Mensent Photography/Getty, Tyler Le/BI
When I joined Amazon Vancouver in July 2014, the office was small, with less than 200 employees.
When I decided to leave, Amazon Vancouver had offices in multiple buildings incorporating thousands of employees. Both Amazon and I experienced growth simultaneously. I left Amazon in 2022 for a new opportunity at Meta.
It's hard to make a generic statement about a large company like Amazon. Factors like managers, colleagues, and projects can have huge positive or negative impacts on your career. Therefore, these factors don't necessarily relate to or can't be generalized to Amazon as a whole.
I joined Amazon during one of its darkest times when the work culture was at its most toxic. But they had already begun making changes to improve.
I started as a junior engineer in 2014 and left as a senior. While working there, I never felt indifferent toward the company; I either loved or hated it.
There were positive aspects of working for Amazon that benefited my personal and professional growth.
I loved that you were never assigned a task to follow blindly at Amazon.
Instead, you were often responsible for owning a project from start to finish. Sometimes, you were only given a vague description of what needed to be done, like integrating Microsoft business software into the Amazon system.
You researched the problem, prepared a solution, and crowdsourced revisions of the plan until you reached a design consensus. You also had to launch and monitor the feature.
Amazon felt like an engineer-driven company because technical engineers had control over entire projects versus being assigned small tasks by non-technical managers. I liked this about the company because it leads to better design decisions and more autonomy.
Many services at Amazon Web Services (AWS) are pay-as-you-go rather than subscription or one-time payment. This means AWS loses revenue if the systems aren't running reliably. The same is true for the retail website. Any automated system has to be expertly engineered, or the company will lose money.
As a developing engineer, I loved working at this high level. For every feature launch, you needed enough code coverage, reliable tests, proper metrics and alarms, an effective dashboard, and a detailed runbook to reduce the possibility of potential issues.
As a young engineer, it was time-consuming, but it trained me to have better code quality and engineering approaches in the long run. It also meant there were fewer frustrating bugs to fix later in the process.
A wide range of learning materials were available internally at Amazon. It helped you ramp up quickly and resolve almost every possible issue in a short space of time.
There was a YouTube-like channel for internally sourced and created educational videos, a stack-overflow-type website where engineers can seek help from their peers, and an efficient searching system that looks for anything inside wikis, emails, or codes, to name a few.
In engineering discussions, what you said mattered more than your level. As a senior engineer, I ran a training on "customer obsession," one of the main "leadership principles" that define Amazon employees.
I encouraged new hires always to challenge others' decisions, especially if a clear, rational reason wasn't obvious.
I've sat in many meetings where a junior employee asked a senior colleague challenging questions. Seniors at Amazon have to respond meaningfully and never in a way that assumes they are correct simply because of their seniority.
Amazon has some great initiatives, but I believe some aspects could be improved or changed for the better, especially when it comes to creating a more efficient and happy workforce.
While many companies stick to a couple of values to define their culture, Amazon's leadership principles are ever-increasing. These are the guiding values they judge employees on.
When I joined, Amazon had 12 principles; now, they have 16. These principles are part of Amazonians' daily communication, whether you want to praise or critique someone. It's common to hear things like "You need to show better bias for action" or "Thanks for your bias for action."
Because there are so many principles, managers could use them in contradictory ways. For instance, a feature delivered under a very tight deadline may have obvious limitations. One manager could praise you for "delivering results" and "bias for action," while another could claim that you needed improvement on the "Insist on highest standards" principle.
Managers could easily manipulate them to critique employees. If a manager wants to give you a bad rating, they have many options to find something.
At Amazon, to get promoted, you needed examples of your experience or "stories" for each leadership principle to advance. Each story had to be validated by an employee at least one level higher than you.
From my experience, getting promoted wasn't about how well you do your job at Amazon; it was about finding the right team and projects to fulfill your promotion criteria. Playing the "promotion game" is not limited to Amazon, but it was apparent there.
If you were lucky to be in the right environment, fulfilling stories happened naturally. However, in most cases, you need to pre-plan well before the promotion dates to ensure you've completed the necessary elements of your promotion.
If your manager is new, your colleagues are juniors, or the team's projects are not impactful enough, it's much more difficult for you to move up.
At Amazon, most of our product decisions were based on customers.
Even when dealing with tickets, we always looked for customer-originated ones to action first. If customers were not happy, employees were often blamed.
On-calls — when an engineer is "on-call" to fix bugs — could be especially frustrating. You could get paged any time during your shift to solve a problem. It was hard to find a team at Amazon that didn't have heavy on-call shifts.
Engineers could work all night on operational issues without extra compensation, and talented people left because of on-call frustrations. These on-call shifts prevented me from going on trips. I was paged during friend's birthdays or dinners at a restaurant and would have to leave to fix a problem.
I remember once getting paged at 2 a.m. and 4 a.m. When I woke up at 4 a.m. to work on an issue, my body started to shake badly, and I had to wrap myself in blankets for 15 minutes before I could open my laptop.
Once, I asked a VP about possibly being paid overtime for on-calls that took longer than your allotted shift. They responded, "If you do your on-calls perfectly, the Amazon stock goes up, and you would benefit from it." It felt like a weak justification for unfair treatment.
I had a week to complete the boot camp and the ramp-up process when I joined Amazon. In the second week, I got a real task. I enjoyed getting my hands dirty as quickly as possible.
However, recruits often struggled to keep up with the company's pace, affecting their work quality. When I joined the Alexa team, a teammate told me to "Drink water from the hose," meaning I had to learn a lot quickly. I found it very stressful because I wanted to prove myself, but I didn't have the experience that meant I could work quickly.
Once you're up to speed, managers had to give the names of the bottom 10% of performers to HR every quarter. Low performers were often put on mentorship programs or more serious performance plans — similar to PIP. Unfortunately, I saw many new hires end up in one of these plans in the first few months and leave the company under huge stress.
The mentorship programs were high stakes and pushed many employees to their limits rather than their best potential.
I was once assigned to help a colleague on an improvement program. He was very stressed and desperately asked me to add some coding tasks to the project to fulfill his program requirements. I assigned him to write test codes, even though I had more pressing tasks I needed help with. After a few months, he moved to another company despite the lower salary.
Even managers can be affected by the fast-paced environment. I saw managers try to alleviate some of the pressure experienced by employees, yet the employees still ended up leaving Amazon. New and less senior managers often experience the most stress because they have to deal with pressure from engineers and higher managers.
In a nutshell, Amazon is a great engineering company with many high-impact and technically challenging projects. This helps employees learn top-notch concepts at a quick pace.
However, it came with a price. Your health or relationships with loved ones could be impacted if you are unable to manage the stress properly. I was impatient while working at Amazon because I was under so much pressure. I experienced two break-ups while working there.
Editor's note: When approached with the claims in this article for comment, an Amazon spokesperson said it could not verify the author's account. "From what was shared with us, there appear to be a number of inaccuracies about what it's like to work at Amazon today. We care deeply about our workforce's wellbeing, and that includes supporting them in both their professional and personal growth through a wide variety of benefits, resources, and in-the-moment support. To suggest otherwise based on a single, anonymous, years-old account is misleading and inaccurate," they said. They declined to elaborate on which elements of the article they regarded as inaccurate.
