Amazon reviews

For a company with $100B in Revenue, the systems and processes are extremely sub par. That translates into a lot of work by people that should be handled by software. Cronyism is rampant. Political backstabbing and positioning is a fact of everyday life. Greediness permeates and poisons an already ugly culture. Employees are in encouraged (expected) to believe that Amazon is so much more than this era's Sears and Roebuck. The human component of management is lost here. People management skills are not developed here like other companies I've worked at, resulting in a lot (a lot) of people managers who shouldn't even be in charge of deciding what's for dinner. Decision making is centralized with the S Team( senior leadership team that meets with Bezos) This means that getting approval, which is delegated to managers in other places I've worked, for simple things takes way too long and impairs business and creates apathy among employees.

Ridiculously hard to get promoted. You're more likely to see incompetent managers get hired into positions that they don't want to promote you to. Performance reviews and compensation systems are set up to allow the company to work you harder and pay you as little as they can get away with. Basically, you will only get a promotion or a decent raise when you work so hard that management runs out of excuses not to reward you properly. Very top-down management style. Every engineer's goals are the result of his or her manager's business goals which are trickled down from the "S-team" - the top level VPs of the company, and so bottom and mid-level creative initiatives tend not to happen. Engineers have to deliver on project after project with overly aggressive deadlines, support a huge operational load (i.e. pagers going off in evenings and weekends), and are then held accountable for quality-related issues. Many teams with bloated mid-level managers who demand lots of meetings, book keeping, reporting etc. TPMs and Dev Managers have to depend on tribal knowledge and personal networking to get anything done. Company emphasizes "Leadership Principles" which are the basis for how everyone ought to behave, but is vague and contradictory and only gives the impression - to those who drink the Kool-aid - that the company appreciates hard work as well as results, but in reality, they're no different from any other company who stack ranks their employees based on all sorts of subjective opinions. Reviews are full of BS and are mostly written after ratings have been determined. Eventually, the only engineers with rewarding careers at Amazon tend to be the fortunate ones whose managers know how to game the system, rather than play along with it. Everybody else eventually leaves - burned out and under-appreciated.