Amazon.com Reviews

Pros

salary and good learning opportunity

Cons

less transparent which should not be the case

Advice to Senior Management

increase transperancy

Pros

Customer-centric. People are generally impressed when you tell them you work at Amazon.

Cons

"Ownership" is a double-edged sword. When you "own" something and things go well there is no praise. God help you if you "own" something and things go wrong - errors are never forgiven. Often you are blamed for things that you do not "own" as well.

Terrible middle management (Directors/Senio managers) for the most part. VPs and SVPs seem better - atleast the ones I've interacted with seem humble.

Many Amazonians who've been there for 2+ years know how to game the system. Do minimum work while "pushing back".

Terrible for new-comers to the company, there is no help getting ramped up in a culture that is so selfish and individualistic.

Your manager "owns" your review - so if you want to "do well" make sure your manager has a good opinion of you, doesnt matter what work you actually do - just ensure your manager thinks you are working hard - and you will stay happy at Amazon for many years.

Advice to Senior Management

Make the review process more data driven and holistic not opinion based! Think of your employees because once they become ex-employees after the churn-burn process they will hate Amazon! And your employees are your customers too :)

Pros

-brand name (for now)
-being associated with the #1 Ecommerce company in the world
-bring pets to work
-casual dress
-#3 company admired by customers

Cons

-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.

Advice to Senior Management

The company is awesome if you're a customer. Where else can you order something online and magically have it delivered to your house in 2 days for free? I am a huge fan of the company...as an employee. But all this success and growth is placed on the backs of extremely overworked, unappreciated employees. MBAs are dropping like flies. They should utilized an attrition metric and see how many people actually leave after only 1 year. It's like the Wizard of Oz, when you finally look behind the curtain all you see is "glue & duct tape" holding this hole place together. Mgmt spends too much time looking at granular Week-over-Week data. We have weekly business reviews, monthly business reviews, quarterly business reviews. Employees spend hours & days to gather all this information to just drive looking through the review mirror. Constantly looking backwards.

Pros

The company places high expectations on all of it's employees as well as the managers and provides constant challenges to improve processes and procedures. There are many opportunities to move up within the company.

Cons

while the pros are exciting it is sometimes hard to find a work life balance with the high workload.

Pros

Good schedule, generous personal time, great benefits

Cons

High turn over, It is too easy for inferior employes to survive the initial trial period.

Advice to Senior Management

require more respnsibility from the Associae

Pros

Fast Paced, work on interesting and complex projects. The computers and equipment were newer. Free Happy Hour on Fridays

Cons

Managers are disrespectful. Yelling seems to be acceptable behaviour. No clear goals to be measured against. People from other departments are hostile and don't want to work with other departments for the common good. The yelling from the manager killed off all 7 contractors. The lead developer would yell over the slightest issue. It was later discovered he was fired from previous job because he couldn't get along with anyone.

Advice to Senior Management

Get manager's with some social skills. Yelling is not going to get you heard. Communicate changes in a respectable manner.

Pros

* Provides Good Benefits compared to the other companies for the same job role.
* Has great opportunities in other departments such as IT or Software Development.

Cons

* Unsupportive Senior Management.
* Flawed appraisal system
* Negligible growth opportunities.
* Needs more experienced management.
* More clarity on growth process.

Advice to Senior Management

* Needs overall improvement in employee development program.
* Needs to invest in Employee development.
* Improve appraisal process for employees.

Pros

Amazon offers cutting edge technology, successful online retail, beautiful campus on South Lake Union in Seattle, and company name recognition.

Cons

Door desks, aversion to business and process standards, internal politics, pager duty, micro-management from the executive level, expensive parking, stingy benefits especially when compared to the industry, stock accounts with sub-standard brokerage house.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop treating employees like commodities that can be thrown away once they are 'used up'. Your data-center business practices are unsustainable, does ITIL not make sense to you? AWS is a mess, services are not secure by default, little thought is given to cross-service functionality and capacity planning is an afterthought left to inexperienced program managers.

Pros

world wide known company,respect for the employees. It was a great experience at least for me. I started as intern and now I am SDE

Cons

I think the biggest problem at Amazon is bureaucracy. For any small thing you have to ask for the highest level.

Advice to Senior Management

Take care when you negotiate your salary. Ask as more as you want. Amazon is well known for its frugality.

Pros

Challenging, always an insurmountable mountain of work and opportunity.
The very best talent I have ever been a part of.
Impactful work that is felt by our customers.
Historic growth.

Cons

Throw Quality of Life out the window.
If you need accolades, don't come here.
If you want to develop and you need others to help you, don't come here.
Communication - very poor here. You have to bull ahead in a direction that feels right.

Advice to Senior Management

Take better care of your people. When the economy swings to the positive, we will run out of talent to hunt. Focus on retention and diversity, engagement and community support.