
Amazon's Stressed Out Culture Is Burning Out Employees - Flopsy
http://www.minyanville.com/sectors/technology/articles/AMZN-AAPL-WMT-GOOG-MSFT-Amazon/10/10/2013/id/52177
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apetresc
For what it's worth, as someone who did two internships there, the whole
"Amazonians hate their job" thing is way overrated. With the exception of
pager duty, most of the legitimate complaints employees used to make have long
been addressed. I've interned at other big tech companies too, and Amazon
stands out in my mind as having some of the highest morale.

Here's another interesting data point: both of my teams at Amazon are still
pretty much 100% intact after 3-4 years – whereas my team at Google, to take
one example, have almost all left the company since 2011.

~~~
hackcasual
Ex-amazonian here, It really depends on the team. There's 2 types of crappy
places to be at Amazon: the really important legacy system, or the we need to
catch up with the competition product.

In the first case, there's no opportunity for really improving things, it's
usually a small team which can really hamper your advancement, and it breaks
constantly. You'll work a 40 hour week, but will get paged all the time and
have lots of little emergencies.

The second is sexier, and a good opportunity to move up the ladder, but you'll
be working 60-80 hour weeks, loads of crunch time, and suffer due to
constantly shifting management as the team explodes in growth.

All that being said, there are a lot of good opportunities, especially for
younger engineers. Provided you have a decent performance review, mobility is
pretty easy, so if you're stuck on a shitty team, that can change after a
year+. You'll want to find a team with a manager who's been around amazon for
a little while. You're supposed to tell your current manager first that you're
looking around at other opportunities, but in practice this is rarely done
before all but securing a new position. I recommend the Rowhouse coffee shop
for talking with potential future managers. It's usually pretty clear after 2
and has lots of little rooms and well shaded windows.

If you end up stuck on a shit team, without being able to move around, start
looking around Seattle. Twitter, Google, Hulu and Facebook are all hiring
here, and they all usually pay better, in addition to having better perks.
It's quite something to interview at Google's offices and see the difference
in culture. If you've just gotten a promotion, or shipped a major product,
that's an ideal time to start talking with other potential employers.

~~~
timOKle
Doesn't Amazon make you sign an 18-month non-compete? How could someone jump
to Google?

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faddotio
Anecdotally speaking, I went to a party which had a few Amazon employees in
attendance. After a few drinks, two of them let on to the group that they were
quitting their jobs because they were sick of Amazon - and high fives were
shared all around, including among the folks that weren't leaving. Doesn't
seem like a happy group.

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hawkharris
Before Bezos settled on the name Amazon, he wanted to call it Relentless. In
fact, the domain [http://www.relentless.com](http://www.relentless.com) still
leads to Amazon. That fact seems indicative of his leadership style, in light
of this article.

~~~
turar
The company's lore is that it was originally called Cadabra.com (as in
abracadabra). But then people were confusing it with cadaver, so it was
changed to Amazon.

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steven777400
This is a poor article. The article begins by claiming a "stressed out"
culture is resulting in the factually low employee retention rate, but then
goes on cite as evidence things like: no free cafeteria, average pay, and
emails that report up the management chain, and that the CEO has a weird
laugh. Of all the "evidence" listed, only the team darwinism and searing
insults would contribute to a stressful environment. The rest are just random
factoids of average employers.

I don't know if Amazon is stressful to work for, because I've never worked
there and haven't talked to any friends about it in detail, and this article
did not help at all to shed any light on that.

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kirubakaran
Is there anything wrong with the CEO forwarding an email, adding just a
question mark? It is shorthand for "Can you please tell me what is going on
here and how it can be taken care of?". It isn't like if he typed out a whole
sentence, it would cause the person who panics at a "?" to somehow not panic.
They'll probably just read too much into the sentence and panic even more.

~~~
justrudd
As someone who was on a team that got these "?" emails quite a bit, it isn't
the email that was the problem. It was the culture that you will drop whatever
you are doing to answer this one very specific question that was the problem.

Now my team had a very good manager who knew the system and pipeline. So if he
was 95% sure he knew the answer, we never got the email. If he didn't, he
would forward it onto the oncall. And the oncall might forward it onto someone
else if they were busy with a Sev1/2 issue.

But it was expected that you would drop what you were doing and answer. I've
seen devs get up during the middle of lunch and go back to the office to
answer a Bezos question.

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blindhippo
Ahh, this explains why I, a web developer in the middle of the Canadian
Prairies keeps getting hit up by Amazon's recruiters. Quite possibly they've
poisoned their local talent pools so much they have to pull in naive people
from out of market.

