Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees | Hacker News Reader

Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees

minyanville.com

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For what it's worth, as someone who did two internships there, the whole "Amazonians hate their job" thing is way overrated. With the exception of pager duty, most of the legitimate complaints employees used to make have long been addressed. I've interned at other big tech companies too, and Amazon stands out in my mind as having some of the highest morale.

Here's another interesting data point: both of my teams at Amazon are still pretty much 100% intact after 3-4 years – whereas my team at Google, to take one example, have almost all left the company since 2011.

I also did two internship at Amazon and had a different experience.

There's probably a ton of people who love their job and a ton who "hate" their job -- it's a huge company and you're gonna find everyone. However, I do think that the culture has it's flaws, namely that the core values include frugality.

Working at other startups and large companies I've seen a new way, a much better one. Amazon cuts on the expenses to save their bottom line. Other companies do as much as possible for their employees. It leads to a much happier person (IMO). Free food, nice perks, etc. I'm more productive and work much longer (at my last internship I spend 12 consecutive nights at work). I distinctly remember everyone on my team being jealous of other companies and their free food/drinks/perks and always talking about how nice it must be there.

> 12 consecutive nights at work

It might have been a truely great experience, but just by the sound of it it's hard to endorse as a 'nice to be there' style of work. Did you have to convince your manager to let you do it, or was it just part of the ambient mood to stay so much?

It was more of me wanting to hangout and chill after work, followed by me wanting to work and get stuff done before a launch. I was told many many times to go home and take days off. Just my personality to work a lot.

Ex-amazonian here, It really depends on the team. There's 2 types of crappy places to be at Amazon: the really important legacy system, or the we need to catch up with the competition product.

In the first case, there's no opportunity for really improving things, it's usually a small team which can really hamper your advancement, and it breaks constantly. You'll work a 40 hour week, but will get paged all the time and have lots of little emergencies.

The second is sexier, and a good opportunity to move up the ladder, but you'll be working 60-80 hour weeks, loads of crunch time, and suffer due to constantly shifting management as the team explodes in growth.

All that being said, there are a lot of good opportunities, especially for younger engineers. Provided you have a decent performance review, mobility is pretty easy, so if you're stuck on a shitty team, that can change after a year+. You'll want to find a team with a manager who's been around amazon for a little while. You're supposed to tell your current manager first that you're looking around at other opportunities, but in practice this is rarely done before all but securing a new position. I recommend the Rowhouse coffee shop for talking with potential future managers. It's usually pretty clear after 2 and has lots of little rooms and well shaded windows.

If you end up stuck on a shit team, without being able to move around, start looking around Seattle. Twitter, Google, Hulu and Facebook are all hiring here, and they all usually pay better, in addition to having better perks. It's quite something to interview at Google's offices and see the difference in culture. If you've just gotten a promotion, or shipped a major product, that's an ideal time to start talking with other potential employers.

Doesn't Amazon make you sign an 18-month non-compete? How could someone jump to Google?

Anecdotally speaking, I went to a party which had a few Amazon employees in attendance. After a few drinks, two of them let on to the group that they were quitting their jobs because they were sick of Amazon - and high fives were shared all around, including among the folks that weren't leaving. Doesn't seem like a happy group.

Before Bezos settled on the name Amazon, he wanted to call it Relentless. In fact, the domain http://www.relentless.com still leads to Amazon. That fact seems indicative of his leadership style, in light of this article.

The company's lore is that it was originally called Cadabra.com (as in abracadabra). But then people were confusing it with cadaver, so it was changed to Amazon.

This is a poor article. The article begins by claiming a "stressed out" culture is resulting in the factually low employee retention rate, but then goes on cite as evidence things like: no free cafeteria, average pay, and emails that report up the management chain, and that the CEO has a weird laugh. Of all the "evidence" listed, only the team darwinism and searing insults would contribute to a stressful environment. The rest are just random factoids of average employers.

