3 Good Things and 3 Bad Things About Working at Amazon: From 12+ Years in Management
Line manager to Senior Manager to Director. It was a great place to work, but I have a pretty balanced view of what Amazon does well, and what it doesn't.
Welcome to the Scarlet Ink newsletter. I'm Dave Anderson, an ex-Amazon Tech Director and GM. Each week I write a newsletter article on tech industry careers, and specific leadership advice.
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Hey all. I had fun writing this article, but I got carried away. I recently had some people ask if I could please write about what is good and bad about working at Amazon.
This sounded good. So I started writing. While my normal article is a beefy 2500–3500 words, I found myself at over 7000 words, and I wasn’t done. Whoops.
So I’ve carefully cut my article into (at least) two parts. I’m going to post the first 3 good and bad things now. In no particular order. I posted the remaining bullet points, the following week. We’ll see how long that one ends up at. I stopped writing once I realized I had gotten carried away.
I think my specific 12-year tenure at Amazon makes me well suited to write this article. I started Amazon as a Level 5 manager (the most junior level of engineering manager at Amazon), and ended as a Level 8 Director / General Manager. This means I worked for years at the “line” level with individual junior engineers, and also worked closely with VPs and SVPs.
My experience was also across a wide area. I worked in Global Payments (a widely used platform team), 3rd Party selling on the retail website, AWS networking, Devices, and Games. My experiences weren’t simply in one or two organizations, but 5 different organizations. Even better, I worked as a bar raiser / bar raiser trainer almost all those years, so I had regular interactions across the entire company. This means I can identify what was unique in an organization, and what seemed to apply across all of Amazon.
If you do decide to work at Amazon despite (or because of) what I wrote, then I’d recommend you start your interview research here, at my famous Amazon Leadership Principle article. I don’t exaggerate that over the years I’ve probably had more than 100 Amazon employees credit my article (in large part) to them getting into the company. So seriously, it’s worth the read.
I’d like to start with one big personal note. I liked my time at Amazon. I learned a ton. I was paid extremely well. I had fantastic co-workers, and I keep in touch with a number of them to this day. This article pulls apart the good and bad things about working there, but I hope you can recognize that it’s one person’s experience, and that in my opinion, the good outweighed the bad. As much as I rant in some places.
I’m sure some people will detail a different experience. I’m not going to tell anyone that their experience was wrong, just because it wasn’t the same as mine. But I’m also willing to bet that a few people will tell me that I am wrong about what I write below. Such is life!
I probably should give a disclaimer before I say anything. I’m speaking only for Dave. Not for Amazon (where I no longer work), or anyone else. I don’t believe I’m spilling any secret, as any topic I discuss (example, top grading in my next article), is covered in numerous public news articles. So I’m only explaining my interpretation of these very public things.
That all being said, let’s get into the meat of things. In no particular order! Because sorting these things would be such a pain!
Bad Thing One — Senior Leadership is (frequently) out of touch
I’m sure this is true at many big companies. By the time you’re making $3M a year as a senior exec, you probably don’t know what life is like on the ground. But it causes stupidity and delays attempts to address structural problems.
For example, Amazon has a stack ranking system, where organizations need to fire a certain number of people each year. Like a literal goal, for an organization of 117 people, “You must fire 7 people by 12/31/YYYY.” I talk about this process in next week’s article, by the way. These goals weren’t something to joke about. It was important for leaders to hit these goals (the well-known threat was that leaders who couldn’t hit this goal would become part of it).
In a very senior leadership meeting, I brought up an issue.
Dave: “Once an organization hits their annual goal, they’re incentivized to hold on to poor performers so they can get a head start on next year’s goal. So if our organization has hit their goal of firing 7 people by November, for example, they’ll keep that 8th poor performer around until April, to ensure that person is counted in next year’s goal. I would like to propose that any people let go above the goal be counted towards next year’s goal.”
Side note — I said April because goals were frequently created in April. And the time between January to April practically doesn’t exist regarding hitting your goals. Which is a strange quirk of bureaucratic red tape.
The senior leaders looked aghast.
Senior leader: “No, no one would ever hold on to a bad employee simply to hit their goals. That’s ridiculous. We’re all here to do the right thing.”
