Amazon Operations Manager reviews

sometimes frugality is taken too far. work life balance can be an issue. some of the practices like no powerpoints in meetings can be quirky when taken to the extreme

Coming to AWS supply chain group. This group is nothing but laid off/struggling workforce of Dell, who have pulled each other into AWS. The whole group is a big mess as people come and leave in few months. Here the work culture is even worst that the amazon retail groups. The team is small, the work is loads, the ups and downs in business are huge because of which planning almost always goes wrong and you never know how that bad planning affects your work and you are made a scape goat of the events that were beyond your control. Someone somewhere is constantly counting the strikes against you and you will see that in your review or some other way when you finally walk off from AWS. The whole company runs on excel sheets with no ERP system that is strong enough to give visibility to people. So there is constant guessing and errors in what you communicate. Even if this is happening, you should be able to prove that you are smart and good at all times. There is a culture of writing a white paper. Any time something goes wrong you write a 1 pager and publish to the group. The management believes in churning papers, which no one really reads in future but you need to write them for proving your point or to cover of the mess that happened for no fault of yours but may be held against you. These papers take your office time and then you have meetings that never end and the work will start after 5.00pm. They actually have hired someone to help you write these papers. Amazon does not believe in ppt but believes in word documents. They are so frugal that they do not have a color printer on every floor. You may have to go 10 floors up or down to get that 1 colored copy. The seating space is so cramped up and they call it high density seating. You can actually touch 3-4 people if you stretch ur hand on both sides. There is a wait list for 2 years for parking in the building. So you eventually take a bus every day. All I would say is it is a big mess in AWS supply chain group. Which company hires and fires people in a period of 1 year, just because someone wrote something against you. The trust and healthy work culture does not exist. You will lose your health and hair in return of wealth that you cannot enjoy. It is not easy to survive in this place if you are not work smart, diplomatic, very fast paced and consistently vigilant to watch your back. Everyone leaves with a bitter taste. It is very common that on a Monday morning, your very next seat colleague is not at his seat because he worked his last on Friday and nobody knew it till he did not show up. Eventually you will learn he was recycled. Above all, there is no severance package and amazon takes every penny of your joining bonus and relocation back even if they lay you off and you did not resign out of your own will. So do not spend that money you get on something you like, because you never know how long you will be at AWS before you are long forgotten because the show must go on and there are lot of qualified people in the world that this company can afford to recycle. I never had experienced and never believed that a company has a culture that can ruin you, but there exists such a company- Amazon