Amazon reviews

-Confrontational environment, nothing is ever good enough...always grow grow grow. Exponential growth. -It's a marathon, except that you're not jogging but always sprinting it. -Pay sucks, they give you a below market salary but entice you with RSUs, but get this, the vesting period is not the traditional 25% over 4 years. Because the company has an employee retention problem majority of your RSUs don't vest until Years 3 & 4. It's a horrible carrot & stick. -Average Amazon employee lifespan is 2yrs and declining. Why else would they have RSU vesting towards Yrs. 3 & 4 instead of evenly during Yrs. 1 & 2. -Company treats vendors and employees the same...like crap. -Mgmt rules by fear...employees are terrified to make a mistake because people get "called out" during Weekly meetings. -Forget about being in a lean company. This place is anorexic. Mgmt doesn't care that there's only 1 person doing a 5 person job, but God forbid you make 1 mistake and you're dead. -You would think a technology company would have systems to pull data much easier. What would take a few minutes with competent systems, employees have to use SQL & ETL queries to pull their own data. And trust me when I say the data never matches. -Skills learned here are not very transferable to the outside world, because our systems are all homegrown. -We have acronyms and abbreviations up the ying yang -Mgmt is not consistent with goals and lacks processes. Everything is ad hoc and "winging it" -Mgmt does not celebrate or showcase "wins" only losses. You would think the company is sinking when you walk around and see the stress and mood. But the company is doing well. But it's always spotlight on the negatives. -While the rest of the world is growing 1-2% or declining, mgmt complains 45% growth YoY is not good enough -Mgmt states we think long term, but every category leader is short term focused to hit their own metric goals. Many times 1 person's metric goals contradict another person's metric goals. -Everyone is looking out for themselves with ulterior motives to meet their goals. -Lastly, the company does nothing to develop employees. They hire the best & the brightest and expect them to run & run & run and eventually burn out.

-They came up with some pretty nutty work campaigns. I was told that in one dept. employees had to take turns doing four hour shifts 24 hrs./day throughout one December to monitor competitor website prices. The way it was told to me, they'd sometimes have to get up at 2am, work till 6am from home, then come in and do their normal shift. (To their credit, some of the worst shifts were apparently reserved for the managers involved.) -The above story reminds me that in giving employees such autonomy, you're probably going to have a few more half-baked ideas get executed. ;) -I was under the impression that employees were paid pretty well, but contractor work can start at $15/hr for even somewhat technical work. -Like probably any other company nowadays, a contractor here can find a wide range of attitudes within Amazon about how they should be treated. The key seems to be your manager. Your workmates will likely , so be leery of the unfriendly job interview where your new boss-to-be has no time for pleasantries. .