Hiring SWEs and EMs — what are the negatives of hiring Amazon people?

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BejahungEnjoyer@reddit

I work at Amazon and all the individual contributors are great people. Senior IC's (Sr / L6 SDEs) can start to take on the bad management traits and most SDMs have these as well.

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As an l6 is an active battle to not take on the management traits. If you manage to avoid it you end up like me, just holding on until it the stock vest in a few months and then leaving this trainwreck of a company

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Adept-Log3535@reddit

Some of them truly believe in some of those leadership principles and wouldn’t stop yapping

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Ambitious-Tennis-940@reddit

The leadership principles, on paper, are not bad. But man are they applied poorly

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WrongThinkBadSpeak@reddit

Be wary of Joneston kool-aid drinkers

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LaughingIshikawa@reddit

I don't have anecdotes, but I would bet the majority of the problem is Amazon management thinking they can "solve" every problem by just telling their underlings to "work harder" a long with having ridiculously "optimistic" projections of what a single person can accomplish in a given time period, all in service of the Almighty shareholders.

From what I have heard from ex-Amazon people, this is generally the vibe. Some managers are wise enough to know it's toxic and unsustainable, and won't bring that energy with them... But some of them really drink the Kool Aid, and don't understand what's rotten with Amazon culture.

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kylecodes@reddit

I think in general former Amazon SDEs are fine. But i would be really suspicious of former managers.

It’s not even that they just say “work harder”, it’s the manipulative ways they demand people work harder. Setting arbitrary launch dates and then always pushing it back a week at a time, so every week for months is high pressure “we need to get this done before launch on Tuesday!”

One manager I had demanded I get a project done by the end of the month because “otherwise you’ll be blocking this entire other team, and that will block the launch, and that will…”. When I finished the project on time after working 80+ hours/week like a good little SDE, I found out the other team wouldn’t even be ready to start to integrate for another 6 weeks.

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Ambitious-Tennis-940@reddit

I've been working at Amazon as an sde 3 for 4 years now. I've never seen or heard of a project being delivered on time with the scope it was supposed to have.

Also no priority 1 items have ever been done.

It's constant firefighting for the new deadline tomorrow which by tomorrow is no longer the deadline.

Also a team of 8 devs may be working on 9 major initiatives at one time, so many the people who started their careers at Amazon do not know how to actually work with other devs to finish a project, as devs get very siloed

I've been oncall for a year maintaining a project that I did not write. I have been given no time to investigate it.

When I leave in January there will be nobody in the company who knows what it does, as everyone else has left.

And from what I can see this is not that uncommon.

Amazon is dieing slowly, it used to be high pressure but things did get done, but ironically the model is not scaling well into the sustainability phase Amazon finds themselves in now.

Will they figure this out before slowly bleeding out over the next half century, idk. I'm gone in Jan so not my problem

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kasakka1@reddit

I've seen this too. It was a lighter "We hope people will work through the weekend to hit the important deadline" type thing. I declined because I had plans I could not cancel. Some friends did work.

Stack ranking is the dumbest shit in the industry. Incentivizing good developers to go to trash teams to keep their jobs.

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callimonk@reddit

Yah my husband was asking about why companies even do it and I was like “honestly, I’m too autistic to really get it myself, but I’ve always just assumed it’s about the optics and politics”

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_hypnoCode@reddit

Nah, there is no amount of autism that will help you understand this shit. I took the test with my psychiatrist just in case and I score no where on it and this shit doesn't make any sense. It's just toxic.

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callimonk@reddit

Exactly! I’m here to be a better engineer and write code, and maybe help make opportunities for people like me who are at a disadvantage in some way. And that requires working on a team, with other people.

I remember being so shocked at Microsoft when I realized a coworker was gaslighting and manipulating me to make me look bad. Like I made it four and a half years at Amazon without a PIP, so I knew something was up and documented everything (otherwise, i probably wouldn’t have figured it out)

That shit caused so many shipping delays. If she had worked with me instead of against me, we likely would have been ahead of schedule.

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geekhaus@reddit

You'll see competent managers walking around the now full offices about 60% of the way through the half to start grabbing the weaker devs onto their teams, so they can cut them and keep their high performers.

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callimonk@reddit

Or at least, spin the politics one way or another. Myself and another dev had to constantly fix the code of one of these so-called performers because it always became our problem. Which then was spun to make us look bad.

Honestly, if it weren’t for the benefits, I’d never want to go back to FAANG or big tech. I sure as hell have no interest in leaving the startup I joined back in April. At least here, there’s only like 4 devs so we don’t have anyone to stack rank since we all own different parts of the stack. (Certainly pros/cons, but hah, shit left me needing therapy)

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_hypnoCode@reddit

Microsoft is by far the most aggressive company out there when it comes to stack ranking and have been using it since the 90s.

