
Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started - agoldis
https://medium.com/@andrewgoldis/why-i-quit-amazon-just-5-months-after-ive-started-4ce872520f02
======
jurassic
I think this is getting upvoted because everybody likes to dogpile on Amazon.
But nothing this guy says seems to reflect especially poorly on Amazon. If the
author is going through another job search now I might recommend taking the
piece down; it's not doing you a ton of favors.

The summary: guy interviews and accepts an SDE1 role at Amazon, guy resists
building alliances with those holding power in the org, guy is surprised that
his work is boring and nobody trusts him to make big decisions, guy quits.

Reality: No large company is going to let newbie junior hires call the shots.
Everything in this piece was completely foreseeable and does not reflect
poorly on Amazon. You have to earn trust in any company, especially when hired
into a low-level role.

I also don't understand why the candidate with 10 years of industry experience
decided to move forward with interviewing after being told it was for an SDE1
position. It seems like he missed a big opportunity to realign expectations at
that early stage of the interview process.

~~~
lilyball
Someone with 10 years of experience getting offered an SDE1 role is a huge red
flag for me and makes me wonder what this person's skill set actually is.

~~~
philliphaydon
I'm willing to bet if I interviewed at Amazon (or Google/MS/FB/Uber) I would
probably be put in a similar role, despite having been programming since I was
8 with 14 years of commercial experience. I never went to Uni and have no
degree.

~~~
twblalock
I know engineers in your situation. I've interviewed a few. It is unusual for
someone with 10+ years of experience to be considered for an entry-level job,
no matter what kind of education they have.

~~~
philliphaydon
With the type of interview and questions at those places I would probably
fail. I’ve read stuff on algorithms but I’ve never been in a job needing to
use this stuff so if you asked me anything about them I wouldn’t have a clue.
Yet it seems this sort of thing is a key requirement for interview process at
these big companies.

~~~
lsc
so, from experience? Interviews can be the best way to learn algorithms for
the interview.

First trick? there are fads in interviews. When I go through a round of
interviews? there is always a lot of overlap between one company and another
in the same location at the same time.

Second trick? Most places are cool with interviewing you once a year. In my
experience? the second interview at the same company a year later is more
different than a second interview at a different company a week later, but
still, there's a lot of overlap, and most companies are actually pretty okay
with you trying again every year, if you are close (and if you aren't close,
you usually won't make it past the phone screen)

When I was a contractor, I lumped all my interviews into around the same time
of the year, and I interviewed with all the top tier companies, a few of the
second tier companies, and occasionally one of the not so second tier
companies. (The latter mostly because those are usually the easiest interviews
and they usually got back to you fastest, so it was a good ego boost, and a
good way to negotiate my yearly raise as a contractor) I didn't have a
spreadsheet or anything, but often the recruiters at my targets would hit me
up when that year was up. Or I'd start wondering how long it had been since my
last raise.

But, point being, when you interview? always remember the questions you got
wrong. I put any memorization/trivia into flashcards the night after, and I
practice the flashcards year round. Keep the old ones; you won't get those
questions as often, but you still get 'em. And they are usually interesting
bits of trivia that can come in handy in other cases where you want to look
smart.

Go through any algorithms you didn't get with a friend to make sure it is what
you think it is, and then with a book or online resource. Note, it's totally
okay to ask the interviewer what algorithm it was supposed to be if you get it
wrong; I mean, you still got it wrong, but if anything, it shows enthusiasm
and willingness to learn.

Also, interview in clusters. At least in silicon valley, the fads change
pretty quickly, so the more interviews you can do in a row, the better.

------
NAHWheatCracker
This was the least convincing blog post on this sort of topic that I've read.
I didn't see anything that actually painted Amazon in a very bad light. I
think anyone should expect bureaucracy to be a major problem at a large
company. Complaining about promotions seems a bit unfair since he was only
there for 5 months.

    
    
      Moreover, I saw quite a few senior engineers and discovered that I do not want to be alike…
    

This is one thing that I've seen at several jobs I've had and it seriously
concerns me. I'm almost 10 years into my career and I've worked at 5
companies. I don't feel like I've ever worked with someone that I really
thought of as someone who I want to be like.

The senior engineers, tech leads, and managers I've worked with are usually
people with more seniority, less energy, and not much more wisdom.

It wouldn't make me so anxious, but that I'm getting to the point where I feel
like I'm their position and my less experienced coworkers are thinking the
same of me. I try to be better but I've gotten tired of it and I get the
feeling that everyone else is tired too.