I don't know if Amazon is stressful to work for, because I've never worked there and haven't talked to any friends about it in detail, and this article did not help at all to shed any light on that.

Is there anything wrong with the CEO forwarding an email, adding just a question mark? It is shorthand for "Can you please tell me what is going on here and how it can be taken care of?". It isn't like if he typed out a whole sentence, it would cause the person who panics at a "?" to somehow not panic. They'll probably just read too much into the sentence and panic even more.

If you're asking someone to look into something, putting a "please" in there somewhere would probably be considered a bit more polite. Or are CEOs too busy to treat their employees like actual people as opposed to APIs for processing e-mails?

As someone who was on a team that got these "?" emails quite a bit, it isn't the email that was the problem. It was the culture that you will drop whatever you are doing to answer this one very specific question that was the problem.

Now my team had a very good manager who knew the system and pipeline. So if he was 95% sure he knew the answer, we never got the email. If he didn't, he would forward it onto the oncall. And the oncall might forward it onto someone else if they were busy with a Sev1/2 issue.

But it was expected that you would drop what you were doing and answer. I've seen devs get up during the middle of lunch and go back to the office to answer a Bezos question.

Ahh, this explains why I, a web developer in the middle of the Canadian Prairies keeps getting hit up by Amazon's recruiters. Quite possibly they've poisoned their local talent pools so much they have to pull in naive people from out of market.

Glad I saw this article - now I don't need to fret about whether I should respond to the email. Just the very fact this article was written signals enormous alarm bells for anyone considering moving to work at Amazon.

You are very naive if simple blog spam articles like these influence you that much.

For trusting blogspam, maybe. For putting stock in the comments elsewhere under this post, not so much.

Actually, it's pretty naive of you to assume that this is the ONLY article that I might have read documenting Amazon's work culture. Moving across the country to work for a foreign company isn't the type of decision to be made lightly.

Amazon has a terrible reputation, as evidenced by this article as well as a simple google search for "amazon work culture". And that reputation is costing them talent.

That's all I was getting at...

I work as an SDE I at Amazon. This article is pretty ridiculous.

1) I don't see anything wrong with the question mark emails. Amazon places huge emphasis on customer service, and Jeff rightfully wants to know why is this particular customer unhappy.

2) No perks. Yeah, good free food would be nice. But I'm cooking my own launches most of the time anyway.

3) My salary (as an SDE I, college grad) is almost exactly the same a good friend of mine (also a college grad) got at Google in California (his was 10% more to cover the CA income tax).

4) Not sure about the stacking program, never heard about it. I'm certainly not stressed that I have to be better than my peers so that I don't get fired.

5,6) 3 out of 6 points in the article center around Bezos. Your chances of running into any of those 3 issues are next to nil. Amazon != Bezos.

So out of curiosity, which major tech companies operate on a stack ranking system? It seems that Microsoft has gotten the most flack for it in the past, but it seems that many other companies also have it. Here's what I've heard, from different employees at different companies:

* Amazon - top 20%/70%/bottom 10% buckets

* Facebook - definite bucketed review system every six months

* Google - unsure if bucketed, but performance review every three months and again at end of the year.

* Yahoo - definite bucketed review system every three months and again at end of the year.

If anyone knows the performance review systems at any other company, please definitely feel free to call them out in the replies.

Valve has an annual peer view, it's described in the leaked Valve Employee Handbook.

Summary:

>There are no professional reviews by supervisors (because there are no supervisors). Instead, Valve uses a system of anonymous peer reviews, conducted once a year, where employees give their opinion of everyone they work with. Every Cabal is asked to rank the people they work with. No one ranks themselves. Results are delivered anonymously, and it’s up to the individual to decide what to do with the information. One concrete change that comes out of peer reviews is compensation adjustments. Valve goes out of its way to pay its people what they deserve, according to “who’s providing the most value at the company.”

http://www.forevergeek.com/2012/04/10-things-learned-from-va...

