Amazon walking back raises after internal bug miscalculated compensation
Resigned some time back. After joining I realized what a sh*thole I fell into and decided to brave it out for some time to get the FAANG stamp. I usually journal interesting work instances and my thoughts on them. Here are some from Amazon:<p>1. Teammates are out for blood. They go out of the way to ruin their teammates metrics. So much so that manager has to intervene because overall team metrics are declining due to this. Additionally, the metrics tracked are insanely stupid such as no of comments, revisions on a PR. This makes sure no healthy discussion&#x2F;debate can happen on a piece of code.<p>2. Manager asks to crunch for no apparent reason. The problem with greedy and selfish managers is that everything looks critical to them. They only want to appease the upper management without any thought to people who will actually work with the deadlines.<p>3. People expect u to sacrifice weekends for &quot;learning&quot; internal tools. They quote everything as &quot;learning experience&quot;.<p>4. Hell is an agile sprint system that has been optimized to require 10 hour days. We were required to estimate tasks for up to minutes and even then manager questions and pushes to reduce timelines.<p>5. