I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

Hey congrats on making it 10 months!<p><i>&quot;Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work&quot;</i><p>Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn&#x27;t immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work. Truly, he recapped it for me, the expectations were absolutely incredible and I&#x27;d consider him a hard worker who has found a ton of success in his current role.<p>I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). But living in Seattle, a notable chunk of my social circle works there. I&#x27;d say a few enjoy the scale of things they get to work on or perhaps the brand name, but overall none of them ever talk about liking the work environment&#x2F;balance&#x2F;culture.<p>One friend, at a director level, just quit on a whim because he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out. He told his VP to fuck off, left, and is now on sabbatical. I&#x27;ve never seen him so happy.

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it.<p>EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird.<p>EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I&#x27;m the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers &#x2F; Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben&#x27;s. Wow. We&#x27;ll... get on that. Sorry.<p>FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29814868" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=29814868</a>

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn&#x27;t?<p>I thought the author was incredibly fair&#x2F;objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn&#x27;t so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain&#x2F;abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he&#x27;s wrong about a few things too), but overall it&#x27;s less of a &quot;Amazon == bad&quot; piece and more of a &quot;this is why it wasn&#x27;t to my taste&quot; reflection.<p>Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he&#x27;s going to carry forward with him... isn&#x27;t that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team&#x2F;org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that&#x27;s obviously a bad thing, but that&#x27;s not his problem either.<p>Note: in case it wasn&#x27;t clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah

I also left Amazon after ~10mo. I&#x27;ve written about this elsewhere, but the short version is:<p>* New manager who was a nice guy but didn&#x27;t help me or other folks onboard<p>* A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire.<p>* SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, and he said he &quot;didn&#x27;t know&quot; what we owned. I asked him for help configuring a monitor for a service, and he said he couldn&#x27;t figure it out while <i>literally</i> backing away from my desk slowly.<p>* A culture within our team in which no one was willing or able to help others out. It was very much every man for himself.<p>I GTFO of there and have been happy across the lake since. Paying back my signing bonus was well worth the significant reduction in stress and quality of life.

&gt; The churn I experienced was significant<p>One thing I don&#x27;t see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy.<p>Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics.<p>Of course every org&#x2F;VP has some latitude, but this is a common principle adopted by many VPs to appease the &quot;bar raiser&quot; standards as well as giving enough motivation to axe employees with considerable equity despite how good they may be on an absolute scale.<p>This was the policy at a number of orgs when I was there 5 years ago, and I have heard similar stories as recently as 2019 pre-covid.

Ex-Amazon. Lasted 2 years. I&#x27;ll just repeat the comment I posted the other day:<p>There are only two instances when you&#x27;re happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren&#x27;t worth it.<p>Avoid at all costs. You&#x27;ve been warned.

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this:<p>- RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...)<p>- Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.<p>- Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why?<p>- Make it easier to switch teams

I left amazon after just under 2 years and I agree with everything you wrote here.<p>You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with.<p>On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with

&gt; In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level.<p>This is put succinctly.<p>Seeing Amazon from within was an absolute shock. It is hard to be hyperbolic about the company&#x27;s technical achievements: Prime, AWS, 2-hour Delivery, Alexa, Prime Video, Amazon Go ... absolutely incredible, world-changing stuff.<p>But the experience of working there felt like the place was on fire. People transferring teams in droves, joining in droves from outside, entire teams doing duplicate or triplicate work, managers of managers of managers of managers. And yet the speed at which they launch successful products at global scale is unrivaled.<p>I&#x27;m glad I got to be a part of it but there&#x27;s almost nothing that could entice me to go back.

A couple years ago I turned down an offer at AWS as a Solutions Architect. The same day I did that, the hiring managers director requested that I speak with him. He was basically selling the job and saying what a mistake it was to turn it down. It felt really high pressure!<p>I’ve literally never had that happen in my life. Most companies just immediately ghost me if I turn down an offer. This isn’t covert bragging about being some kind of superstar either, it just felt like they were desperate. I know all the horror stories about people getting PIPs, it kinda started feeling like some kind of trap lol

&gt; I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart.<p>I haven&#x27;t worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents:<p>* Pipelines (CI&#x2F;CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason)<p>* Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since)<p>* TT (ticket tracker)<p>* SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don&#x27;t know what it has become.