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samelaaaa@reddit

I have been at multiple companies that hired a few ex-Amazon people to management positions, and culture subsequently went to shit.

Obviously the causality isn't clear there, but why risk it? There are plenty of great people from less toxic companies.

I wouldn't count it against an IC under say, the Staff level. But for anyone in a more senior position I try to avoid people who spent more than a year or two at Amazon.

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DefinitelyNotAPhone@reddit

Former employer hired on several former high-ranking Amazon managers, and the (admittedly already shit) churn rate shot through the roof across the board complete with department-level stack ranking, completely unreasonable demands for quarterly goals/quotas, an unfailing obsession with quantitative-only measurements for success...

I think I watched 70% of the tech leads in my office churn inside 6 months because it was expected that they would be EMs, mentors, and 10x engineers all at once. Amazon managers are churned out to use their underlings like a steam engine uses coal.

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Ok_Suggestion5523@reddit

Can confirm, worked with a fair few ex amazon bods. The management types are fucking evil. Devs were actually decent. Interestingly the devs all had long term stress related illnesses.

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Sea-Us-RTO@reddit

Interestingly the devs all had long term stress related illnesses

Counterpoint: I've worked with a few ex-Amazon people in senior positions, and none of them have created toxic environments. There's a lot of potential selection bias in anecdotes in this thread.

My advice: Just cover it in the interview. We're talking about people who think toxic behavior is positive; they're not going to hide it as long as you ask about it in a neutral tone (i.e., don't signal to them what you think the right answer is). They'll be proud to tell you about their "effective" management strategies.

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samelaaaa@reddit

Thanks for posting an opposing anecdote. I don't like how these threads can start to pile onto a point of view, and my experience is just my own.

Honestly I think the toxic, stack ranked environment is just getting more common in big tech in general, and it's easy to misattribute it to any noticeable change.

I've still more bad than good experiences with ex-Amazon managers though :)

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BenOfTomorrow@reddit

Thanks. To be clear, I believe your experience, and I certainly have experienced poor/toxic leadership in various places.

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alienangel2@reddit

But for anyone in a more senior position I try to avoid people who spent more than a year or two at Amazon.

This specific comment?

Without revealing too much to avoid doxxing myself (tho I suspect it's far from an isolated case):

I worked at a company that hired a relatively high rank ex-Amazon manager for a relatively very high rank manager.

That's when stack rankings started and we started getting layoffs every 6 to 12 months.

Coincidence? Maybe, maybe not.

Emphasis mine.

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skelterjohn@reddit

Yes. A single data point, by itself, is not that useful. If there were ten such replies then it's pretty interesting. The OP called it an interesting data point. Then the pattern recognition in your brain honed in on part of the comment and regurgitated an irrelevant socialism. Honestly I'm not sure why you're arguing about this.

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xXxdethl0rdxXx@reddit

Fantastic. A lesser poster would have hesitated to continue engaging when confronted with such a ridiculously flimsy example of this “data”. You’re still standing behind it. You’re committed. That’s rare!

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skelterjohn@reddit

No I'm not, that's the whole problem. You don't understand what people are saying and insert what you wish they were.

I'm saying that an anecdote is a data point. Get a enough of them, and it's data. Maybe not the greatest data as Reddit surveys are fraught with selection bias and bots, but data none the less.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

OP here, you’re talking past each other a little, charitably.

From a hard science perspective, an anecdote is a subjective snapshot, taken informally, usually isolated. In that domain it is distinct from a data point, which is an objective/factual measurement. They’re different things and an anecdote isn’t a data point.

This is a legend, perpetuated by people who got fired quickly after getting hired because they were incompetent and tried to justify it.

It's an extremely time consuming effort to hire someone, no managers do that, especially because there are always people that are not meeting the bar in every team.

Also, the firing quota is yearly, not quarterly.

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alpacaMyToothbrush@reddit

Also, the firing quota is yearly, not quarterly.

Jesus fucking christ, can't you see it's insane to have a set quota at all?

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Life-Principle-3771@reddit

Personally no I don't see how it's insane. The URA percentage is 6%. Personally I think that the idea that 94% of your workforce is doing a good enough job that we don't want them gone is probably the more insane position. Hiring is incredibly scattershot and a shockingly high percentage of people are somewhere from incompetent to not good.

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Bobby-McBobster@reddit

I never said it isn't.

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lasooch@reddit

Yearly firing quota based on meeting the bar
Nobody sees their teammates as competition

Yeah mate those two don't go together.

It may be true no one hires to fire, but you can bet your ass that when there's a stack ranking with their jobs on the line, people will see each other as competition.

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No they weren't.

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lasooch@reddit

That still means they're your competition, if your team is not performing as well as the other teams. You can either burn yourself out trying to pull your team up, or get axed along with them if they underperform bad enough to put you at risk.

