[nirvana]

Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon.

I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management.

Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop. (or suppliers, or anyone really. They only treat customers well because it is profitable. It is kinda funny that Zappos got bought by them, since Tony's ideology is the polar opposites of Bezos, but maybe Tony is just propagandizing the way Bezos makes himself out to be a visionary.)

Amazon is like the cult of scientology: It sounds really great on the way in, but well before you get to the verbal abuse, the death marches, denial of sleep and the beatings[1] you realize it was all a lie.

They do roll out the red carpet treatment in the early days for people that a manager insists need it.

But they operate on stack ranking, are completely political, anti-innovation, and really they are very much like a cult, with their own reality distortion field and magical sayings. "Its day one!"

For contrast: Over the 25 years of my professional career, I have worked for a lot of startups. Many of them were poorly run, simply because the management was in well over their heads. There's a huge difference between management being well intentioned and over their heads and what I experienced at Amazon. Management at amazon is pathological, because Amazon is designed as a Lord of The Flies experiment, not a company.

I've also worked for Microsoft and a number of other big companies. Big companies have Big company suckage syndrome, and Microsoft has management problems. But again it is sorta like management ends up being a bit incompetent in areas where they shouldn't, not evil. Microsoft was also a little bit of a cult but a pretty mild one. Both companies practice the "once you've turned your back on the cult you're unclean" police though.

One important lie: "If you don't like where you are at amazon, you can move to another department." Despite getting an offer from the cutting edge part of AWS, my manager naturally blocked it because he was losing too many people (%60 of the team left by the time I left, because he was a total abusive asshole who knew nothing about computers, let a lone programming.) So, I resigned. (This was also after I'd tried to resolve the issue by going to HR, only to discover that HR told my manager everything I said, despite offering confidence, and thus he knew I wasn't going to lie to cover up his misdeeds.)

Just FYI, my manager at Amazon was a drug dealer who dealt to other amazon employees in the parking garage next to PacWest. He's had a wonderful career there because his boss is also incompetent, and the incompetence goes all the way to the top, and he's really effective at blaming others for his problems (like, you know, being a drug addict and forgetting to tell his team to do stuff.)

Incompetence is irritating. But that said, I had great experiences at a lot of companies, and at least perfectly fine ones at almost all the places I worked. I don't particularly like Microsoft, really, but I would never warn someone off working there.

Amazon is the only place I've ever taken the time to warn people against. Some people work there and do fine because they end up working for a manager who knows what a loop is. There are even largish groups like that (namely AWS). But that doesn't change the fact that there are whole divisions run by asshole bozos as well.

Amazon's crime is not in hiring an asshole bozo and putting him in charge of programmers. It is in letting him drive out %60 of his team and then promoting him. It is the culture that lets such a terrible person thrive. That culture is what makes Amazon a terrible place to work, because it is completely up to chance whether you will be treated decently or not.

[1] I wasn't beaten. If I had been, I would have sued. Everything else is an accurate description of the experience.

[jsolson]

For what it's worth, this is nothing at all like my experience at Amazon. I'm about a year and a half in. My management is technically competent and, in general, has a good feel for where that competency ends. They don't interfere beyond that point.

I don't work nights or weekends unless I want to. Sometimes I do -- I like some of what I'm working on, but nobody is there cracking the whip.

I do know the experience varies dramatically from team to team, but in the last 18 months I've met and worked with people from many other teams (we're a newish group that's integrating with many parts of existing Amazon infrastructure), and absolutely nobody I've encountered has given any indication at all that their team was like the one you describe. There have definitely been teams that I wouldn't want to work on, but that always came down to a giant chunk of legacy code that nobody wanted to maintain (this is actually a pretty big problem -- there is a lot of scary Perl Mason around Amazon).

I don't know when you worked at Amazon or which team you were on, but either the company has changed, yours was an isolated hellhole of a team not representative of the general experience, or you are vastly overstating things. My team is far from perfect, mind you, but I could do a lot worse.

[c2]

Sounds like you just had a bad manager. At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers. I'm sure your opinion would be different if you actually made it to the AWS group like you wanted.

You're turning a bad experience with a single manager into a personal vendetta against the company as a whole. I have friends who work there who work normal hours (and have for years) and they even said they feel like they are more respected employees as engineers then the business owners.

[potatolicious]

> "At a big company (like Amazon) there are good managers and bad managers."

This is a lousy excuse and doesn't stand up to scrutiny. I too had a bad manager at Amazon. So did my roommate. So did my friends in the company. So did his friends.

In fact, I was a returning intern who went back full-time with dozens of other employees, and here we are 3 years in... and practically no one remains. I can count the number of people who have stuck around on a single hand.

Look into Amazon's employee attrition rate. Eye-opening. Hell, if you can, go to one of the company all-hands, where at some point they encourage new employees to stand up (hired in the last quarter)... that's not company growth, that's replenishment.

Amazon has consistently one of the worst retention rates, if not the very worst out of all the tech "majors". The problematic management is incredibly pervasive, and I'd argue that the islands of sound management are the exception, not the rule.

Be very, very, very wary of working for Amazon.

[jsolson]

Where the hell are all of you people working? I'm about 18 months in, and on my team or any of the other teams I've worked with I haven't seen any of the horror stories people here are describing.

[potatolicious]

I was in Ops, but I knew people in RCX, Customer Service, Data Warehouse, Search, Fraud, Identity, and a bunch of other places who were absolutely miserable (and have since left).

I lasted 24 months. Management was mediocre for the first 18 months, accelerating very quickly downwards in the final 6 months after repeated re-orgs.

