[serioussecurity]

Ruthless environments where low performers are stack ranked out of the company creates a psychologically unsafe working environment that encourages toxic competition and makes it hard to retain your best people. I got out a long time ago, but Amazon struggled to retain their best employees because they'd go somewhere else. Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.

[tbrownaw]

> Amazon had such absurd turn over that they are running out of people to interview. It's a wood chipper, designed to burn out young, insecure engineers while extracting two years of boilerplate from them.

I thought those news articles were about warehouse workers, not IT workers.

[whimsicalism]

It's also true of their engineering - they have a terrible reputation which caused them to raise salaries a ton in the last 2 years just to try to get comparable engineers.

They easily pay 30% more for the same engineer just because of their culture/reputation.

[jrd259]

This is absurd. As an Amazonian for eight years I can say it would be absurd to do this. First, hiring someone is a lot of work. Second, we don't get much value from people the first six months anyway. We don't hire people to do boilerplate. We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

[rurp]

> We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

:eyeroll:

This reads like PR fluff and flies against the experiences shared by a lot of employees, current and former. Amazon is a huge company with a lot of variation between teams so I'm sure it's not a meat grinder for everyone, but they don't have this reputation for no reason.

[BeetleB]

> We hire people who want to obsess over their customers.

I keep hearing this, but as a customer, I don't see it.

Amazon retail experience is poor.

The layout of the site sucks (so many clicks just to see all the reviews).

They used to allow comments to reviews, which often were very useful (e.g. top review complaining about something not working, and the comments explain how to fix it). But reviewers weren't notified of the comments so they couldn't engage. And to top it all of, they recently removed all the comments.

The reviews have been gamed, not very useful.

They still let people make product pages with very different products as "formats", and that skews the reviews the wrong way.

Lots of counterfeit product issues. Perhaps more common: Problems with comingling items. I know it doesn't happen often, but being burned once is bad enough. I recently bought a toy for my daughter's birthday. The box had creases. Upon opening it was clear this was a used item. Some of the items were out of their (sealed) packaging. Perhaps my mistake for not examining it before, but whenever I buy from Walmart or Target, I don't even have to think this will be a problem. Fixing it up with a great return policy is not a solution. Oh, and I couldn't return it. They recently made it hard to contact a human, and the automated return system on their web site wouldn't let me return if I had used it. I had to open it as we couldn't change her birth date.

The search sucks. Way too many results that have nothing to do with what I searched. eBay, of all sites, is way better in this regard.

I've also been an Amazon seller (FBA). The seller portal was crap.

[serioussecurity]

Done much crying at your desk recently?

My boss at Amazon told me he was happy that his baby was born prematurely, because it meant he could be back at work in time for a launch.