And it can stifle cooperation between teams, because it makes the other team not your friends whom you want to achieve great results with, but your opponents whom you want to outperform. Which means you're more likely to focus on your own goals instead of on the shared ones, etc. etc.

It's toxic as fuck and if you don't think it is, then you've drank too much koolaid already and you're one of those Amazon people I wouldn't want to hire.

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Bobby-McBobster@reddit

And I'm telling you there's no competitiveness between people. How long have you worked at Amazon so that we're clear on the fact that you're talking out of your ass?

There's an infinite supply of people who aren't good enough but make it through the hiring process to fire, there's absolutely no need to work against your teammates.

And if you had an ounce of common sense you'd realize that you cannot be a good performer if you're not also a good teammate.

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lasooch@reddit

How long have you worked at Amazon

Exactly 0 days (and I intend to keep it this way). I have worked at a company that introduced stack rankings though, and also I can apply reason to understand that if you make it a policy that an org has to fire n worst performing people every year, then people we'll end up competing not to be among those n.

there's no competitiveness

Sure bud.

infinite supply of people who aren't good enough but make it through the hiring process

Unless, I suppose, Amazon is that bad at hiring. Wasn't the case at my company, the vast majority of people who made it through the hiring process were great.

cannot be a good performer if you're not also a good teammate

The actual truth is "you cannot be deemed a good performer if you also cannot make the decision makers think you're a good teammate". You can be a meh performer and a meh teammate as long as you can bullshit them well enough.

And I'm not talking about people being in your face with it, like "fuck your goals, I'll just do mine and I'll make sure to take an hour every day to sabotage you". I'm talking about an underlying vibe of avoiding supporting others in less obvious ways, general distrust, less close cooperation due to the fact that everyone is disposable so people don't want to invest their time into those relationships and many other little things gnawing at the teams.

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Bobby-McBobster@reddit

That's a whole lot of words for literally 0 experience backing them.

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lasooch@reddit

Not bashing people from FAANGs. Bashing specifically the people who are indoctrinated into stack ranking and companies that use stack ranking. "Firing quota" is enough I need to hear to know I never want to work there, lmao.

But sure, I'll be transparent: I applied to Google, once, some 9 years ago. I didn't get a response, which didn't surprise me at all considering the circumstances under which I applied (\~95% of my applications in that period were ghosted, of course I don't know exact reasons for each of them but I know the reasons for the trend).

Never applied to a FAANG again. I think I would make the cut - I don't know that I would - but I value work/life balance way too much to bother trying. My current job is cushy, interesting, mostly WFH, pays more than enough, although I'm sure you make more money than me.

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TheNinjaFennec@reddit

Peer reviews (inter-/intra-team) are a significant part of perf reviews & promotion recommendations. Helping the people around you perform well and grow as engineers is a hard requirement for getting decent reviews and being promoted past the entry level dev position. You can’t make management think you support other devs without those other devs vouching for your support, and that can only come from you actually supporting them.

I guess you could consider helping your team members with the underlying motivation of looking good to management as cynical or artificial, but from my experience most people are generally looking for every opportunity to help other devs on projects. The stack ranking is done at a high enough level within organizations that it doesn’t really counterbalance the more team-local motivations.

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illustrious_feijoa@reddit

At the risk of getting downvoted to oblivion, this tracks with my experience at Amazon. To be clear, I despise the URA quotas and believe toxicity tends to proliferate at Amazon for a number of reasons. But I never witnessed a hire-to-fire, and I never felt tension with my teammates. Maybe I just got lucky, but my teammates were incredibly supportive, and we still keep in touch (I left Amazon about a year ago).

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Bobby-McBobster@reddit

I think people on the CS subs are just trying to find ways to justify why they wouldn't want to work for a FAANG anyway, while the real reason is they couldn't even if they wanted to. For a profession based on logic and data, it's absolutely pathetic to see people dismiss first hands experience but praise anecdotes from the third cousin of their ex-wife's daughter's dentist.

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HQxMnbS@reddit

Also haven’t seen a single person fired

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Bobby-McBobster@reddit

Oh I have seen plenty but outside of 1 or 2 occasions where it was because they had a beef with their direct manager, they were all perfectly understandable.

To be fair a large portion of those are just people never passing their probation period.

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Chronotheos@reddit

“there are always people that are not meeting the bar”

Those are the people you didn’t hire.

This is the fundamental problem with this management style is that it’s relative and not objective. You’re not measuring the team against the real competition.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

Unfortunately not just Amazon. I hear a lot of big tech is doing the same thing.

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vom-IT-coffin@reddit

It's not even just tech at this point.

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IlliterateJedi@reddit

That's what Enron did back in the day.

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I was at Amazon for 6 years and have done over 200 interview loops. I'm pretty sure this is not true... We judged all candidates the same. There's never a case where we passed a bad candidate.

