| I haven't worked at Amazon, and I won't speak to whether things are uncommonly bad there. Certainly Microsoft seems to have produced plenty of similar stories while escaping the broad stigma Amazon has acquired. I will say, though, that I think your bad-reputation timeline is totally off. By the time that NYT piece broke, I had heard "Amazon is a horrible employer" from a half-dozen different places. I didn't even finish the thing, I just shrugged and went "well, matches what people have told me, no new info here". The first time I was warned away from Amazon, it was over specific (and probably unenforceable) pieces of their internship contract. A friend rejected his offer because it contained a bizarrely broad non-compete that could theoretically have barred him from ever starting a company with anyone else who had ever worked at Amazon. This was 2012. The second time was from a friend-of-a-friend who spent one year as an SDE. He talked about bureaucracy, burnout, and made the Microsoft comparison. He said it Amazon was reasonable as a ~2 year cash out, but nothing more. This was 2013. After that, I was still open enough to respond when I heard from a recruiter. The internship interview required invasive rules like the ones at issue here, which proved fundamentally incompatible with my machine/internet setup at the time. I declined it, and scratched off Amazon unless I got news that these things had improved. This was 2014. How you deal with mistakes is what counts, agreed, but Amazon's reputation struggle is far older and more pervasive than the perception spread by the NYT story. Fair or not (and I honestly don't know), it's a long-standing issue. |
The non-compete and non-solicit for customers & business partners lasted for 9 months from when my internship ended and the non-solicit (titled "Non-Interference") for Amazon employees, contractors & consultants lasted 6 months from when my internship ended.
The interview process was two back-to-back phone screens. I heard from other interns the following summer that it had changed to an online coding test and one phone screen. I had never heard of anything so invasive as what is mentioned here before this article (and the precursor a week or two ago) hit HN.
I was working at Amazon when the NYT hit piece broke. It read like it was about the business/sales/marketing side of the company and it did not at all reflect what I experienced at Amazon.
I have met a few interns who had bad experiences at Amazon but most had good experiences and were invited back. I can only think of one who was invited back but had such a bad experience that they refuse to ever work for Amazon again.
When it comes to things like this, the variation between teams within large companies is much much greater than the variation between large companies.