~~~
kilroy123
Wow your comment really made me think. I too have been in the industry for
over a decade.

Thinking back, I can not think of a single manager or lead that I wanted to be
like, as well.

In fact, because of my last horrible manager, the worst I've ever had, I want
to exit the industry all together.

I just want to go my own way and have my own small business.

~~~
austincheney
All the people that I wanted to be like, growing up as a developer, were
people who seemed more focused on their programming hobby than their
programming job. Here is the take away that I noticed about those people and
have attempted to apply to myself:

    
    
        * Extremely focused on product quality and defensive code
        * Maintenance focused more than feature focused
        * Excellent with documentation
        * Indirectly focused on self-promotion by writing good books or producing beneficial tools
        * Never directly focused on self-promotion
    

It is so easy to get bogged down with bloated, dependency heavy, framework
bullshit at work that product quality is distantly lost. When writing
important software as a hobby you don't have to conform to a lowest common
denominator for acceptance by new hires.

~~~
adregan
That's a great list and echos what I have noticed about developers I want to
emulate as well.

Any tips on how to be "Maintenance focused more than feature focused" if the
culture is focused on pumping out features on tight deadlines? I have, of
late, found myself engineering more on nights and weekends—trying to clean up
and refactor the code that we have to pump out to meet the deadlines. However,
I'd love to find a way to make that kind of work part of the day to day.

~~~
austincheney
Spend a lot of time on reported issues from users. If a user is willing to
spend time to report a defect spend time to ensure you really understand what
they are reporting and solve it as completely as you can.

Don't wait for users to report defects. You have to constantly use the
software you write. Stress the hell out of it and really try to make it fail.
Write tests to ensure the edge condition is covered against future regression.

Attempt to automate everything. Adding new options and features in the
previous version of my application was a pain in the ass. Now they are all
listed in a single JSON file. The build adds the options into the supported
interfaces as well as the documentation. Now all I have to do to add a new
option is update the JSON file, add the desired result into the application
logic, and write tests.

Ensure your documentation is well structured. You want to ensure all the
features are mentioned, but its helpful when reading the docs if there is a
uniform organization that explains the purpose, data type, compatibility, and
options of each feature.

The challenge with supporting many features is that collisions of various
features can result in unexpected outcomes. You have to really look for these
things before your users do.

------
agentofoblivion
I work at Amazon. Was hired in at L4 and promoted to L5 within one year, which
is a little early, but not by much. I think 18 months is typical.

I want to say that I like their promotion process. It’s designed to be
transparent and owned by the employee. I’d much rather have an ongoing
conversation with my manager, using the doc as an excuse, that keeps the
conversation on how close I am and exactly what I need to do to progress. This
is far better than just working heads down and quietly wondering when you’ll
be picked.

It’s also designed to persist in the event your manager leaves, which is a
high likelihood event in the tech world on the scale of years. It would be
really bad if your promotion totally depended on the support of one person who
then leaves and you’re left at square one. At Amazon, boxes are ticked and
they stay ticked if your manager leaves.

Yes, it takes time to maintain this doc. But it mostly is an excuse for you to
have an open conversation with your manger and focus the conversation in a way
that helps you grow and progress. It may not be perfect, but it’s designed
with all the right intentions and in my experience has been very helpful and
effective.

I also struggled with trust early on, but that’s not an amazon thing, that’s a
human thing. People will tend to not take the new guy whose preaching big
changes seriously, especially if he’s at a lower level. In that case, I found
the best strategy was to find the high trust members, get their buy in first,
and then present it as “I was talking with X and we think...”. That way, you
get to borrow their trust level and he heard, and stengthen the relationship
with them. Plus, they probably are better and smarter than you, so the
conversation will likely lead to you learning something and being better off
than just pushing your ideas on people that aren’t really listening.

~~~
agoldis
One of the best comments so far. Thank for taking your time and writing it!
Good luck at Amazon!

------
Pfhreak
I was super happy with Amazon for 6 years or so. Compensated well, worked hard
but fairly (and rarely more than 40-45 hours a week), great peers, good
managers, and plenty of interesting work to do.

