[theli]

I've spent 8 years at Amazon and for the most part I enjoyed it (mostly AWS teams). Never ever I felt anything even remotely similar to what has been described in all those stories. Not sure if I just got lucky or it's not bad everywhere and people with bad experiences are just more vocal.

[photon12]

I worked in a role at Amazon that required me to interact with a different team every 1-3 weeks. I would often sit directly with the teams as I was doing work with them for the duration.

There are teams at Amazon full of some of the best technical and professional managers on the planet. There are teams at Amazon that are so brutally driven that they will sacrifice anything, even accepting an incomplete pentest audit and a forgoing week's worth of sleep, to hit a launch date.

I personally had a close friend on my team get PIPed and it was obviously a play from management to get rid of him. I have another friend who had to take months off after leaving because of the abuse she experienced. I have other close friends who have stayed for years.

It's such a big organization and the leadership chains are so decentralized that you get a wide variety of emergent patterns, and the decentralization makes it hard for people across the organization to know about the experiences of other teams.

Edit: in general I wouldn't say the horror stories are the norm at all from what I've seen.

[bodge5000]

Never worked for AWS, but I'd imagine its different depending on division/team. Before starting a job once I had an ex-colleague warn me against the company, saying he had friends there and it was brutal (none in the team I was joining, but its a big company). Turned out to be the opposite for me, and in fact was far nicer than the company I worked for when I was working for him.

Big companies are often far less consistent across teams than you'd expect/they'd like it to be, for better or worse

[Moru]

It can even be different in the same team. It's about who wins the bully lottery just like in school. Some will go through school totally oblivious to the fact that some people gets so bullied that they decide to end their lives a few years down the road.

Once I came in to work in the evening, I had forgotten to bring my phone with me. There I find one of my coworkers crying his heart out because the women treat him like shit. I had not noticed a thing until then. They thought he was sent there to optimize them away and was making his life hell. He had sold his appartment and moved to our little town to work but couldn't take it and moved back again.

[deltaonefour]

The women treat him like shit? What was he optimizing?

[Moru]

Well he was the only male except for me so there was noone else to treat him badly. He was just taking over the invoicing that noone had time for anyway so I have no idea why they were treating him so bad. The ones that were doing the invoices were always complaining that they had to do that on top of their normal job. Some people just can't handle new people showing up and think it's a threat to them. Turns out they were right to feel threatened though, the company shut down the whole branch a few years later and moved everything.

[ignoramous]

> Turned out to be the opposite for me, and in fact was far nicer than the company I worked for when I was working for him.

The company is the same for everyone (ie un-humanistic in its management), and if and when your personal circumstances change, you'd then perhaps see what others currently in it are moaning about.

[masterof0]

I also worked at Amazon, my team was great, and I had a great time. But, I also acknowledge the immense amount of toxicity that comes with "getting promoted" at Amazon. Many manager are on a visa, and get pressured to "deliver results" or they lose their visa. So these managers push insane deadlines, people burn out, the ones not in a visa leave, the others need to deal with the huge ops load, the frequent on-call rotation, and with an angry manager.