The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being &#x27;normal&#x27; at Amazon.<p>And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse.<p>At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working conditions through Unions. When will we finally realize that Amazon is equally over-working everyone and join that solidarity effort so that everyone&#x27;s working environment becomes better? Quitting doesn&#x27;t change anything, we can see they just rehire and perpetuate bad culture. Even the author of the article says just that; he was hired to replace someone.<p>If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I&#x27;ve seen it.

I worked at a large, brand name, older company and there are parallels. I think past some size of an organization, it turns into a bureaucracy to get anything done.<p>- Internal tooling was poor and most teams DIY. Any centrally managed thing was horrible and either home-grown and poorly documented or some VP picked it and poorly documented<p>- The companies needs superseded your career goals to the point that very specific trainings were basically forced even if it had nothing to do with what you do (six sigma)<p>- To get anything done required 3-5 other teams to do anything and took forever. Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks.<p>One thing that was different was attrition. This was before remote working and when the nobody in town was hiring you really were stuck.<p>I like working in smaller organizations where you can have an impact. I only think one of the FAANG would be worthy of me putting up with working in a large bureaucracy again - the other A - and only because I haven&#x27;t heard horror stories - if you have them, share them.

It&#x27;s really a shame what many of the &quot;FAANG&quot; companies (and the companies who admire&#x2F;adopt their practices) are doing to tech work.<p>My own experiences, the horror stories I&#x27;ve read, the broken&#x2F;horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession.<p>It didn&#x27;t use to be like this. There was a time not long ago when individual personality and skills mattered. Workloads could be negotiated, interviews were conversational.<p>But now it seems that a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful &quot;toil&quot; of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines, and thousands of other companies follow suit almost blindly.<p>I&#x27;d love to see a job aggregator for anti-FAANGs. Does such a thing exist?

I finally started just marking their recruiter emails as spam. I still get a couple a month despite asking them to stop. I interviewed for them a few years back and it was clear then that they are looking for people that are technically smart but total pushovers. If you are the type of person that are susceptible to abusive relationships then you&#x27;d fit right in. The sad part is many of their employees prob feel lucky to be in that situation. If you know your own worth you would not work for them and if you believe in treating humans with respect and dignity you&#x27;d definitely not work for them. I got a sense of a complete lack of ethics.

this actually turned out a lot more evenhanded than i was expecting from the title.<p>i took a job at AWS myself, and left after 8 months. partly it was pull factor to a more exciting offer, but i wont deny some push factors. Amazon hires generally very smart people, but the bureaucracy and legacy is just stifling for someone used to a faster pace in tech. After a while I identified the 4 things I felt that we had to ship in order to be a competitive product, and having determined that we&#x27;d take years to do it, left in good conscience hoping that whoever stayed would carry on the good fight. I didn&#x27;t know it but my manager would leave 2 months after I did, lol.<p>good times, decent pay but it is clearly no longer Day 1 in many parts of AWS. If I were Adam Selipsky this would be job #1 IMO. AWS can only coast on past reputation so long.

Cases like these happen at companies at all levels. Massive companies such as Amazon and especially at startups, where roles are not as defined.<p>After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a year, due to the COVID closures affecting my plans.

FTA - &quot;I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript)&quot;<p>But hey, you bet he knows topological sort and dynamic programming.

I have been told by multiple ex-Amazon people that if you are moving for a job there, not to rent a place for the full year as there is a decent chance you will not need it.<p>Everyone I know says it is worth working there, but mostly as a grab and go for the resume.

<i>&gt; (It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases)</i><p>I worked for a Japanese company, and they used Excel for <i>everything</i>. GANTT Charts were done in Excel (not Project), documentation was written in Excel (not Word), etc.<p>They had these monster 3,000-row excel punchlists for QC. If even one test failed, the whole shooting match was scrapped.

&gt; the Amazon Leadership Principles.<p>Such bullshit.<p>&gt; Strive to be Earth&#x27;s Best Employer<p>&gt; Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what&#x27;s next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees&#x27; personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.<p>&quot;Lead with empathy&quot;, by creating conditions in which workers feel they have to urinate in bottles [1].<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;k7amyn&#x2F;amazon-denies-workers-pee-in-bottles-here-are-the-pee-bottles" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.vice.com&#x2F;en&#x2F;article&#x2F;k7amyn&#x2F;amazon-denies-workers...</a>

I interviewed with Amazon about 2015, pretty long process but compared where I was coming from (huckster data startup) AMZN seemed ideal.<p>Onboarding was interesting at the general company level, but basically non existent at a team level. I gave it about three months trying to get to grips with the manual tasks underlying their Virtual IP assignment process (was on their networking team). Couldn&#x27;t make head nor tail of it, had constant problems with the VM running on my laptop and basically started looking around for another job.<p>However, this little FAANG checkbox I now have ticked has opened lots of doors for me since then. I&#x27;ve seen most of my old team at a few tech events in the interim, and taking to them it seems like I got out in time. The team was &quot;traded&quot; to another senior director, and things got very bad, with loads of folks quitting.<p>My last day included an exit interview, which kind of stuck with me ever since. Talking to the HR rep, I said that the role probably wasn&#x27;t a good fit for me, but maybe sometime in the future I&#x27;d wind up back at Amazon. You know, one of those throwaway comments you might say to be polite. The HR rep responded with &quot;Well, you never know, maybe&quot; while unconsciously shaking his head at the same time :)

This is like my situation. I just left after being there for 20 months. Various reasons on the team side. Imposter syndrome is a bad excuse but it contributed. Tried switching but other teams insisted on a full interview loop before I could even see it that team would be a better fit.

&gt; It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains.<p>Enterprise work summed up in one sentence. Impressive. While I agree with Andreessen’s “software is eating the world,” it might be more apt to say “Excel is eating the world.”

The idea of leaving before the year mark at a company that does signing bonuses stresses me the fuck out. Don&#x27;t you have to pay back the bonus? When I got an Amazon offer that was the case

&quot;It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains.&quot; - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

Always interesting to see comments from people who worked at Amazon. I did a stint, and I hated it, but I am always trying to get a read on if I was just unlucky, or if I can fairly draw a broader conclusion about Amazon overall.<p>I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn&#x27;t &quot;Amazon proper,&quot; or maybe the lesson is &quot;be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture.&quot;<p>OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there&#x27;s probably something to the &quot;avoid working in a cost-center&quot; lesson.<p>Then again, there&#x27;s so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being &quot;unlucky&quot; seems to happen more often than seems optimal.<p>I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can&#x27;t say I&#x27;d recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.

As a former amazonian, this one hits close to home. Especially the part about internal tools duct taped together. And most work being simply to stop hemorrhaging and bleeding.

&quot;Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)&quot;<p>Sounds like my first job out of college (it was early 1990s, big consulting shop).<p>There was a ton of pressure to arrive early, stay late, 55-60 hour weeks were normal, continually document progress on your tasks, but the project overall was well behind schedule and what had been completed didn&#x27;t really work.<p>We got paid straight overtime after 40 hours, and I didn&#x27;t have much else to do with my time, so it wasn&#x27;t all bad. I only did it for about a year. It was a good reference for my next job.<p>Young people can afford a few years in the salt mines to get some perspective.

&quot;How manual most of the processes were&quot; - manual processes are more durable to turnover<p>&quot;Documentation is very important at Amazon&quot; - helps alleviate the impact of constant turnover<p>&quot;Teams are fragile&quot; - um, because of turnover?<p>&quot;Everything is urgent&quot; - indirectly because of turnover, because if you don&#x27;t nag people to enable your deliverables, you get fired.<p>&quot;Everything is built in house&quot; - helps make you harder to fire, gives you bully power over other new hires since you know it top to bottom, protects you from the organization that is trying to constantly turn over people

I left Amazon after 11 months as a new college grad in engineering. As others have noted, Amazon’s RSU vesting structure is blatantly designed with the expectation that many (most?) new hires will leave after only 1-2 years. When I was there, the typical plan backloaded the bulk of the vest amount in the third and fourth year of employment. Contrast this with Google or many other tech employers who distribute RSU vesting evenly across the term of the plan. One of many reasons I’m glad I left such an anti-employee company.