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you-create-energy@reddit

Are you saying there weren't firing quotas? Or that you personally never intentionally pushed a bad candidate?

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random314@reddit

I don't know if there are during quota... Never experienced it and my team was never pressured like that... We had the same team members for a few years as well... I do see people put on pip but they were legitimately bad.

I have never personally intentionally pushed a bad candidate. Why would I ever do that? Where did you hear that Amazon purposely hires bad candidates from?

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proxy@reddit

I can't speak to the first one (unless you're talking about layoff quotas, which is common across the industry), but

Or that you personally never intentionally pushed a bad candidate?

Also as a result of this, signal on their abilities is low regardless of their tenure. If they stayed a long time, there's above average risk it's due to nepotism and their lead being a hire-to-fire guy. If they had a short tenure, there's a high risk they were hired to be fired regardless of their talent.

All you know is they passed the hiring process, which is more rigorous than no-name shops but still very gameable by grinding LC memorization instead of being "good"

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bombaytrader@reddit

ICs are probably ok. No indian manager from Amazon. Run them through 3 culture interviews if you have to.

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UnworthySyntax@reddit

Almost no Indian managers in general (if they are over 40), but give them a fair chance during interviews. The culture they were raised in teaches them to push people until they are burned out and then push to fire them. I've worked with enough and it's generally hell.

SaltyBawlz@reddit

100% this. I will never work for a manager who came from Amazon again. Worst work environment of my life.

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Tired__Dev@reddit

We have two SWEs from Amazon and they both hated it. They were politically fired and ended up rising up the engineering hierarchy fast in our company. I had a manager at another company that also became our product manager. He was useless.

A lot of FAANG are acquisition companies that seem to favour the new thing. High turn over rate eats into profits and companies trying to build products with budgets in the low tens of millions die due to the performative nature of management in these companies.

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plinkoplonka@reddit

I can actually give you some of these. I worked for them for several years.

You'll see people say one thing and do another. Anything to get a leg up on someone else. It's that cutthroat there. To put some perspective on that - I was an Accenture consultant for 5 years, and AWS made it seem like kindergarten by comparison.

Add Googlers, Oracle etc

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GronklyTheSnerd@reddit

The key to understanding Amazon is that it has an ideology. Supposedly it’s based on the “Leadership Principles.” But the truth is more complicated than that. If you want to understand Amazon, I recommend reading The Everything Store and The Everything War.

The good ones didn’t drink the koolaid. What you should ask is “what things did you disagree with at Amazon?” Anyone who is a decent human being should have a long list. The problem will be to get anyone to tell you in an interview.

The single most toxic trait is common with most corporations, just taken much further: a willingness to consider people to be interchangeable, replaceable parts in a machine. As one of my managers put it, “engineers must be fungible.”

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necrothitude_eve@reddit

As one of my managers put it, “engineers must be fungible.”

I had a director say that we are all fungible in an all-hands after he fired 15% of the org.

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csanon212@reddit

I propose looking people in the eye, and in a serious tone asking "Are you a replicant?"

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cbunn81@reddit

Describe in single words only the good things that come into your mind about your mother.

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KhonMan@reddit

The good ones didn’t drink the koolaid. What you should ask is “what things did you disagree with at Amazon?” Anyone who is a decent human being should have a long list. The problem will be to get anyone to tell you in an interview.

Yeah this is a tough spot for an interviewee because it's a bad look to trash your current employer.

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cassidamius@reddit

I actually think it’s a great question because you can see whether they’re capable of constructive criticism of something they’re very familiar with

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mrdevlar@reddit

This, there's a wide berth between "my boss was an assface" and "the company culture resulted in poor priorities among upper management"

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commonsearchterm@reddit

I find it hard to believe that someone asking this question is in a position to pay an engineer enough to be worth it for someone from Amazon to leave for it.

Stereotyping like this is just bizarre.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

I’d argue the opposite. But I also wouldn’t have understood that point when I was early or even mid career.

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commonsearchterm@reddit

Whats the job and pay?

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

SWEs and EMs. Comparable or better pay to Amazon at the same levels. Seems like anecdotally 20% of my apps come from Amazon.

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meatdrawer25@reddit

Former Amazon SDE 1 here. I left voluntarily around 2023 very shortly before SDE 2 transition (I was functionally SDE 2, just without the title). I’m mostly adding my 2 cents around what other people have said here.

First and foremost, Amazon is a massive company, so you can’t really make a broad judgment. I’ve heard horror stories about yelling matches and such but I never witnessed it.

I worked directly for a senior SDM, turned director (SDM 3-4?) before I’d left. They were wonderful. Very kind, very smart, always stuck their neck out for the team and protected us from stupid stuff. In typical Amazon fashion I had like 4 managers in the few years there. All of them were fine.

SDEs were very competent. I only met a few that I’d actively avoid working with. Amazon (at least my org) focused on hiring “fungible” engineers, aka you could throw them at a broad spectrum of problems and they’d figure it out in a reasonable amount of time.

