My Time at Amazon
beccaselah.substack.com
beccaselah.substack.com
They are the worst of all companies to join [0] and always have tight profit margins every year, meaning they need to find ways to eventually increase that and have to lay off at least 10,000+ employees out of necessity on top of the constant politicking just for that promotion to survive the next layoff.
They are about to cut another 14K+ employees because they can [1] and want 30,000 jobs cut in total (For comparison, that is 6x OpenAI, 0.95x of Nvidia and 0.38x of Meta employees) this year.
There's 1.6M+ of you joining a forever squid game to survive elimination when the company openly wants to replace their (warehouse) workers with robots AND the (corporate) rest with AI agents + humans, meaning an eventual reduction of human labor to increase their margins.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45774189
[1] https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-plans-...
If you're someone who comes from the American Hinterlands [0], i.e., not a born-and-bred Coastal Elite, this could be the difference between barely surviving and being able to help your extended family survive. If you can keep off the hedonic treadmill yourself.
[0] https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/H/bo28...
After my first few years of experience, I specifically started filtering out companies which have people from Amazon in a leadership role. Their work culture is poison, and I'd rather not join than see myself become a zombie for the next couple of years. This has helped me stay sane in my career, but there still are some early scars that remain.
I explicitly do not believe that you can "make it anywhere" if you survive some brutal culture, and that surviving a few years in that place will bless you with the ability to "live life at another company". Why ruin my health and sanity when I can directly join that other company? This glorification of bad environments needs to stop.
Well, that’s just the idea. Some people can only get their start by joining Amazon and not the other company.
Also, I wouldn’t call Amazon’s environment “bad.” It suits some people for some amount of time, clearly, or they wouldn’t do it.