The seeds were planted early though - one of the major reasons I left was the constant death-marches due to the high attrition rate, and some boneheaded desire to "maximize engineering utilization" by instituting a hiring freeze in the middle of 2010, despite the fact that we already had more work than we could do in 3 lifetimes. It took a little while for the full impact of this to materialize.

[c2]

Also be wary about anecdotes from previous employees who feel slighted by the company, because they are usually passionately vitriolic and have a bone to pick :)

[potatolicious]

It's weird how many isolated anecdotes from different people, each one passionately vitriolic about the company, that we run into everywhere in the software engineering community.

It's also pretty weird how many ex-Amazon employees I know who would never, ever go back, regardless of the size of the paycheck.

Either there's an organized hit job against Amazon as an employer, and myself and nirvana (among many, many others) are all shills.

Or perhaps the notion that Amazon, as a whole, is a heavily mismanaged company, has some merit ;) Food for thought.

[nirvana]

Why is it when someone talks about a bad experience they had, then they are biased? Why do you feel the need to minimize my experience? "Slighted"? No, I was slighted by microsoft thru an unintentional sequence of events. I'd still say "Congratulations" to any friend who was excited about a job he got there.

I was abused by amazon, lied to, and when I attempted to resolve the issue, my trust was betrayed by HR, and my ability to transfer to a better job with a non-abusive manager within the company was blocked.

This was not being slighted, this was a systematically broken system.

But still, since what happened to me doesn't portray amazon in the best light, then I must be "vitriolic" in all my anger and thus not actually telling the truth....while you, whose only been there 18 months, is the beacon of objectivity, because you're saying nothing bad, right?

[yajoe]

I want to believe your story based on strong emotions, but there's two things that bother me to the point that I think this is BS.

1. Stack ranking? Nope. Amazon has no desire for "up and out" like Microsoft. They're happy for a competent person to wake up and do the same job everyday for 15 years. Raises are non-existant, so it's cheaper to keep that same person in the same role than hire a new person. The review system is NOT like Microsoft. Firing someone takes 2 months end-to-end, not 12 like at Microsoft.

2. If the guy was really selling drugs in the parking garage, then it would be trivial to prove. If you actually worked at Amazon you would know that the physical security at all buildings is insanely high. Guards at every entrance who look at your badge. Roaming patrols. Off duty police officers. And cameras everywhere. If he was on company property (you said the parking garage, right?) there was a camera recording him. Even if HR was out to screw you they also would put a stop to the drug dealing for fear of a bigger lawsuit.

[legoviking]

I think the thing to keep in mind is that Amazon is a company of extremes. There are parts of the company, maybe a large fraction of the company, that are at least in the direction of what you described (although the drug dealing bit is a one-off if it’s true). However, there also parts where there are many people that have been at the company over a decade (namely AWS). I’ve been working here a few years, and I won’t deny that I got lucky with what team I work for, but outside of maybe being a college hire you should really get some idea of what you’ll be working on and who you’ll be working with before you actually work there. I work on things that are really interesting to me, and yeah, there are some crappy parts like oncall and occasional bad management, but the first gradually improves and the second tends to resolve itself.

Also, my experience with people leaving/coming in my part of AWS is that people who leave the company entirely almost exclusively weren’t doing very well. The more experienced people tend to just transfer elsewhere within AWS. Also, Amazon hires a huge number of ex-Microsoft employees, whereas I only know of one person personally who left to go to Microsoft.

[_delirium]

Hmm, if there's a strong political/ideological component to how they operate (I have no personal knowledge of that), that would explain the otherwise puzzling part of the policy where it restricts which subjects you can study. I've been trying to figure out the business angle on that, and it doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. On the one hand, it is normal for employers to restrict tuition reimbursement to things plausibly relevant to an employee's job. But Amazon explicitly says here they aren't doing that. So if it's not to benefit the employer, then it's more of a perk. But if it's a perk, it's not clear how adding restrictions improves the perk. Why not let the employee decide what they want to study? It may lower the perceived value of the perk to some employees, if, say, they already have a trade and would consider some other subject more valuable to take a few classes in (improve their writing, increase their command of history, etc.).

But, it does make more sense if you view it not as a business decision, but as an ideological decision stemming from Bezos's personal views. If you view it as a sort of paternalist attempt to encourage his employees to do with their lives what he thinks more people should do with their lives, it fits better than if you try to figure out how it makes sense as part of a compensation package or business strategy.

[retroafroman]

No, it's a business decision. To get to study whatever they want, they have to stick around for 3 years. They're holding a bonus perk over their head for the first 3 years someone is working. Based on what I've read in this thread and also from the Mother Jones journalist [1], they have a terrible time keeping people in the organization, from programmers to warehouse associates, and everything between I assume.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/02/mac-mcclelland-f...

[_delirium]

I can see how that explains the 3-year service minimum, but I'm not sure how that explains the field-of-study restrictions. Once you're there for 3 years, why do they care which courses you enroll in?

[jabwork]

Ostensibly because high demand fields are more likely to get hired and lead successful careers outside of Amazon.

Logistically it also simplifies things because you can respond to "Why can't I pursue education X?" questions with "because the BLS doesn't list them"

[_delirium]

I guess I'm still confused why that matters to Amazon, unless it's part of some world-bettering mission. Wouldn't it be logistically simpler to say employees can enroll in any course offered by the state community college system, and wash their hands of it past that? I mean, they're just offering a perk as part of a compensation package, it's not like they're supposed to be their employees' parents or career counselors.

[pavel_lishin]

If your manager was a dealer, and you could document his dealing, it seems like the problem could have been trivially solvable.