Amazon is a huge company & perhaps this experience is something that many current amazonians might not necessarily agree with. It's like there are so many startups within the Amazon universe & everyone would have a completely different experience altogether. But for the most part, I think that the BIE role won't differ much at least from the learning curve offered by the position. Now, the org that I was a part of - Customer Trust & Partner Support org at Amazon isn't a great team to be a part of at least in my opinion. At the face of it, people would be helpful, however, it's a different story over what they are thinking about you in their mind. Blame game would run deep down & most if not all the folks are burnt out to a point where working over the weekend as well as 10 hours/day is the norm, the worst part is no one wants to acknowledge this as they feel that this is the only way through. Managers just have 1:1 for the sake of it & if by chance you get into a position where you have to offer them a perspective which is different from what they would like to hear then oftentimes it turns out to be an argument when in reality you were just trying to make them understand your perspective. The result of this useless 1:1 would typically be along the lines of your manager repetitively saying "I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done" (these are the actual quotes used in the conversation). Almost everyone wants to draw a red line on the white drawing board whilst holding a green marker in their hand. If someone acknowledges how burnt out they are it's not only ignored but also you tend to be in the bad books of your hiring manager.
In my humble opinion, a Business Intelligence Engineer at any organization is responsible for churning out actionable insights from the raw data as opposed to being a data vending machine who more often than not serve as PM's personal calculator whilst working on some archaic code/tools available. For the most part, you would just leverage the existing legacy code & make some modifications to the WHERE clause of the SQL code for the Adhoc requests that float in every now & then. The PMs aren't adept to do something as simple as pivoting the data in MS EXCEL. If you get an appreciation email from your customer, then instead of acknowledging it in the email & applauding you in your team meeting, your manager would ask you some preposterous question whether you adhered to the so-called team policies & had your code verified (doesn't matter if the other person has any context around the report/doesn't have the bandwidth to do so). Tools that you would work for the most part are SQL (just modifying the filters of the query), datanet (a legacy ETL tool) & Quicksight(Amazon's version of Looker + Tableau combined). If you try to ask some intelligent questions to your business stakeholders to understand the business problem in depth then again you would fall in their bad books because you are asking too many questions. You are expected to know everything & anything about the data even if it's not reliable/doesn't have a single source of truth or you haven't worked on that data/report earlier or they have half knowledge about things(which again is far more dangerous than not knowing things at all).
Bias for action as a leadership principle is been modified every now & then by everyone across the board so that they can taint/defame other folks for a fault of their own. The first step in solving a problem is realizing there is one & it doesn't seem to me that folks at CTPS org(especially the higher management) are a huge fan of that. Managers are just interested in impressing their higher-ups & then if for some reason they can't do that then the only person to be blamed would be the BIEs like me. To shed some light on that, they would just like to show them the data which would present one side of the coin & impress the higher-ups, something along the lines of saying there has been a 50% increase in the employee-count when in reality you just 1 employee & added 1 employee. Perhaps, this explains why there was a huge restructuring in the senior management as well as at the analyst level where people were just fed up with what they were going through. If your customer is on a personal vacation & you need some clarification from them for a report that you are working for them, then it's on you if the report isn't delivered on the agreed-upon date. Too many redundant business processes which just doesn't take you anywhere & guess what response you get when you bring that up in your 1:1- you guessed it right, 'I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done'. I was so burnt out that I used to practically work 50-60 hours every week including the weekend with no words of encouragement/acknowledgment about it. Now when I look back in time, I think I was naive to care too much for my work, not having a WLB, ignoring all of this & just focusing on my work right from the 2nd week I joined Amazon when my offer letter clearly stated: "you have been compensated for all the hours worked". As a BIE, don't be surprised if you just use MS EXCEL extensively so much so that the WBR reporting is simply done by running an ETL job involving SQL script, downloading the excel file extending the fill-handle & filling in the numbers manually every week. (It might have changed now ). If you tell your customer that this metric doesn't make sense for a particular report backed by the right data then the feedback you get would be to learn & be curious, have a bias for action & customer obsession & again you guessed it right "I don't wanna argue about this & I don't care how you figure this out but I just want you to get this done".
