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by haltingproblem
2435 days ago
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You (and other Amazon) employees keep saying orgs/organizations while talking about Amazon vs. Google vs. FB vs. .... I was confused and after reading for a bit I realized you mean divisions within Amazon. That might appear to be a valid distinction, to an outsider it appears less material. Perhaps you can start by describing how the culture varies within Amazon. |
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Within Amazon, some places will absolutely grind engineers with nightmare on call rotations, untenable deadlines or deliverable dates, etc. but these things are part of any job depending on your company. What really sets Amazon apart is the brutal honesty - if you’re not performing or meeting someone’s expectation, regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it is - you will get called out, sometimes in front of colleagues.
Over time, you learn there’s ways of influencing people or motivating them to be at their best. One such way is running a cut throat organization where people end up blaming others to save themselves - sometimes because it is the other person who dropped the ball - other times because that’s how you preserve yourself.
As a business model, this actually works. Running a cut throat organization where people are terrified to go out of line out of fear of losing their jobs - it has worked at Amazon at scale.
But to be clear - not all of Amazon is like this. I’ve been lucky to bounce between really great teams during my 7 years at this company. I’ve had one bad manager who didn’t know how to manage and honestly wasn’t qualified for his role. I’ve met people who legitimately helped me grow and become a better engineer and mentor to others. I’ve gone through two promotions. I’m paid really well.