Amazon reviews

(Sorry this is so long-- I left my job of five years to work at home for Amazon and was fired while still in training. I want to let prospective employees know how very little it takes to get fired though, and how you may not even know it's coming. --During interview and recruitment, I was told I would be on a 'chat' team to assist customers with technical issues via instant message. This was not true and I was assigned to a frontline phone support team-- a horrible assignment and definitely not one I would have left my former job for. I really doubt it was intentional but it certainly something they should have told me. --They called me back a few days after the interview and asked if I could start two days later (!). I could not since I had been with my employer for about five years and wanted to give them two weeks of notice that I was leaving-- only fair since we had a great working relationship and they depended on me for many things. We're still friends outside of work. The recruiter agreed (or said they did, anyway) and rescheduled me for training so that I could give notice and I thought everything was looking good, until training started. --A little over a week into training, a situation with family came up and I needed an hour of personal time-- I asked for the time and was told how to handle these requests. A couple of days later, I was contacted by my manager (which is pretty funny because didn't know I had one until then) and they wanted to talk about my attendance issues-- surprising since I didn't know I had done something wrong (I didn't say this, of course). About 10 minutes into this call, my manager brought in someone from HR as well. It was immediately clear to me that this was a well-versed routine and that they were trying to pressure me into quitting (which I wouldn't). With the HR person on the call, my manager went on the offensive and immediately asked me why I punched in precisely 20 minutes early every single day--- a really strange accusation since it's completely untrue-- I signed in and out exactly when I was supposed to and I still wonder where this question came from. Did my manager have the wrong person, or was it just an attempt to throw me off or provoke me? I'll probably never find out. We were told in the training that we had a window of approximately sixty seconds to punch in and out, which is really not enough time since we had to use an RSA token and PIN to sign into their VPN (a little device that gives you a code to sign into their network), then had to remotely connect to our desktops, then finally login into a time-keeping site and hit the 'punch clock' button. After that, you had 4 minutes left to sign into four different communication platforms (email, group chat, instant message, and their knowledge bank. I can only imagine how many of the other trainees had similar experiences or worse... A shame since I was a huge fan of Amazon before I went through all this.

Amazon makes no absolutely effort to attract high-quality people (in fact, they do quite the opposite with their self-claimed 'frugal' -- absolutely-under-no-circumstances-any-benefits policies). When Amazon tells you about 'Work Hard', what they mean is that they make work hard. Like all the stuff you're expecting: a powerful developer machine, or a second monitor, are things Amazon has a policy against (Although, as they will tell you -- you're allowed to buy and bring in your own stuff like RAM, SSDs and Extra-Monitors ... lucky you!). And what about Admin access on your developer laptop? LOL no, that would make life easy. To be approved for that, you need to be literally 4 levels up from the bottom! Root access on your Desktop? Nah, but they'll give you sudo, but you can't actually use your desktop for development -- you'll have to work through a VM. And to make sure you don't enjoy it, your development VM will be some ancient Red Hat image, with absolutely nothing newer than 5 years old (literally!). Just in case you ever want to google something, all the libraries/function/features made in the last half-decade won't work. The internal systems at Amazon are so painful, that I suspect that a large percentage of employees after a hard-days work, come home and put needles in their arms for fun. When stuff works, its slow and largely unusable, and a dozen times worse than any freeware you'll find on the internet. The source control, build systems and all other developer tools seem like it was developed by a retarded monkey after he drank too much that night. Apparently they're now working on an "internal github, that works on more SCS than just git -- and has an awesome advanced security model". I wonder why they don't try get their page-load times under 10 seconds first. Even things that you thought were solved 20 years ago, Amazon manages to break with their own special flavor of retardedness. Like the mailing lists. It's an accepted fact, that it's impossible to *reliably* filter a message to a folder, because the send is not from the mailing list -- there is no mailing list header, and no required subject prefix! Another great joy is, after sending a message to a mailing list, your inbox will lag for *literally* the next 5 minutes, as you get spammed by "Out of Office" replies. But no one excepts the Amazon workplace to be functional or enjoyable, so this is just the normal. And of course, then there's the bureaucracy. At first, you'll try fight it, and try do what's best for the company. But soon you'll realize, like half the company is nothing but paper-pushers -- and you can easily waste a month just trying to get approval for some trivial thing. In the end, you'll be a lot happier here if you treat it as a job, don't try fight it, don't try enjoy it, put in your hours and leave at the end of the day (hoping your pager doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night, over some stupid issue)