Google's performance reviews are every 6 months. No bucketing.

Well, you get to know if you are "needs improvement", "meets expectations", or "exceeds expectations", and you can pretend those are buckets if you try hard enough.

Does it lead to employees/groups competing with each other to keep their job? I've experienced that at one of my gigs and it just kills my morale. I have a habit of helping co-workers. Then, I notice that I don't always get any acknowledgement in front of mgmt. At the end of the year, the people doing perf reviews don't seem to always know what role I had in some of the successes. At a previous employer where this stack ranking stuff was not prevalent, my coworkers were very generous with their sharing of credit (as was I). As time goes on, I feel I am being a naive person and have no one to blame but myself.

I think this is a key comment. It's not so much that the concept of a stack ranking system is bad in a vacuum. But nothing happens in a vacuum, and individuals will nececcesarily adapt their behaviour according to that which will keep them safe. In a nutshell, the effect of a stack ranking system is to discourage collaboration and hurt camaraderie.

The original article on which this article is based[1] has an interesting chart of median employee tenure for various companies. Amazon is at the bottom, with the median employee leaving after only one year. Google is not much better, with a median employee staying 1.1 years. In contrast, Microsoft employees stay 4 years and IBM employees 6.4 years.

[1] http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-a...

The chart has the useful footnote that it, "does not account for overall growth in workforce" which penalizes companies with quickly growing headcounts. I'd also guess Amazon's warehouse staff has more churn that a technology company and they are a large portion of the overall workforce there.

We have a fair number of ex-Amazonians at work and they all complain about the work culture there, so I do believe it may well be that bad.

I have very little insight into the matter. Just noting some limitations and biases in the data presented. Former employees are probably biased sources of data, too.

Anyway, I've heard it's a tough place to work, but some people thrive on it... nothing beyond what's in the Businessweek article.

A very middlebrow dismissal of OP. :|

Keep in mind that this measures the median tenure of current employees, which significantly biases against companies like Google and Amazon that have done a lot of hiring in the last few years.

A better measure would be the median tenure of employees that left.

Someone here mentioned Amazon's core value on frugality:

"We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra points for headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."

But isn't making the employees happy directly and indirectly influencing the product and service the customer is getting at? I understand the business Amazon is in is of low-margin profit. But still, high employee turnovers may cost more than the extra-money the company can spend on making the employees happy. Not to mention the employees productivity can increase when they are happier, so the ratio of (productivity/salary) still increases even though salary increases. May be now Amazon can have less number of employees, but each doing more productive work because they are happy.

Dear God, is it that bad? Sounds awful.

Does Bezos seriously forward any complaints received at jeff@amazon.com to the right person? I'll bet that is panic-inducing.

The mentioned book "The Everything Store" gives hundreds of examples of this corporate culture, culminating in the quote:

>"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you into the ground."

It's a good read on how not to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe based on Bezos' enormous drive.

I would never work there.

"It's a good read on how not to lead a company"

But they are very successful. People say the same thing about Jobs, and again, they are very successful. People that say, "this is no way to lead a company" have to have counterexamples of equally successful companies that aren't run this way.

Yeah but with apple you hear people loved working there even if jobs was harsh. Looks like there's a balance between getting the most out of people and just creating a toxic work atmosphere.

The Roman Empire was very successful, maybe that's the best way to lead too? Of course that's ridiculous. If you have a big house, a big salary, and you're miserable, are you successful? Amazon has a nice stock price, good technology, and (allegedly) broken employees, is it successful?

so you don't have a counterexample?

He generally sends it to a group email for all the Senior VPs. Based on the question in the email, 1 or more of the Senior VPs will take the issue and forward it onto their VPs, which gets forwarded to GMs, directors, etc. and finally ends up in the mailbox of a developer.

This is based off my knowledge from late-2003 through 2008. It may have changed by now.