Depending on OP&#x27;s exact start date, the value of their RSU grant may be lower than when it was originally granted, making it easier to jump ship: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.google.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;finance.google.com&#x2F;quote&#x2F;AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y</a>

This makes me wonder how much complexity can they grow until it&#x27;s not sustainable by the culture? At what point smart talent would say enough is enough and start hiring average joe&#x27;s? How would that be reflected to customers?

Worked there from 2011-2012 at the then LAB126(Cupertino) on the kindle Fire and project. Was a total dumpster fire filled with Ex Apple folks who liked to throw their egos adound(this was when Jobs was still alive). Because I was in the devices teams traveled to china 4 times within the year, got burnt out by my next level managers and his managers and finally quit after taking in my singnon bonus. Took me a decade to get over that experience and now I am back to the races this time interviewing for Level5 software engineering roles with the MAAGMA(F went meta)companies.

I wouldn&#x27;t wish the byzantine nightmare that is Cognito on my worst enemy.

Had similar experience with another large enterprise. I always wondered how come those companies can survive with such friction. Building small internal application was costing millions, 500x more that what you can build as a startup. It took me 3 years to quit.<p>Also why do you want to work for Amazon and Google? There are many great people there, you will not be noticed. Work for a smaller company, they will pay you more, appreciate everything you do and you will be much happier!

I&#x27;ve had this realization at every company I&#x27;ve worked for, big or small. Not sure why I&#x27;m still surprised by it:<p><i>&quot;The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual the vast majority of processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases.&quot;</i>

This is really insightful. Makes me wonder how this compares to other FAANG companies. Are there other essays that capture the on-the-ground experiences so well?

I glanced through the leadership principles and laughed a bit. I feel sorry for the people who think they have to put up with that bullshit.<p>It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible, that&#x27;s the single reason those principles exist. To make specially young and clueless employees forget it&#x27;s just a job, because hey, it must be an obsession!<p>If you are young, this may seem normal i guess but I would never ever touch amazon.

&gt; When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level.<p>Counterexample: amazon<p>if every team is reinventing square wheels, they are adding a lot of inefficiencies which worsens the situation at macro level.

I am a retired electrical engineer and have worked for various power utilities throughout the years. I have never experienced anything close to this, and have mostly good memories. After reading through the comments here, it sounds like most FAANG companies truly suck. I don’t know how you deal with them.

&gt; <i>When I read through they offer they were pushing aggressively for a start date (2 weeks from the offer).</i><p>Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn&#x27;t swept away from under your feet one day.

Is Ben Adam your real name? Or are you referencing the Hebrew for &quot;human being&quot;?

According to a half remembered article , average retention is about 10 months, so when I saw the headline I assumed this was the topic. Amazon turn over more than their total workforce, every year.<p>This includes all staff yes, but still shocking. If true.

I wonder how Jeff Bezos Leadership Principles competes with Charles Koch&#x27;s Secrets of Success. At times these have a cult-like following. And both companies are among the largestpublic and private in the world.

As someone who&#x27;s preparing for a job interview, this post was revealing.