Having worked at a few other tech companies I’ve noticed that the communication style is more direct at Amazon, but not necessarily rude. There were definitely people that came off as rude, but they’d usually apologize afterwards if that was the case. Being a dick wasn’t really tolerated, and it’s a good way to lose influence in any company.

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deuteros@reddit

I would caution against jumping to conclusions about people based on where they've worked or what they've worked on. I've seen this happen so many times, where someone is biased against a candidate before even talking to them because "they worked for ABC company", or "they've never worked with XYZ technology". They are almost always wrong.

I’d like to add that the Amazon folks brought some really good culture changes, too: we really benefitted from their focus on polished written communication and on engineering and operational excellence. “Make sure it scales to a zillion users” wasn’t appropriate for new products in our org, but the Amazon folks experience at scale was legitimately really helpful for our products that had market fit.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

As much as I loathe the constant suggestion of writing a whole PRFAQ constantly from them, I do recognize the value of writing things down for clarity, so think I can learn something here or sharpen my process a bit. I don’t think it’s worth leaning in as hard as they do, but letting the pendulum swing slightly more toward more writing is probably good.

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doyouevencompile@reddit

Writing is the process to clarify your own thoughts as well.

I think it’s a much better way to communicate your thoughts and vision than anything else

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myusernameisaphrase@reddit

100% agree. The process of clarifying your thoughts can helps identify weak ideas, arguments, and bad assumptions. You can then work on fixing that, ending up with better doc with better clarity.

I've had this happen on any number of docs I've written. Sometimes it's straight forward to fix, other times it can lead to better ideas, and in a few occasions it actually cancelled projects because they didn't make sense.

The goal isn't to write the perfect doc, it's to get to the best outcome you can as a team. People can lose sight of this, which is why I think it gets a bad rap sometimes.

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loptr@reddit

Writing is the process to clarify your own thoughts as well.

100%

I feel that this is the true power of note taking/writing things down in general, just the act of [re]phrasing the knowledge into coherent sentences to write down helps structure the thoughts and solidifies the knowledge/memory.

In my considerable experience in the topic, I can tell you there’s 3 general buckets of people here.

The cut throats where all the PIP and hire to fire stories are real.
The coasters.
The ones that actually care about what they are doing.

Group 1 has essentially taken over by implementing promo driven development across the company. Group 2 is essentially waiting to be piped (on purpose) to get severance and bounce. And group 3 has been incredibly reduced in size and is struggling.

I consider myself part of group 3, and have taken pride in being able to choose to work in teams that have impact on people. Won’t say further to avoid doxxing. I genuinely love what my team is doing right now.

How have I survived this long? This is where autism comes in 😂 I have been top performer basically for the last 10 years. I achieved this by staying away from politics and just focus on meaningful output that doesn’t require me to sell it around for it to have impact, to a degree where when OLR comes around, nobody can discuss the outputs and rarely it gets discussed. TT and move to the next one. It also helps that I mentor more people that I can count, I help struggling people to bounce back up and provide significant help getting people (who deserve it) get promoted.

Why is this relevant to your question? It’s relevant because you need to avoid group 1. At all costs. Group 2 should be fine, and group 3 is suffering bad imposter syndrome (dealing with it right now, Amazon is a toxic relationship).

When dealing with internal transfers I can weed them out easily via all the internal tools we have, but externally, it can be a little harder. If they use examples where they emphasize on “this is how we did it/do it at Amazon” or “this is how you should do it” and not presenting any sort of flexibility, should be your biggest red flag.

Job hunting has been really hard for me exactly because of all the reasons people mention here. Most of which are, unfortunately, true. 😭

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eightnotes5@reddit

Hello, fellow group 3 member. As cliche as it might sound, being in that group has made me “lose my spark.” My current team is so toxic and I feel relief from just having made up my mind to leave.

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StockRoom5843@reddit

I can’t speak for ICs, but never hire leadership from Amazon. Unless you want your life to suck of course

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humanquester@reddit

I know a happy Amazon guy who has a PhD and works in AI, and an unhappy one who manages a warehouse. I would say both are super-go-getters and more motivated by money than the joy of doing their jobs, but that can by a minus or a plus, depending on what you want. They aren't that creative and their personalities are a bit cold, I wouldn't enjoy working under either one, but it wouldn't be terrible either.

My former boss (director turned VP of Eng) was an Ex-Google, Ex-Microsoft guy. Mind you, this is a 500ppl startup, less than 100 in engineering.

We go to an offsite and he starts talking about how we shouldn't be collaborating with other domains in engineering, we should be cut-throat, we need to worry about us and ours first, we need to have a "startup within a startup" mentality.

Which works for large companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft because they're separate product lines. We didn't have that. We are one product line.

