ensued was a nightmare. I don’t think the team recovered even after he was eventually fired about a year later.
It’s hard to consider hiring any manager coming from Amazon after that disaster.
Our academic gets tired of terrible wages and thinks “I’ll do a tour of duty at a tech company and pay off my mortgage.” They arrive and freak out because the incentives are totally different. They spend their days trying to replicate the vibe of graduate seminars or R&D projects (e.g. “hey everyone, let’s explore type systems!”), but the working developers around them are not buying it. They rant and rave about how they can’t get approval to publish this or that IP. Oh, and it turns out their coding skills are below that of the incoming junior engineers who they used to teach.
Ultimately they fail to make any impact, so their project is cancelled — an indignity which they would never experience at uni. So they leave, but during that 1-2 year adventure they have been paid 10x they would have made at a university.
And now they can return to academia having paid off some debts and with a shiny entry on their resume that says they have Real World experience at a BigCo.
Again, that’s not everyone, and I sort of rolled all the bad problems into one scenario. But I have seen it many times - just last month I watched a team of academics get torn down due to this type of square-peg-round-hole mismatch.
Oh my God, I laughed way too hard.
yep, working at Amazon (AWS specifically) is like playing for the 2000/10s Patriots. Belicheck will work you to the bone and indoctrinate you into the AWS Leadership Princip... er, I mean the "Patriot Way", and your SVP Tom Brady will chew you out in the "correction of error" process. But if you want to be at a place where people want to win at all costs--with all of the pros and cons that entails--there's no better place to be.
Amazon hate comes from people who don't see a problem with getting the Washington Commanders giving you a $100 million contract to put in the bare minimum effort. To some people that's a dream deal, but not for everyone. To each their own.
A hundred million dollars is a hundred million dollars. Washington doesn't even have income tax.
This isn't a perfect analogy with Amazon since they also pay near top of market, but in terms of what you can potentially accomplish, it's similar. Some people are willing to put up with demanding work and long hours in order to be able to say things like "I built S3" or "I built RDS", which gives you instant credibility. To some people that doesn't matter and they're perfectly fine building an internal enterprise app that nobody will ever see if they have less stressful hours. And that's fine too! There's room on the planet for both types of companies, thankfully.