[yummy_box]

I also work at Amazon, and I can tell you, your experience was pretty unique. Some teams are worst than others, of course, but no one expect you to pick up a project by yourself, fresh out of onboarding and own it end to end. After you clear your interview loops, you get the chance to match with several teams (not always) and that is your chance to figure out what the team does, whats the situation over there, etc... if you were hired for a specific team, and you feel is a bad match, you can talk to your recruiter/hiring manager and they will find you another team. Is more expensive to let you go, after you cleared the interviews, than to send you to another team. Most teams are always hiring, they even pouch engineers from another orgs, etc... I'm by no means saying Amazon is a paradise, as I said, it highly depends on the team. But for them to fire you like that you have to be doing pretty bad, or maybe your manager felt you were a bad person. For other folks reading this: The team matching rounds are *very* important, if you get assigned a bad team, you need to react quickly, and move on. I feel sorry for OP, I wish him/{*} well.

[fumer]

> I also work at Amazon, and I can tell you, your experience was pretty unique. Some teams are worst than others, of course, but no one expect you to pick up a project by yourself, fresh out of onboarding and own it end to end.

I am a SDE at Amazon and I can tell you for a fact that so far the majority of the projects I've been involved roll out exactly like this. The excuses vary, and fortunately I haven't seen the inclusion card in play yet, but all the gaslighting and sacrificial lamb elements and shifting responsibilities and career tactics are ever present.

> if you were hired for a specific team, and you feel is a bad match, you can talk to your recruiter/hiring manager and they will find you another team.

I have to call bullshit on this. Either you play that out in stealth mode until you are sure the other team picks you, or you are in a world of pain. As soon as you click on the recruiter button, your SDM and senior SDM are notified immediately, and if you are not in the best terms with them they can and more often than not do screw up with your plans and even your job. There's a horror story around my corner of the org of someone who wanted out of his team and simply did what you said should be done, but long story short his transfer was sabotaged by the SDM who afterwards placed him in a performance improvement plan with no return.

> But for them to fire you like that you have to be doing pretty bad, or maybe your manager felt you were a bad person.

No, not at all, at least from what I see on a daily basis. All it takes is that you get in the way of your manager's career goals. They have attrition metrics and goals and you have your yearly Forte to cull the herd and keep the average tenure below 3 years.

[yummy_box]

> I have to call bullshit on this. Either you play that out in stealth mode... Again, that depends on your org and team. I know many people(including PMs, UX, Data Science roles, etc...) who have jumped between teams in the first few months of being hired, and even after several years of working at the company. That doesn't make it "bullshit" , your experience is just different. Before I was hired, I read all the horror stories in TeamBlind as well, and I was surprised to see a different environment. Maybe, is survivorship bias, sure, but it just haven't been the case. For example is well known, that AWS is way more cutthroat than Devices, Retail, and the other orgs, but again, depends on your team as well. Most stories come from people who were PIP-ed. As I said before, Amazon is no Google or Microsoft regarding how they treat their engineers, TC, or WLB, thats for sure, but I have heard first hand stories at Facebook(for example) that are way worse than OP's. You can switch teams very easily, even across countries, my manager was able to move to a team in the US from India, being L4, so, there is definitely opportunities.

[moron4hire]

There is always someone coming into the thread to say "that's not been my experience". Frankly, the company is so large, how could you know? When you get a situation like the article describes, you could be sitting a desk over from the guy and still never know. I've seen dozens of stories just like this of toxic behavior at Amazon. It makes it sound like they have their flagship projects that they use to attract developers and a long tail of drudge work they need to attrit through developers to get done.

[crossroadsguy]

When someone says this about companies like Amazon or Uber I immediately find it suspicious (Shills? Apologists? Or people from PR/HR?) because people at these two companies I know personally have nothing but horror stories. As in - that is the general sentiment I get.

There’s another aspect I always get - they knew what they were getting into or it became clear pretty quick and they went in or continued just for the money.

What never gets mentioned is “best and brightest” minds rhetoric that I see in posts and comments online. They say it’s so fast paced, toxic, burn outs causing the revolving door of attrition to move constantly that there’s no time to meaningfully do this “interacting with those proverbial super minds”

[nikau]

Having worked in large fortune 500 companies they can be totally different experiences depending on the department and particularly the country you work in.

For example a US company will be different to work at if you are in an office in a country with strong labour laws.

[lightbendover]

On the flip side, my first week was “here are three disparate teams that are all on fire, go put them all out by yourself.” And honestly, that was my best manager, one that I returned to years later. It’s a huge company, almost any set of onboarding circumstances have transpired.

[Sparkyte]

My experience is pretty much with you.