long time lurker, finally qualified to comment on a post.<p>I&#x27;ve been with amazon for 8 years (still an employee) as a software engineer. I&#x27;ve concluded that your experience at amazon - both work life balance and technical - is entirely dependent on your skip manager and your org.<p>I started with Amazon in the bay area. When I joined we were still in the very early days of our project. The work was awesome, and it felt like we were creating great things. Unfortunately, the ops burden (oncall) became way too much for our team to handle and the quality of life plummeted. My existence during those days was pure pain. From there I relocated (through Amazon) to Seattle to work on something else. I did the move with the promise that I&#x27;d immediately get to work on a cool project, but I ended up sitting around doing nothing for months. I didn&#x27;t even have a desk. Once the project finally started though, things become great. Both of these teams had different VPs, and the cultures of each org were very different as well. My experience in the bay area started off very positively, and then become extremely shitty. My experience in Seattle started off extremely shitty, but then it turned into the most fun 2 years of coding I&#x27;ve done.<p>Additionally, different orgs do things differently. AWS does things different from how Alexa&#x2F;Retail&#x2F;Music&#x2F;Movies&#x2F;etc do things. A good example of this: Twitch isn&#x27;t fully integrated with all of Amazon&#x27;s internal systems (see recent news for reference). Some teams don&#x27;t have oncall rotations, other teams have brutal ones. One of my previous directors used to do bi-weekly (once every two weeks) fireside chats. I haven&#x27;t even met my current director, and I&#x27;ve been under him for a year and a half.<p>If you&#x27;re entering the company from the outside, you might very well be walking into a dumpster fire of a team. If you&#x27;re inside the company, it&#x27;s really easy to spot which teams are garbage and which ones are not. Below is my guide:<p>Red Flags: - No nearby principals (no tech guidance at the director level) - Too many principals (bureaucratic arm chair engineering hell) - Average tenure of engineers on the team is SDE1 (trash code) - No PRFAQ&#x2F;BRDs (projects have no north star, scope is all over the place, dumpster fire product team) - Ops burden is too high (you can check a teams ticket queue on SIM, high ticket count = bad oncall) .... and many more ....<p>Doing team switches are pretty straight forward as well (ymmv). Once you&#x27;re in the door at amazon, do your research and determine whether you need to switch teams ASAP. You can search any engineer&#x27;s username and look at what code they&#x27;re contributing. It&#x27;s pretty easy to investigate the code base you&#x27;ll be working on in advance of joining the team to determine its health.<p>Regarding tooling, amazon does and doesn&#x27;t have great tooling. There are things like Pipelines, CR&#x2F;Crux, Sim&#x2F;TT, Apollo, iGraph, etc that are actually world class tools and don&#x27;t really have any rivals out there (yet!). Then there are other things like people wanting to fork bootstrap and react so that they can rebrand it as an amazon version.... In one of my early teams, I saw the SDETs (test engineers) metaphorically go to war with each other to write the best end-to-end integration test framework. There were four frameworks in the end.<p>Regarding the leadership principles. Those are predominately tools to be used during the decision making process. There is this concept called &quot;one way door decisions&quot; which would be any decision that is made such that the amount of effort needed to undo that decision is not feasible. Basically if you take that door, you can&#x27;t come back out. When faced with a one way door decision, you use the leadership principles to decide.<p>Are you on a fixed timeline because your deliverable is tied to AWS Re:Invent? Then you need to optimize for Bias for Action and Deliver Results. Are you about to create a core platform service that many many teams will build on? Obviously you need to optimize for Insist on the Highest Standards, if not you screw over your org for years.<p>The leadership principles contradict each other, but that generally gives you an idea of what&#x27;s being gained and lost in the decision making process.<p>For software engineers, I would not exclude amazon as an employer just because you read some stuff online. If you can get in, do it and stick around for a year or two at least. The amount that you learn in such a short amount of time is significant, and you can take that experience with you anywhere. If you&#x27;re having a bad experience at Amazon, remember that the company is massive. You can switch orgs and it&#x27;ll feel like you just changed companies (only the tooling is the same).<p>Final thoughts: don&#x27;t ignore your mental health! I have never had a manager actually ask about my mental well being before. I don&#x27;t think that culture is actually fostered at all at Amazon. Use your vacation time if you have it, switch teams if you need too, or just straight up quit.

I got an email from an Amazon recruiter the other day. I thought it was an invite to a phone screen but it was actually a link to my dev plan.

Speaking of Amazon, does anyone have any insight into working conditions, etc in the AWS cloud support jobs? Interviewing for this soon.

Is AWS terrible to work in as a PM-T? These stories in the comments are pretty somber, but not sure if it’s isolated by role.

I’m impressed by your really clean website. Could you please share what stack and backend platforms you’re using for this?

I thought you said 10 minutes!<p>Given today&#x27;s turnover rates, this isn&#x27;t even a sensation.

&gt; CRMs, Email Builder, Complex Automations etc,<p>hmm are Amazon in the CRM space?

hey congrats! are you starting some side project?

Are there any good FANG size companies? Amazon sucks, Facebook is unethical as most Social Media and ad selling. Crypto is a scam. It seems everyone is hiring but I struggle to find a good company to work for. Google perhaps?

How long before admitting for a FAANG has the same notoriety as saying you work for Walmart, McDonald&#x27;s or Target?

Ah, at least there wasn&#x27;t a CCTV camera by your desk that docked your pay for scratching your arse :)