| I will offer my perspective, and this is not to disparage or dispute anyone else's experience at Amazon or any other company. Personally, I worked at two companies before Amazon. I left both companies because I was unhappy. Two people from my last company also left for the same reasons I did. One of them is at Amazon, and the other one is at SalesForce. Does my experience at my last employer represent a systemic problem in their work force? Probably not. I did know folks who were plenty satisfied and didn't leave, who didn't follow me even after I tried to recruit them. All I'm saying is – it's easy to draw a conclusion and the wrong one. When you have a company that hires at Amazon scale, 1% of your workforce being unsatisfied and some percentage of that 1% willing to speak out about it means you have a lot of negative press. At that point, your rival companies, especially in the news media, have plenty of ammunition to run campaigns where that 1% seems like it's 80% or 99%. Lastly – there is a negative Amazon article on HN just about every single day, and from reading those articles, it seems like people out there wish my mental was suffering or I hate d my job, even if I feel great and like the people I work with. |
It represents your lived experience.
(I'd also say that with only three different company cultures that you have personally expirenced, your perspective is skewed).
What you are missing is that you do not see similar news reports about (say) Google, Netflix, etc. Sure there will always be individual stories in any organisation but the fact that there are *continual* stories about Amazon in all areas (blue collar, white collar) indicates that this is a systemic, widespread problem that they are either unaware of (unlikely) or do not care about.
Whether it is not caring (probably) or unawareness you have to be worried if an organisation like Amazon is this complacent.
[ note: I work at AWS, and I've experienced all this bullshit from the inside. When people I know ask me for a referral in, I tell them to run away. I'm looking to leave shortly ]