I eventually left because Amazon restricted building games in my spare time
with my friends. I just wanted to jam on the weekends on something that would
never ship as a creative outlet. Turns out they have a policy that says you
cannot make games (even in your spare time) with people who are not Amazon
employees and you have to be willing to give up a license (or ownership) of
all games related IP you develop while employed.

The policy was separate from the open source policy, and applied specifically
to games. I tried everything I could think of to change it, and ultimately
made the choice to walk away.

Reading through this post, I see some stuff that I agree with from my six
years, and some things I disagree with (or were likely just the result of
landing on a bad team). But I'd still be there if I could make some stupid
games side projects.

~~~
nicolashahn
I don't understand why Amazon would call out games specifically - is there
some rationale behind it?

~~~
hackcasual
Probably because they're in the game business now.

~~~
test1235
They are? How so?

~~~
Kurtz79
[https://www.amazongames.com/](https://www.amazongames.com/)

------
twblalock
This is the quote that stands out to me:

> You won’t be promoted for doing your job, you will be promoted by focusing
> on your promotion.

Well, yeah. That's how it is in a lot of companies, especially big ones. Doing
what is expected of you in your current position is proof that you are well
suited for your current position. Exceeding expectations for your current
position is how you get promoted.

If the company has a documented promotion process, (and it seems like Amazon
does based on the article), then focusing on that process is not a distraction
from doing your job: it _is_ doing your job! They went to the trouble of
spelling it out for you because that's what they want you to do!

It seems like the author's idea of "doing your job" was different than his
employer's, so of course he had a bad time.

~~~
agoldis
Thanks for pointing that out!

I was frustrated by the expectation to focus on documenting to get a
promotion. I don't think it is a good practice and was surprised to see that:

> focusing on that process (promotion) is not a distraction from doing your
> job: it is doing your job!

Seems like you understanding of "doing job" is different. To make it clear - I
used to be promoted by helping a business grow - complete activities on time
on an excellent manner, optimize, reduce costs, propose new features / work on
POC.

Not by writing self-promotional documents.

> Exceeding expectations for your current position is how you get promoted.

Unfortunately, it is not by "exceeding", but documenting that you have
exceeded, and knowing how to document it right, sometimes not really exceeding
at all.

> It seems like the author's idea of "doing your job" was different than his
> employer's, so of course he had a bad time.

Do you think I came from Tel Aviv to Vancouver AND brought my family to just
"do the job" and not to exceed? And, moreover, write and share an article
about that? No.

~~~
throwawayamzn98
>Seems like you understanding of "doing job" is different. To make it clear -
I used to be promoted by helping a business grow - complete activities on time
on an excellent manner, optimize, reduce costs, propose new features / work on
POC.

>Not by writing self-promotional documents.

>> Exceeding expectations for your current position is how you get promoted.

>Unfortunately, it is not by "exceeding", but documenting that you have
exceeded, and knowing how to document it right, sometimes not really exceeding
at all.

You're stating the problem to be documenting. Yes, Amazon, I, and many others
think that having concrete examples and data outlined explicitly is a good way
to make these important decisions. Otherwise you have nepotism and gut-feeling
type promotions for employees. If you thought about this more, would you
really want promotions handed out randomly? How else do you show you're
"completing activities, optimize, reduce costs, work on POC". Do you want to
leave this all up to one person, your manager? What if they have a slight
against you? Do you want your manager to do the work of documenting your
progression? You still run into the single point of failure problem, on top of
your manager's workload increasing for each developer, on top of them usually
being already busier. Amazon et. al. constantly seek data on doing these types
of things better, but you haven't proposed much of an alternative.

(Disclaimer: Amazon employee, opinions are my own, not my employer's)

~~~
agoldis
Thanks for your comment! And disclaimer. Probably that's the best process that
the company at such scale could adopt, but please let me dislike it.

Probably it's better than other processes, but still, it has few problems, and
I tried to point them out: 1\. It doesn't solve "nepotism" problem -
especially at the higher levels 2\. It puts employee's focus on promotion and
the document, but not the actual job

------
faitswulff
> Supposedly, every employee should be guided by the leadership principles
> during their day-to-day routine. The principles actually make a lot of
> sense, when used appropriately. As time went, I discovered that the most
> common application of the principles was to creatively find a leadership
> principle that best supports the situation.

Bryan Cantrill has a sometimes hilarious takedown of Amazon's "leadership
principles" here, which definitely corroborates this blog post:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9QMGAtxUlAc)

~~~
joffotron
Honestly, everyone needs to watch this. It's not just Amazon, but so many
companies have these absolutely toxic and ridiculous "principles"

------
vfc1
Sounds just like any other large organization that I've worked at: Too much
bureaucracy, mindless procedures, politics, blame deflection, responsibility
avoidance, siloed teams hiding behind a black hole support email address that
don't communicate with other teams, etc.