That's almost worse. So instead of nameless Joe E. Dev getting a chewout from Bezos, his boss's boss does, who in turn chews out his boss, who in turn is furious at Joe E. Dev for causing the ruckus. Ouch.

Edit: Wait, I just re-read that. You mean each time Bezos receives a credible complaint from the public, he personally forwards it to all his VPs? Isn't that a massive time hole for his VPs? I'm sure it focuses people on random complaints, but then they spend much less time focusing on making their service(s) better for everyone.

I don't know. I can only comment on the "?" that I received and answered. Looking through the email headers, it started with Jeff, went through a few different groups, my manager, and finally me. I don't know if it was like this for all complaints.

And the lack of focus was the problem. Depending on when I got the email, I would look for root cause and other affected customers. But there were times I was operating on 2 maybe 3 hours of sleep and was just like "fuck it. I'm fixing this single order and moving on".

Please take into account, I was in Supply Chain and it has (had?) probably millions of lines of legacy code. Even after being on the team for 4 years, there were parts of the code base that were just voodoo. I would look at the code and be like "this can't possibly work".

Edit: fixed some autocorrect mistakes

Engineer currently working at Amazon here, and I agree with most of what's in the article. Obviously, there will be different opinions on Amazon depending on what team you work for. I can speak in detail for my team in particular, and the biggest complaint that employees reported in the annual survey is the high operational load, which cuts deeply into your personal life for a week once in a few months. In a nutshell, you have to cancel all activities during your oncall week and you will most likely get awoken almost every night of the week. Random stuff happens (host failures, overload and random internet weather/congestion) and there's a certain stress that hangs over your head as you are the primary person for keeping the service up and running at all times. Although...I do have to say operational load has gotten better over the past year as we've made it a goal of ours to reduce the number of pages we get.

Most of my friends who don't work in tech think that Amazon must be a great place to work for since it is a pretty successful tech giant and they think all tech giants give amazing perks and benefits to their employees (probably due to the standards set by places like Google and Microsoft). But this frugality to their employees is one of the main keys to Amazon's success. Amazon's goal is to make the customer happy, and they will be frugal on expenses that don't contribute to that goal. I mean, why would the customers care whether employees get free lunches everyday? This type of thinking is much different than a place like Google's where the obsession is towards making the employees happy, which in turn makes more productive employees.

As for stack ranking employees, it depends on the team you work for. My team in particular does stack rank people. Basically if you get ranked in the bottom 10% bucket for two years in a row, then you're fired. Yeah I know this system sucks sometimes as an employee but it does do the job of keeping people on their toes and making sure the quality of the people on the team is high. I personally tend to not like to work with people who coast at work and produce results at a slow pace, so I have no complaints about the stack ranking.

The pay is actually quite decent for a new grad. You might get slightly less in absolute pay from a place like Google or Facebook, but this is offseted by the lower cost of living in Seattle and also the no state income tax in Washington. But the pay on average for mid-level and senior engineers do lag significantly behind that of other tech giants. Again, this goes hand-in-hand with Amazon's concept of frugality and lower costs for the customer.

I would agree that Amazon is not always a fun place to work for due to high pressure to produce results and also the pager duty. If you want to have good work/life balance, then Amazon is not the place for you. Some of my co-workers originally from Microsoft who have gotten used to the comfortable lifestyle there are finding this out the hard way. Those who enjoy the relatively fast-paced work environment and the great potential for individual growth are the ones that are most successful and stay at Amazon the longest, while I've seen others who have more or less burned out by 2-3 years and have left the company.

In all, now is a great time to join Amazon as it's experiencing unprecedented growth and more buildings are being constructed now just to have enough office space for everybody. If you were to think about working for Amazon though, I would recommend some teams in AWS as the projects there are more technologically interesting and the hiring bar (and in turn quality of your peers) is higher than most other teams at Amazon.

Side note: ?refresh=1

Reloaded the page in the middle of reading it. Why?

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