He ended up getting fired, he had fired two women engineering directors because they disagreed with his cutthroat mentality, and when asked about it in at an all-hands in front of the CTO, he lashed out at the engineers who asked, who were coincidentally women.

He and I also butted heads a lot because we didn't see eye to eye on stuff. I was a tech lead turned manager, kinda forced into the role because he gave my tech lead position to another engineer in a promotion despite not having the headcount for it. He was being investigated by our ethics board for sexism and stuff, and I gave a statement when asked if I experienced anything from him directly.

I said I didn't think he was sexist in his heart, but the way he tried to run engineering was detrimental to women, especially women who challenged him. He tried to run engineering as if it was Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft and they aren't shining beacons of ethics or role models in the way they run either, and to the women in engineering, it was a distinction without a difference.

So yeah... Dude ruined our engineering department. I stayed as an EM for some time to rebuild it, but ultimately left for another startup as a principal engineer.

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teslas_love_pigeon@reddit

FYI you don't have to be explicitly sexist to be a misogynist. A person in power, like your former boss, changing the culture to be extremely hostile to women is sexist in itself.

At some point you have to acknowledge that business culture can change any time for any reason, this person knew that and actively made it worse rather than better.

Do good intentions matter if you're still deliberating hurting people?

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davy_jones_locket@reddit

For sure. I just like to be explicitly clear between someone who holds sexist beliefs vs someone who participates in sexist behavior.

I spent three years working for a VC that focused on early-stage and pre-seed startups, and while I absolutely won't pretend to be an expert (if I was I wouldn't be posting here, I'd be loaded), it did give me a little insight into what many VC's look for in a good return.

It's just not really a thing. The "startup in a startup" mentality is an explicit red flag, and one commonly called out in business programs as a failure to understand the parameters of your business. While the mentality is nice, it's just not attainable when your reality is that you are your own backer. You don't take the same risks, you don't make the same relationships, and you absolutely don't seek the same market opportunities - you can't because your ceiling is already defined by your parent company.

If it were a thing...why be a part of the parent company in the first place? They are offering no competitive advantage as your owners, and success likely means being swallowed anyway.

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BomberRURP@reddit

California ideology strikes again! Fucking cunts

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acroback@reddit

I am not sure about Amazon since I never had to deal with them but did have to deal with a new svp who came from a multibillion gaming conglomerate.

I am director of Engg at my company and know all flaws we have I believe.

Obviously I clashed with the svp repeatedly. I think the problem is that he has good intentions but extremely myopic view of things. The fundamental problem is you cannot take a culture where you have thousands of engineers and apply that to a 50 person engineering team.

It just doesn’t work.

I’ll give a classic example.

I was called out to deliver something by date. Obviously to do that since I was being called out in update meeting, I had to skip a step. And in next meeting I was again called out for skipping the step.

It boiled my blood and I realized that some of the dudes from FANG companies just want to make things stressful.

After that I don’t do that, you need something write it down to skip the process.

Not to mention really confusing instructions e.g “Enggrs are not being pushed enough” combined with “Enggs do not have depth of knowledge” “Why are enggrs taking so much time”.

May be management should focus on fixing the process instead of doling out conflicting instructions.

I have seen Engineers crumbling in race to deliver things asap.

/rant over

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Gunny2862@reddit

Biggest problem tends to be with senior/execs who come over from there. They can bring a super aggressive/confrontational style that was expected before.

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Herrowgayboi@reddit

sobrietyincorporated@reddit

PTSD

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valadil@reddit

I’ve worked with Amazon people and I know a few socially who are all perfectly reasonable. The red flags I’ve seen show up in interviews. You’ll have someone who picked up a best practice that applies at Amazon scale, without realizing that the best practice doesn’t apply in other contexts. E.g. I run a data schema whiteboarding panel at my current job. We get amazon candidates who won’t touch any flavor of join because it’s bad for performance and won’t scale.

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kaumaron@reddit

This has been my experience with most FAANG+ people I've interacted with. But mostly if they never worked outside of big tech. The naivety of everything works like big tech is funny.

If their team environment wasn’t too bad and they aren’t jaded, they’re strong owners, delivery and communicate deadlines well and as a manager if you assure them and help them get over the Amazon PTSD they flourish

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EnderMB@reddit

As a current Amazonian, my first thing to say after reading these comments is "holy shit, absolutely do not make assumptions about people..."

