And then there is the Fire TV team who had to work under a director who was indicted for being part of a sex trafficking ring and is currently awaiting trial in King county courts. The women were slaves who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia. Yes, Amazon hired a sex trafficker/pimp into its management org. Parts of Amazon are totally corrupt. We can only imagine how much worse the people that hired this person are.
Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there.
It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.
But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls (which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff)? And once there, talking to each other about work stuff while doing, you know, their "business"?
Taken together, these anecdotes paint a picture of a company that's not just hard-driven, but... weird.
And in some corners, apparently kind of gross.
There's no where else to put it if you need to go to the bathroom and you take your laptop. I mean, some people just leave it at the sink but eh. But laptop into a stall to work? No.
> which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff
Most of the buildings weren't owned by amazon. So they have a normal amount of stalls. Which is a problem on the floors with lots of devs because we have the normal dev demographics.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/at-amazon-employees-treat-t...
Particularly this little vignette:
Even more alarming was the bathroom culture. I can only speak to the men’s room, most of which each had two urinals and two stalls. I come from a background where a bathroom is a place where you do a certain kind of business, in silence, and you leave. At Amazon, the men’s room is an extension of the office. People chitchat about work in the bathroom, as if it is just another meeting room where you can piss everywhere.
The most horrifying moment of my employment at Amazon was the time I was using the toilet and a coworker began talking from the stall next to me. He asked me why I had not responded to his very pressing email. I closed my eyes and pretended this wasn’t happening. What email could be so important that it could not wait five minutes for me to use the bathroom? He began tapping on the wall between our stalls, asking why I wouldn’t respond, as if inter-stall conversation should be a totally normal, not disgusting means of communication.
He became more specific about what he needed—referencing a project I’d never heard of, nor would I ever have involvement in—and I realized he had misidentified me from my shoes. (Many brown dress shoes look alike, apparently.) We both exited our stalls around the same time, and he realized his mistake. He didn’t apologize, only explained that he thought I was someone else. As we washed our hands, he just laughed, and I vowed I would never use the stalls on that floor again.
Is the guy lying? Just imagining things?
Please share your thoughts.
It's needlessly hard and too much of it is unimportant.
Do you really think people at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc... aren't working hard? Aren't working on things they think are important? The job isn't demanding?
Yet the horror stories consistently come from Amazon.
I had a fantastic team to work with - they were all either ex-tech-sector CTOs or equivalent or they had that level of potential. So as the team manager I had permanent case of imposter syndrome. My manager was the kind of engineering leader you want to be, a listener first and foremost, smart and principled and demanding but not harsh. The technology is all the more mind-blowing when you look under the bonnet. The culture and corporate structure is remarkable and in my opinion a major strategic factor in the Amazon success story. We were always hiring, all the time. When you have such strong ICs, they don't want anything less than A-list peers. As an AWS manager I allocated roughly a third of my time to hiring and promotion, and more during certain internal cycles.
So it was hard work in a demanding environment but I loved it, and that made stepping away all the more difficult. Would I return? If my startup tanked, in a heartbeat, if they'd have me back.
I also think that those who loathed it are far more vocal than those who loved it. Part of the culture is a strong sense of nondisclosure, and if you have positive memories of the place, that's going to carry over.
I will say, the hiring process described may differ between teams. There are consistencies that the recruitment folks systematically enforce, but as a hiring manager (at least in my region) we had latitude to vary screening steps and the mix of the in-person interviews. I didn't futz with it much though, to avoid screwing up procedural fairness.
I am not surprised this author got an offer, they seem bright enough, and engaging with the process and the company with genuine interest and an open mind (without trying to game it) is definitely a very positive framing and I imagine this came across in person.