Amazon Software Development Manager reviews

Distributed environment that requires a heavy ability to influence other teams.

Ok where do I begin... Like most Amazonians, I was very excited to start working here. I loved the company as a consumer and wanted to see how cool it was to work here on the inside. For the first 6 months or so, it was awesome. I felt like I was really going to change the world. After a few months, my manager left. This is pretty common since turnover happens all the time. I guess I should have been clued in a little bit when on my first day, I met with my new team of engineers (I was a dev manager) and one of them joked that I was his 5th manager in the past 2 years). It really is rare to see folks who have been at the company for more than 2 years. We were saying good bye to a team mate at least once/month but usually it was more like once/week or so. After a few months, the upper level management on our team hired a new manager for me and a few others. He was a guy who immediately assumed he was smarter than everyone else (including the Amazon engineers and architects who had built the foundation systems that most of the entire company uses) and micromanaged the team enforcing mandatory work hours per week, control of all communication between managers and engineers, etc. Within 6 months, over 50% of the team was gone (including long tenured employees with 10 years at AMZN, etc.). And oh yeah, this new guy put people on PIPs as well. But i don't put all of the blame on the new manager that came in. I do put the blame on his manager (the person who hired him) and our HRBP who were well aware of everything going but but did nothing to stop any of this. Of course team members tried to move teams but he blocked team transfers citing performance issues or anything else that he could make up. A few managed to get out though and they were widely congratulated. For those of us that left to move on to better jobs (read the pros that I wrote about working for Amazon) where we all got 50-100% raises, etc. (even taking into consideration the massive stock price increase after we left), we all had a history of strong performance at amazon and the advice from other folks within amazon was to stick around for a bit because this guy obviously would not last but none of us felt that a year (or however long it would be before's driven out) of hell + poor reviews from this manager would be worth it for our careers. Sure enough, he's not around anymore ...