HR and senior leaders shook their heads at my naivety.
Another senior leader: “Maybe some bad manager might play games like that, but most people just do the right thing.”
This was absolutely garbage. It showed how out of touch they were. I’d repeatedly heard open conversations around these goals, and this exact conversation had happened in every organization I’d participated in. Literally every organization, every year. The idea that this didn’t happen was obscenely goofy.
They didn’t believe that setting these goals would create an incentive for this type of game playing behavior. But because of the massive negative consequences of not hitting the goal, leaders were laser focused on those numbers. And that meant games were played continually.
As another example, we brought up that new hires didn’t get their first paychecks for more than a month sometimes. “They just moved to Seattle, but they won’t get a paycheck until the following month.”
Senior leaders repeatedly shrugged. “They’ll be paid correctly in the end.” I heard this more than once when we tried to get it fixed. I don’t know if this is fixed yet as a side note.
Because when you have millions in the bank and are making hundreds of thousands a month, 4–6 weeks without pay isn’t a huge deal. The mind-blowing privilege this shrug represented is crazy.
I suspect the most recent example of being out of touch is Amazon’s push to RTO. I understand there are reasons for / against returning to the office. I don’t think it’s a black & white issue.
But everything I’ve heard from the rumor mill is that it’s primarily driven by Jassy and his S-Team. When you can hire a private driver to take you to work, and a maid to keep your house clean, and a private tutor for your kids, and a nanny to watch them when you’re out for the day, I suspect that RTO isn’t a big deal.
Take a look at Jassy’s announcement.
There were many words about getting things done, and being successful. How much did he spend on the personal impact of RTO to people’s lives? The fact that some people might appreciate working from home, the long commutes in bad traffic, the additional costs to folks, those who moved further away from the office due to property prices being so high, etc? Zero. The only reference he made was that he gave a 3-month buffer so people can sort their stuff out.
I’m not saying he needed to change the answer, I’m a firm believer that Amazon can send people back to the office if they want. But considering thousands of employees will be sad and be negatively impacted — it’s interesting and telling that the impact wasn’t mentioned.
And I don’t think the callous shrug was just Amazon leadership being rude. I think that many of the leadership team honestly don’t realize how impactful it is to families to be able to work from their home regularly.
Plus, when you’re that senior, Amazon / work is your life. They probably just didn’t understand how some people feel about this change. I know that people wanting to work from home mostly results in eye rolling from senior leaders. I’ve heard it. “Sitting there in their pajamas — they just don’t want to get back to real work.”
For many people, it just meant their workday increased by 2-hours a day, and their time with their family decreased by at least 2-hours a day. Ouch.
Good Thing One — True ownership at a team level
At a team level, it’s simply amazing how much control individuals have over their experience.
As an entry level (level 5 remember) development manager working with my engineers, I could set small things like our project management process (whatever kanban waterfall agile process we wanted), sprint length, standup agenda / time / length, or core hours.
More importantly, we could collectively choose which projects we’d work on, and which projects we were too busy for. We could choose who worked on what projects (like which the senior engineer worked on, and which the new college hire worked on), which directly influenced which projects got done quickly, and which struggled.
We could choose to all swarm a single project, or split everything up and independently work.
Essentially, unless there was a very strong reason for something to be dictated from above, the default answer is that control goes down in the management hierarchy.
When people say that working at Amazon feels like working at an amazingly well-funded startup, this is core to what they mean. As a low level junior manager with a few engineers, it frequently felt like the only thing we were dictated were a few goals, and told “good luck!”
When someone claimed to be helpless to fix their current bad situation, you could almost always see that it was really in their control. They just hadn’t figured that out yet. Which was a big part of my job when I coached / mentored people. I would point out the various ways that they did had agency over their experience.
FYI - this is perhaps the core element to why some people had a great time at Amazon, and others didn’t. I am (without false modesty) a nice person. I liked the people on my team, and always prioritized giving them as much autonomy as I could, and protected them from bad things. This meant that my tiny startup was a pretty good place. If you had a bad manager, their tiny startup was probably a pretty horrible place to work because they also had true ownership over the experience.