<story><title>I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months</title><url>https://benadam.me/thoughts/my-experience-at-amazon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>strgcmc</author><text>I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn&amp;#x27;t?&lt;p&gt;I thought the author was incredibly fair&amp;#x2F;objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn&amp;#x27;t so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain&amp;#x2F;abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he&amp;#x27;s wrong about a few things too), but overall it&amp;#x27;s less of a &amp;quot;Amazon == bad&amp;quot; piece and more of a &amp;quot;this is why it wasn&amp;#x27;t to my taste&amp;quot; reflection.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he&amp;#x27;s going to carry forward with him... isn&amp;#x27;t that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team&amp;#x2F;org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that&amp;#x27;s obviously a bad thing, but that&amp;#x27;s not his problem either.&lt;p&gt;Note: in case it wasn&amp;#x27;t clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>vanusa</author><text>&lt;i&gt;Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he&amp;#x27;s going to carry forward with him... isn&amp;#x27;t that a successful outcome?&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;I agree that it definitely doesn&amp;#x27;t read like a straight tale of horror and abuse. But I don&amp;#x27;t see how can you sum it up it by saying &amp;quot;he found some good practices&amp;quot; when he takes care to point out, for example:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Sounds like a grind, day-in, day-out, with lots of made up stress.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work. Ultimately this is not what I want to be doing with my career.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;So the work sucked basically.  And definitely wasn&amp;#x27;t what he was expecting.&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;One of the projects I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript) was tasked with doing the front end system design for a React application (and the API that would power the UI).&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Standard sweatshop practices, sounds like.&lt;p&gt;Oh and did we mention on-call?  About which he says:&lt;p&gt;&lt;i&gt;To be blunt: it sucks.&lt;/i&gt;&lt;p&gt;Which (among other reasons) is why he quit after 10 months.  Which is definitely not a step to be taken lightly, because (aside from losing on the compensation) it basically amounts to a resume stain.&lt;p&gt;Now of course he said positive things as well, and it wasn&amp;#x27;t a simple condemnation of Amazon, by any stretch.  But still -- it strikes me as rather strange that you are somehow able sum it up as &amp;quot;he had good things happen to him there&amp;quot; and it was a &amp;quot;succesful outcome&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;To my ears, his experience there read like a very mixed bag.&lt;p&gt;My paraphrase of his report would be:  &amp;quot;You learn a lot there, but it&amp;#x27;s a grind that will suck you dry before you know it.&amp;quot;</text></comment>
<story><title>I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months</title><url>https://benadam.me/thoughts/my-experience-at-amazon/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>strgcmc</author><text>I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn&amp;#x27;t?&lt;p&gt;I thought the author was incredibly fair&amp;#x2F;objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn&amp;#x27;t so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain&amp;#x2F;abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he&amp;#x27;s wrong about a few things too), but overall it&amp;#x27;s less of a &amp;quot;Amazon == bad&amp;quot; piece and more of a &amp;quot;this is why it wasn&amp;#x27;t to my taste&amp;quot; reflection.&lt;p&gt;Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he&amp;#x27;s going to carry forward with him... isn&amp;#x27;t that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team&amp;#x2F;org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that&amp;#x27;s obviously a bad thing, but that&amp;#x27;s not his problem either.&lt;p&gt;Note: in case it wasn&amp;#x27;t clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>haswell</author><text>I appreciate your comment and the nuance it brings to the conversation, but I also wonder if some of this is a distinction without a difference.&lt;p&gt;Isn&amp;#x27;t the only difference between the Amazon-bashing and OP&amp;#x27;s take just a matter of delivery, tact and perspective? I personally prefer a communication style that doesn&amp;#x27;t involve bashing, and I would probably choose to write a post much like the OP, but I think it&amp;#x27;s also very charitable to Amazon, almost to a fault.&lt;p&gt;For example, section 3: &amp;quot;&lt;i&gt;Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)&lt;/i&gt;&amp;quot; resonates with me deeply, because many of the issues described are similar to the issues I face at a different platform company. These issues weren&amp;#x27;t always present (I&amp;#x27;ve been here long enough to see the growing pains evolve), and my conclusion isn&amp;#x27;t &amp;quot;this just isn&amp;#x27;t the right place for me&amp;quot;, but rather &amp;quot;the company is trying to continue operating in a manner that only works in small orgs, and must make deep fundamental changes going forward&amp;quot;. Now, to be fair, if that change doesn&amp;#x27;t happen, then it does become a place that &amp;quot;isn&amp;#x27;t for me&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;But &amp;quot;This isn&amp;#x27;t for me&amp;quot; implies it&amp;#x27;s a matter of personal preference, and perfectly fine for some folks, but some of these issues are deep, fundamental problems that must be solved and likely require changes in the org or every person who takes that role going forward will reach the same conclusion (or someone who&amp;#x27;s too desperate to care will just deal with it). That doesn&amp;#x27;t make the underlying problem go away.&lt;p&gt;Realizing that a place isn&amp;#x27;t for you and thinking about it that way is arguably healthier than getting angry about it and staying in that environment. But the reason that place isn&amp;#x27;t for you might still stem from organizational issues that make Amazon (or any company with similar problems) arguably &amp;quot;not the right place&amp;quot; for just about &lt;i&gt;anyone&lt;/i&gt;.</text></comment>