Glad I saw this article - now I don't need to fret about whether I should
respond to the email. Just the very fact this article was written signals
enormous alarm bells for anyone considering moving to work at Amazon.

~~~
dandroid1
You are very naive if simple blog spam articles like these influence you that
much.

~~~
blindhippo
Actually, it's pretty naive of you to assume that this is the ONLY article
that I might have read documenting Amazon's work culture. Moving across the
country to work for a foreign company isn't the type of decision to be made
lightly.

Amazon has a terrible reputation, as evidenced by this article as well as a
simple google search for "amazon work culture". And that reputation is costing
them talent.

That's all I was getting at...

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throwaway68798
I work as an SDE I at Amazon. This article is pretty ridiculous.

1) I don't see anything wrong with the question mark emails. Amazon places
huge emphasis on customer service, and Jeff rightfully wants to know why is
this particular customer unhappy.

2) No perks. Yeah, good free food would be nice. But I'm cooking my own
launches most of the time anyway.

3) My salary (as an SDE I, college grad) is almost exactly the same a good
friend of mine (also a college grad) got at Google in California (his was 10%
more to cover the CA income tax).

4) Not sure about the stacking program, never heard about it. I'm certainly
not stressed that I have to be better than my peers so that I don't get fired.

5,6) 3 out of 6 points in the article center around Bezos. Your chances of
running into any of those 3 issues are next to nil. Amazon != Bezos.

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sgbenson
So out of curiosity, which major tech companies operate on a stack ranking
system? It seems that Microsoft has gotten the most flack for it in the past,
but it seems that many other companies also have it. Here's what I've heard,
from different employees at different companies:

* Amazon - top 20%/70%/bottom 10% buckets

* Facebook - definite bucketed review system every six months

* Google - unsure if bucketed, but performance review every three months and again at end of the year.

* Yahoo - definite bucketed review system every three months and again at end of the year.

If anyone knows the performance review systems at any other company, please
definitely feel free to call them out in the replies.

~~~
skj
Google's performance reviews are every 6 months. No bucketing.

Well, you get to know if you are "needs improvement", "meets expectations", or
"exceeds expectations", and you can pretend those are buckets if you try hard
enough.

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turnip1979
Does it lead to employees/groups competing with each other to keep their job?
I've experienced that at one of my gigs and it just kills my morale. I have a
habit of helping co-workers. Then, I notice that I don't always get any
acknowledgement in front of mgmt. At the end of the year, the people doing
perf reviews don't seem to always know what role I had in some of the
successes. At a previous employer where this stack ranking stuff was not
prevalent, my coworkers were very generous with their sharing of credit (as
was I). As time goes on, I feel I am being a naive person and have no one to
blame but myself.

~~~
grej
I think this is a key comment. It's not so much that the concept of a stack
ranking system is bad in a vacuum. But nothing happens in a vacuum, and
individuals will nececcesarily adapt their behaviour according to that which
will keep them safe. In a nutshell, the effect of a stack ranking system is to
discourage collaboration and hurt camaraderie.

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greenyoda
The original article on which this article is based[1] has an interesting
chart of median employee tenure for various companies. Amazon is at the
bottom, with the median employee leaving after only one year. Google is not
much better, with a median employee staying 1.1 years. In contrast, Microsoft
employees stay 4 years and IBM employees 6.4 years.

[1] [http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-
bezos-a...](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-10-10/jeff-bezos-and-
the-age-of-amazon-excerpt-from-the-everything-store-by-brad-stone)

~~~
throwaway5752
The chart has the useful footnote that it, "does not account for overall
growth in workforce" which penalizes companies with quickly growing
headcounts. I'd also guess Amazon's warehouse staff has more churn that a
technology company and they are a large portion of the overall workforce
there.

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zenbowman
We have a fair number of ex-Amazonians at work and they all complain about the
work culture there, so I do believe it may well be that bad.

~~~
throwaway5752
I have very little insight into the matter. Just noting some limitations and
biases in the data presented. Former employees are probably biased sources of
data, too.

