- If you ask anyone on a large marketing team what the leader was doing on a day to day basis, nobody knew. Other than taking all the team's work and representing it as their own success, with lots of travelling and hospitality, leadership is not there to support or help. If you want to raise a hand to simply discuss an issue or the best approach, the 'amazon principles' will be thrown back in your face and how you're not obeying them - this was a very cult like atmosphere. Additionally, some employees are made people managers, that simply should never manage people - the micromanagement, blaming and sense of power if pretty astonishing, which led to very high anxiety and hate for the job.
- Snakes - there are very few people you can trust, with several pawns reporting conversations back to the team leader (these are also the people that don't do anything themselves, get other to do the work for them and then get promoted). It's incredibly disappointing that a company many aspire to be apart of let this culture reign.
- Amazon papers - if you're someone that appreciates effective internal discussions and decision making, this won't be the culture for you. If you want to go to the bathroom (not literally), you need to write a 6-10 page structured document and elaborate on the most basic and obvious principles, and go through some bizarre doc reading practice whereby you're told to replace words with X, and before you know it, 6 weeks has passed and nothing has happened, and will likely be dismissed. But, as always, you'll never see a doc written by the leader, nor will you get the chance to scrutinise it. Rest assure, if the team leader wants to do something, next day it'll be rolling. Again, a very cultish environment that refusing to accept the inefficiencies.
- HR is not your friend
- Working 10-12 hours per day, across all regions of the world and delivering 3-4 jobs, you might be a little stressed (sense the sarcasm...), but rest assured if you're stressed by an obscene workload, unapproachable boss that promotes their friends to be your line manager, combined with wildly inefficient processes internally that burns people out on their own - you will be highlighted as the problem.
- the politics in AWS are truly astounding - do you kiss the boss's backside and ensure you put your job ahead of your life and family? Then you may be in for a promotion in a few years. If you are a tool that can be leveraged to make the boss look good, you could be a good fit, just don't be shocked when they tell you that's not enough.
- remember in lockdown when working from home was more productive? when there was a focus to support employees? Well, saddle up because if you're within a radius of an office, you will be expected now to be in the office 4 days per week (so much for being sustainable) to falsify usage of office space for investors. You are also negated from promotion if you work in a remote contract....a contract they gave you knowing your location..... don't miss the blatant signs.