Its the same everywhere, its not just Amazon. There are only a couple of
realistic solutions:

\- become a freelancer: this way you can switch jobs every year with no
problem. You will get new challenges and you will be able to face this
bureaucracy knowing that its only temporary

\- work at a smaller company: they often pay the same or more and have a much
more personal work environment, with much more opportunities for gaining extra
responsibility and performing tasks that are actually relevant to the company.

\- start your own small business and become your own boss. This way the only
bullshit that you will have to put up with is your own.

Other than that, this is the definition of being an employee working for
someone else: you are either doing something that someone else doesn't want to
do, or that they don't know how to do.

You will have limited responsibility, and be assigned a supervisor that will
control your every move. That is not going to change, its the same everywhere.

------
encoderer

      My manager told me it is trust that I yet to earn — people don’t trust my judgement and I need to build good relationships
      with decision makers. I agreed. But that what is called “politics”.
    

I don't think this is a good example of "politics". I think this is primarily
about earning a place in a team among the people who have been sweating it out
for years. It doesn't happen overnight, and it's especially difficult in an
entry-level role.

~~~
cblum
I think this might be a cultural issue. It's anecdotal but I think I can offer
some perspective.

I've been living in the US for several years now, but I'm originally from
Brazil. I started my career there.

In Brazil, my experience was always that people initially trust newcomers, and
only lose their trust if they fuck up. I always felt trusted when joining a
new team, and thankfully I never fucked up. But I saw people fuck up, and
other people lost their trust on them very quickly.

In the US (and I think Canada, both countries seem to have similar work
cultures), it seems to be the opposite. When you join a new team, you have to
prove yourself worth of their respect. You have to do some initial labor to
show that you deserve your place in the team. That's been the case in every
team I've joined so far.

I don't know what it's like in Israel, but I wonder if the author of the post
had a similar experience to mine.

~~~
sridca
I think India is similar to Brazil in that regard.

If someone truly cares about cultural acceptance (above and beyond the
superficial diversity jabber), it would serve them well to start by replacing
trust (and distrust) with intelligent appraisals.

------
willio58
Stories like this make me even more sure that my path is not to join a tech
giant as an engineer. The money would be great, but at what cost?

I think the best option for me is to not derive all of my happiness from the
amount coming in to my bank, and instead work on things that I have a clear
impact on.

When I graduate this spring I’m going to be looking at medium-sized companies
with a bright future, not the shadowy giants.

~~~
lapitopi
Always take other people’s experience with a grain of salt. You don’t know
their motivations or their biases or even their situation.

Even if what you just read is 100% true, it’s from someone else's perspective.
So you don’t know what you are missing.

I have worked in both big companies and small. Politics abound in all of them.
In my opinion company culture plays a large role in how toxic the place really
is.

Another factor is your manager. Sometimes they can even compensate for toxic
culture by shielding you from it and having a pleasant environment to work in.
Unfortunately I have not been able to come up with a great set of questions to
divine whether someone is a good manager or not. It totally depends on how
much they believe in having your back vs having their own backs.

Don’t let experiences like these discourage you. There are plenty of big
companies where you can have a sizeable impact because team sizes are small
and the work is challenging. And there are plenty of small to mid size
companies that are just surviving from one round of funding to the next on the
whims of their investors.

Only way to find out is ask a lot of questions and try a few of them.

------
Caillebotte
20% coding is very sad. I hate to think how many great minds are being wasted
this way. After starting work at a startup, I feel more fulfilled in my daily
life. I can easily say I spend around 80-90% of my time coding and feel I
contribute much more than I ever did at any of these jobs.

~~~
laurentoget
20% does sound sad but 80-90% is not very realist if you are working on a
project involving several people working for several years.