Anyway, I've heard it's a tough place to work, but some people thrive on it...
nothing beyond what's in the Businessweek article.

~~~
faddotio
A very middlebrow dismissal of OP. :|

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jw2013
Someone here mentioned Amazon's core value on frugality:

"We try not to spend money on things that don’t matter to customers. Frugality
breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. There are no extra
points for headcount, budget size, or fixed expense."

But isn't making the employees happy directly and indirectly influencing the
product and service the customer is getting at? I understand the business
Amazon is in is of low-margin profit. But still, high employee turnovers may
cost more than the extra-money the company can spend on making the employees
happy. Not to mention the employees productivity can increase when they are
happier, so the ratio of (productivity/salary) still increases even though
salary increases. May be now Amazon can have less number of employees, but
each doing more productive work because they are happy.

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jnbiche
Dear God, is it that bad? Sounds awful.

Does Bezos seriously forward any complaints received at jeff@amazon.com to the
right person? I'll bet that _is_ panic-inducing.

~~~
a_bonobo
The mentioned book "The Everything Store" gives hundreds of examples of this
corporate culture, culminating in the quote:

>"If you're not good, Jeff will chew you up and spit you out," notes one
former employee. "And if you're good, he will jump on your back and ride you
into the ground."

It's a good read on how _not_ to lead a company, and I'm reasonably sure
Amazon will fail once Bezos dies - the success seems tobe based on Bezos'
enormous drive.

I would never work there.

~~~
jshen
"It's a good read on how not to lead a company"

But they are very successful. People say the same thing about Jobs, and again,
they are very successful. People that say, "this is no way to lead a company"
have to have counterexamples of equally successful companies that aren't run
this way.

~~~
colechristensen
The Roman Empire was very successful, maybe that's the best way to lead too?
Of course that's ridiculous. If you have a big house, a big salary, and you're
miserable, are you successful? Amazon has a nice stock price, good technology,
and (allegedly) broken employees, is it successful?

~~~
jshen
so you don't have a counterexample?

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rang
Engineer currently working at Amazon here, and I agree with most of what's in
the article. Obviously, there will be different opinions on Amazon depending
on what team you work for. I can speak in detail for my team in particular,
and the biggest complaint that employees reported in the annual survey is the
high operational load, which cuts deeply into your personal life for a week
once in a few months. In a nutshell, you have to cancel all activities during
your oncall week and you will most likely get awoken almost every night of the
week. Random stuff happens (host failures, overload and random internet
weather/congestion) and there's a certain stress that hangs over your head as
you are the primary person for keeping the service up and running at all
times. Although...I do have to say operational load has gotten better over the
past year as we've made it a goal of ours to reduce the number of pages we
get.

Most of my friends who don't work in tech think that Amazon must be a great
place to work for since it is a pretty successful tech giant and they think
all tech giants give amazing perks and benefits to their employees (probably
due to the standards set by places like Google and Microsoft). But this
frugality to their employees is one of the main keys to Amazon's success.
Amazon's goal is to make the customer happy, and they will be frugal on
expenses that don't contribute to that goal. I mean, why would the customers
care whether employees get free lunches everyday? This type of thinking is
much different than a place like Google's where the obsession is towards
making the employees happy, which in turn makes more productive employees.

As for stack ranking employees, it depends on the team you work for. My team
in particular does stack rank people. Basically if you get ranked in the
bottom 10% bucket for two years in a row, then you're fired. Yeah I know this
system sucks sometimes as an employee but it does do the job of keeping people
on their toes and making sure the quality of the people on the team is high. I
personally tend to not like to work with people who coast at work and produce
results at a slow pace, so I have no complaints about the stack ranking.

The pay is actually quite decent for a new grad. You might get slightly less
in absolute pay from a place like Google or Facebook, but this is offseted by
the lower cost of living in Seattle and also the no state income tax in
Washington. But the pay on average for mid-level and senior engineers do lag
significantly behind that of other tech giants. Again, this goes hand-in-hand
with Amazon's concept of frugality and lower costs for the customer.

I would agree that Amazon is not always a fun place to work for due to high
pressure to produce results and also the pager duty. If you want to have good
work/life balance, then Amazon is not the place for you. Some of my co-workers
originally from Microsoft who have gotten used to the comfortable lifestyle
there are finding this out the hard way. Those who enjoy the relatively fast-
paced work environment and the great potential for individual growth are the
ones that are most successful and stay at Amazon the longest, while I've seen
others who have more or less burned out by 2-3 years and have left the
company.

In all, now is a great time to join Amazon as it's experiencing unprecedented
growth and more buildings are being constructed now just to have enough office
space for everybody. If you were to think about working for Amazon though, I
would recommend some teams in AWS as the projects there are more
technologically interesting and the hiring bar (and in turn quality of your
peers) is higher than most other teams at Amazon.

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lowmagnet
Side note: ?refresh=1

Reloaded the page in the middle of reading it. Why?

