Amazon reviews

- Political and unethical leadership. There are fifedoms that go unchallenged. - Poor people management & lack of quality leadership. It is not uncommon for employees with little aptitude or relevant experience to be promoted based on politics. They often make poor managers and contribute to negative employee morale. I've seen wonderful & talented employees ignored in favour of less competent counterparts, due to nonsensical personal politics wielded by snr management. Without exception, they all have walked away & into much better jobs. Amazon find it hard to keep talent, & when they get talent they dont seem to know how to leverage it. - The Amazon value of "frugality" is in theory a good one, however the way in which it's leveraged within the organisation, leaves many employees feeling used and abused. The constant pinching over basic expenses, door desks, computer equipment etc results in employees feeling demotivated and uninvested in the company. - Type A micromanagement. Everything from MBA managers telling you how to write an email or telling you how to do the job you've been doing for the last 15 years - a job in they haven't done. There is a pervasive sense from snr management, that they are 'superior beings' and this grates, particularly if you find them to be ineffective. There can be lots of focus on face time & clock watching. I was based in HQ (not in a distribution centre) but it felt like I was working a shift job where I had to punch in & punch out. If I was 15 mins late they would want me to stay 15 mins more at the end of the day. - Incredibly high employee churn. This is for a multitude of reasons: lack of work life balance; Type A culture of micromanagement; 'frugality' & poor people management in which unethical politics pervades. The company bleeds talent constantly, but there doesn't appear to be an interest in addressing the issue of churn - in my team, snr management stopped telling the team when a coworker had resigned, because to do so would possibly mean having to address the underlying & aforementioned issues of why employees leave.

They hire you as Software "DEVELOPMENT" engineer and making you do everything : QA, Ops etc. They have short project deadlines (<1 month sometimes). This translates to excruciatingly long hours of work. It drastically impacted my family life. Pager supports keeps you awake on a friday night. I used to see fellow Amazonians carrying pager to museums, parks with their family. They may have to stop having fun and work on thier laptop at parks. The compensation sounds interesting for first two years and then falls flat. They talk about frugality all the time which means hardly any office get-togethers. I would discourage Amazon as your future workplace unless work is everything you have in life. Not a engineer friendly company. I moved to bay area and a very happy person now working for Google.