------
daxfohl
My one advice is don't take a job that you think is below your qualifications.
Don't even apply for them. Because now you're stuck with SDE1 on your resume
after ten years of experience. That makes it look like you must not be very
competent at what you do. It's always better to hold out for a higher
position. If enough time goes by with no bites then maybe reduce your
expectations. But shoot high and don't worry about rejection. And definitely
don't worry about getting in over your head. If you're competent you'll be
fine wherever you land. If not, well you won't be the first person in the
world who has been underqualified at their job. But the future opportunities
will be greater with the bigger role on your resume.

------
filmgirlcw
My biggest takeaway from reading this isn’t that Amazon is a bad place to work
— but that it was the wrong place for the author to work.

To me the biggest red flag was the fact that the role/team wasn’t discussed
until AFTER the interview was over. Maybe that’s common with hiring events — I
work at Microsoft but I’ll be the first to admit I’m very OOTL when it comes
to recruitment efforts outside of my team/org. In any event, I know for me, I
would need to know what I was going to do and who my manager would be before
accepting a job. In fact, I turned down a job that paid extremely well, in
part because I had no concrete idea of what I would be doing - and this was
after I’d met with the hiring manager and I had a title for the role. Still,
the whole thing was really ambiguous and that made me uncomfortable, despite
the strength of the offer. That might not be the same for everyone, but it is
for me.

But the broader problem I think was that the author just didn’t gel with how
things worked at that office. And that’s totally OK. It’s better to leave
early than to stick around, especially if you know that early.

The only area I think the author was overly naive was on the promotion front.
Obviously there will always be exceptions and edge cases, but it’s generally a
bad idea to take a lower-level job with the hopes that you’ll be able to get
quickly promoted. Even the most aggressive promotion schedule at a place like
Amazon would take more than five months to go from SDE1 to SDE2.

I feel the same way about taking jobs as I do about buying new, unproven
gadgets. It’s bettet to take the job based on what it is on paper when you
accept it and not what it might evolve into over time. Now, if the job isn’t
what was promised and you were actively misled about what you would be doing
versus what you actually do (and I’ve had that happen and I’ve also seen that
happen to others), that’s a sign you should leave that job as soon as
possible. But I don’t think that was the scenario here. I think the author
took whatever job he could get because he assumed he’d be able to quickly turn
the job into what he wanted it to be. It usually doesn’t work that way.

But that’s ok! We’ve all made the wrong decision about a job or a relationship
or whatever. I think it’s great the author was able to realize Amazon wasn’t
the right place for him sooner rather than later.

But I don’t think that necessarily says anything about Amazon — just about the
experience and fit with the author.

~~~
agoldis
I read your comment and I'd say you are completely right.

The hiring event is sponsored by Amazon's divisions, it's a massive
recruitment - like, we need 30 new developers - go end get em. There was no
single person from the actual team I was working for at the interviews.

After I passed the interviews, I was told that they still don't know about the
specific job because organizing the paperwork for relocation would take few
months, until then many things can change.

As soon as papers arrived I insisted to talk to my future manager (I verified
after I started that I was the only person who did that - other people were
just assigned a position within a team). It was too late thought - I was
already committed to move.

I do take responsibility setting wrong expectations, and as you pointed out
(and the article states) it is my experience and observations of what
happened.

------
pfarnsworth
The author sounds super naive.

I'm not sure what exactly he was expecting, I believe this is how life is at
all these big companies. Any of the FANGs will have the same level of
bureaucracy. If you want a different lifestyle, you can join a startup or a
smaller company, but this has been the way it has always been. Amazon is one
of the largest tech companies in the world, I'm not sure why he would think
it's somehow not a huge bureaucracy and a certain way of doing things with so
many engineers.

~~~
agoldis
Agree - I was very naive. I worked for Intel for 6 years, but hoped that one
of FANGs is different. Seems like no :)

------
yc-kraln
This is expected and predicted by the Amazon vesting schedule. In the case
that you're curious, it's 5% in the first year, 15% in the second year, and
then 20% per half-year until four years is over. Almost like they expect
people not to stick around...

------
andybak
What strikes me most about the articles about the big tech giants is this:

They are hiring the brightest and best, paying them large sums of money and
then completely squandering their abilities. I mean there's people who in
startup could be single-handedly creating best-of-breed software and Google
would have them tied up in some marginal aspect of a marginal product.

I'm not sure how that makes me feel...