With that said, here are a few of my thoughts about the Amazon culture in general:

It's a Bezos cult of personality. Amazon is first and foremost a Management company, not a tech company. The LP's enable Amazon to create managers in this image, and while it may "work" at Amazon you can look at other companies with a well-known management track and see next to no Amazon alumni that have succeeded using Amazon practices - even though many of them try to rip it off. That's not the case for places like Bloomberg, JPMC, Accenture, etc.
If you were to ask all Amazonians if stack ranking is a good idea, you'd get maybe 90% no's. I've lost many friends to it, and I've seen it rip teams apart when someone goes through Focus, succeeds, and then immediately decides "fuck this team" and transfers. Pairing with the above, I've absolutely seen SWE's go through Pivot, be forced out, and succeed elsewhere. A friend of mine got booted as a L5 SDE, and is now Staff at Google.
Amazon has been on a layoff track for 3-4 years, and during that time the expectations of stack ranking have been more cut throat than normal. I raise this because many people have joined and left Amazon only seeing this side of Amazon, which is itself a failure of executive leadership.
Purely my opinion, but one of the biggest failures I see at Amazon is a failure of reflection on those that leave. You often see L5 SDE's or great L6 SDM's with nowhere to grow, or clearly way more experience/skill than their role suggests, leave for greener pastures. Amazon does base-level exit interviews, but there is no mechanism for handling situations where a bar-raising employee leaves, outside of "here's your questionnaire through Connections, bye".
There is some wisdom in how Amazon runs technical projects, and you can absolutely learn a lot that you wouldn't learn elsewhere. With that said, like many big tech companies, the problems/tools can be so specific, that you'll meet an engineer or manager that absolutely struggles anywhere outside of those parameters.

lord_braleigh@reddit

Well, you're correct that a behavioral interview won't reflect your prejudices back at you as well as asking an internet forum to confirm your prejudices for you.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

The anecdotes are so prevalent and pervasive about Amazon culture that it’s a data point worth considering

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Fresh-String6226@reddit

SWEs seem fine. Even line EMs seem mostly fine. Where it gets problematic is with M2+, directors, and higher - people that have the power to control the overall culture.

Amazon has a particularly toxic culture in how it deals with employees, although it mostly works to get things done. So people hired externally from Amazon at a higher level will often attempt to implement those same toxic tactics in their new companies.

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csanon212@reddit

People at M2+ are absolutely ladder-climbers and some of the most dangerous snakes you can encounter in the jungle.

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krossPlains@reddit

I’ve worked with gen 1 and 2 ex Amazon devs. They are top notch and left because they grew out of being abused. Managers might be a different story…

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colonel_crunch_82@reddit

I also can confirm. I’ve worked with 2 different ex-Amazon employees. 1 was a principal engineer and the other was a VP of Engineering. Both were complete asses. Every minute decision was a throw down and you better be ready to fight to the death.

Ex-aws sde1 here. Can share some insights.

EMs - Don’t hire. They’ll make your team quit and keep replacing & claim boast about managing a big team.

SWE - gauge behaviour. They’re good at interviews but not drastically better at actual work.

Anecdotes:

My manager could bs a lot. - he hired someone just to fire them. - he lied a lot, hollow promises & giving excuses. - he used to throw engineers under the bus when his ass was on the line. - he was convinced that the best managers are the ones who keep their reportees in line / stress & being toxic is what helps grow business. And believed that he was somehow doing a favour by pushing the devs. - he used to get his work done from devs & later take credit. - I tried to switch teams & my manager promised to support it but quickly spoke to the HRs to find ways to block it.

SWEs are of all kinds.

be aware of the ones that directly come from college, haven’t got a reality check & stay delusional & feel superior.
some have a tendency to put you down / laugh if you ask questions.
There’s this thing where everyone stays in a group of 4-5 friends who help each other & gossip don’t help other groups.
some devs were managers pets cuz the managers make false promises.
underestimating problems because they feel they know everything is super common.
few had a tendency to boast & throw others under the bus
unhealthy levels of competitiveness making it toxic.

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newprint@reddit

Anyone have anecdotes on concrete examples of toxic traits I should look out for?

I mean, come one, this is r/ExperiencedDevs sub, not r/ArmchairExpert. Amazon is enormously large organization with 100,000s, with hundreds people coming in and going out of the org. The fact that org treats people like shit, doesn't mean that majority of people working for them are made of the same dough.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

Yeah agreed. But the anecdotes are pervasive and universally agreed with. So it’s reasonable to mitigate the risk a little by being particularly considerate.

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newprint@reddit

You are asking a shitty question. Your question is posed in the same ways as Amazon posed it: they refused to hire bunch of my very qualified friends, who were US Army combat veterans, commissioned officer, under pretext that they found them to be toxic for Amazon work environment, because they were veterans, and veterans make up very large group of people in DMV area, especially in DC/Virginia.

I don't disagree with the overall sentiment in this thread, but anecdotally my current manager spent many years at Amazon, then a stint at Meta before joining our company and he's awesome.

So it's definitely possible to hire good EMs from those places, even if the overall trend is negative. Now can you reliably filter for the good ones in your interview process? That's a better question.