------
paulcole
Interesting take on getting promoted:

> It is not enough to get your job done and help the company grow.

It’s a promotion, not a participation medal. Yes, you should get a salary
increase but are you qualified for a new title and responsibilities just by
showing up and performing adequately at what you were assigned to do and
nothing else?

~~~
agoldis
Thank you for your comment. Of course that is not how I see promotions work, I
have added a remark to the original article to make myself clear. Thank you
again.

------
0xmohit
> You won’t be promoted for doing your job, you will be promoted by focusing
> on your promotion.

You aren't recognized for doing your job, you are recognized for worrying
about your job.

~~~
agoldis
Thank you for your comment. Of course that is not how I see promotions work, I
have added a remark to the original article to make myself clear. Thank you
again.

------
forkLding
To be truthful, it aint a fair world out there, everything tends to deviate to
playing some sort of game. Seems like OP just didn't want to play that game.

Although I do feel this is a norm in all big modern companies not just tech.
Realistically there isn't a big life goal or changing-the-world impact for any
one employee inside the company. I would say once you enter the company, just
get used to playing the game and keep advancing, its easier that way.

------
meuk
> "The major algorithmic / coding / intellectual challenges that I faced were
> of 3 types:
    
    
      - dealing with technical debt of other systems
      - strictly following a policy or a standard
      - fighting with the in-house dev environment
    

> There were very few interesting problems that actually required to find an
> effective solution / optimize / enforce security."

That's how I feel as well at my current job, but it seems to hold for almost
all IT jobs I've encountered.

------
ron_swanson_00
One thing that I would keep in mind when evaluating the post is how Amazon is
organized. I've been with AWS for about 1.5 years and I've found that
experiences are different from team to team. There are even larger differences
between internal orgs. I would describe Amazon internally as a collection of
startups. Each one is run a bit differently than the others.

For me, one of the teams I was on was pretty awful, and the other team was
great. Each team is pretty unique.

------
dustinmoris
I find it silly how he was only offered a junior developer role, but then
again if it was me I'd probably tell the recruiter that I don't care about my
job title, if I have a certain set of skills and experience I just want to get
at a minimum the market value compensation for it, so as long as that is the
case they can knock themselves out with silly job titles.

If they can't pay what I'm worth then I wouldn't take the job even if my title
was CTO.

~~~
meritt
In startups, titles are more meaningless but at large companies like Amazon
your compensation is completely tied to your job title. The two are
inextricably linked.

------
jijji
In his post he talks about how he doesn't want to talk about money. I'd rather
tell them I need $200/hr up front in the first email then to have to go
through all their time wasting interviews and find out they aren't going to
pay what I need.

~~~
windowsworkstoo
Yep, this is what I do for solicited and unsolicited approaches. Weeds out the
pretenders and also signals that you are a serious person. Price signalling
works!

------
purplezooey
"...trying to only work on projects that contribute to your promotion..."

Too many people like this in medium/big companies. Don't be that guy.

------
jancsika
> internal set of tools for source code control

Why on earth?

------
sonnyblarney
This isn't a very good rant, and I'm not sure I respect the author's decision
(though ultimately of course it's a very personal one so we have to respect
that).

From his essay ... Amazon seems like reasonably well run large company by most
standards.

The author maybe doesn't seem to grasp that large teams doing big things don't
seem hugely efficient.

The bit about the Canada/US border trip was rich, they're trying to get stuff
done, it's not like their flagrantly in violation of anything.

"My manager told me it is trust that I yet to earn — people don’t trust my
judgement and I need to build good relationships with decision makers. I
agreed. But that what is called “politics”. "

It's often in addition to politics, but it's not just politics.

Trust, relationships, competency - those are real things.

Surely some people don't want to work at large organizations, but the author I
believe maybe needs some experience to grasp that this is what it means.

I would say to the author: welcome to how it is.

I think the author should have stuck it out for a couple of more years, they
might have learned a lot before doing something much more aspirational.

~~~
agoldis
Thank you for your comment and advises. My target wasn't to disgrace Amazon
and tell people how terrible it is. I wanted to share my experience, possible
help others to get better idea about what to expect.

I do not neglect the qualities and agree that "Trust, relationships,
competency - those are real things.", but I like them pure, non-situational
and not manipulative. And that was not the case.

------
JimGuns
This is how every big tech company operates.