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rexspook@reddit

Amazon gets hate because it is so big. There are an enormous number of employees without those toxic traits. I would probably focus on work life balance focused questions to determine if they fall into the bucket of toxic employees

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TheHoboHarvester@reddit

Ex-amazon engineers are generally great
Ex-amazon EMs are generally great
Ex-amazon senior leaders who are brought into high level positions and then try to transform your company into Amazon 2.0 are the worst

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iprocrastina@reddit

Notice that invariably the people who say you shouldn't hire ex-Amazon people have never worked at the company (or even another FAANG) so all their perceptions are based on what they read on the internet and hear from a friend of a friend.

One dead giveaway someone doesn't know what they're talking about on this topic is when they claim Amazon's stack ranking practice means everyone there is a backstabber. The reason that's such a dead giveaway is because Amazon's ranking is done across orgs, not teams. The people you actually work with are only a small pool of the people you're being ranked against, so undercutting your coworkers not only won't help you, it'll put a huge target on your back (for the usual reasons no one likes backstabber) and be valid justification for firing you (because you're dragging down team productivity with your antics). Likewise, to get promoted requires expanding your scope of influence, and again, that's very hard if people don't like you and avoid you. You have to play nice.

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

No, I don’t know the backgrounds of anyone responding. I have to take every anecdote as a single, potentially-untrustworthy data point and try to draw some general heuristics.

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The_0bserver@reddit

Everyone I've seemed to work with coming from there (none at senior levels though) has had some form of trauma issues.

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BoogerSugarSovereign@reddit

It's bullshit to prejudice against a developer because of where they've worked they deserve to be evaluated fairly as individuals

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

It’s important when evaluating an individual to develop a holistic picture of who they are and their fitness for a role. That includes where they have been employed. Unfortunately Amazon has really gained a blanket reputation for toxicity where no other company has to such a pervasive extent. So it’s worth considering this specifically, and specifically why they chose Amazon and why they continued to work there. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER.

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KhonMan@reddit

So it’s worth considering this specifically, and specifically why they chose Amazon and why they continued to work there.

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LadyLudo19@reddit

I mean, if Amazon culture is the problem wouldn’t it be a good sign that they’re leaving it?

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

Well, people leave jobs for all kinds of reasons. One reason might be “leaving Amazon because it’s toxic,” which is probably a reasonable green flag. But there are a thousand other reasons, such as vesting a lot of stock after a decade and wanting to do something else, or simply being laid off. The folks that apply are often pretty senior, L6 or L7 equivalent, so they’re had lots of time to absorb bad culture.

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LogicRaven_@reddit

Being L6 doesn’t mean they spent many years at that company, they could have joined the company as L6.

Do yourself a favour and put away your prejudice and assumptions. You will meet individuals during the interview with various experiences.

You might want to focus on making the behavioural step so that it finds the right fit for your team. What questions could reveal their true nature?

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Full_Top3691@reddit (OP)

I don’t know if you’re specifically trying to be pedantic, but clearly I can see the resumes of applicants. If they were at Amazon for a year as an L6, that’s way different than spending a decade at Amazon to eventually become an L6 or Amazon equivalent.

That being said, your last point is exactly what I am trying to frame, hence the post.

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thr0waway12324@reddit

You’re going to kill your company culture if you hire these people.

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throwaway0134hdj@reddit

Usually due to burnout and the infamous rank and tank after your productivity dips

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lost12487@reddit

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evanthx@reddit

Are they looking to get people into productive positions, solve issues positively, and find ways to make everyone succeed - or do they see people as replaceable commodities, and go straight to firing people with no regard to what that does to people?

The second kind also tends to hire people like themselves, so … it can transform a culture from a great place to work to a great place to practice your backstabbing.

I have worked with some great people from Amazon. Just … kind of make sure they still have their humanity, I guess.

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BigCardiologist3733@reddit

they are toxic and inept and only know how to play politics

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stoneg1@reddit

I am ex-amazon, i had mixed experiences with EMs and i dont have a good way to filter them. But for SWEs i do, Amazon has super high turnover and very poor retention of true high level engineers. So their high level engineers often arent really all that good. Amazon also has a “promo via chaos pipeline” that can get someone promoted well beyond their abilities.

I would avoid anyone who spent a long time at Amazon (4-5+ years) and got a handful of promotions, often the were just the beneficiaries of chaos. I would also avoid people with under 1.5 year tenure, its easy to get hired by Amazon, but that means they get some awful developers.

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activematrix99@reddit

They hired many of the worst workers and technologists that I know, including people that I fired. Concrete examples are mostly from my spouse, she has a team at "outer FAANG" that is 50% Amazon AWS folks and they are all awful . . . opinionated, ignorant, gatekeepers, useless, constantly creating blockers and underperforming . . . just awful, awful people. Of course, every workforce and environment is different, but the obvious toxicity combined with the incompetence is hard to get over for me. Hard no.

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There’s the ones who left before the burnout, and the rest who are fried to a crisp.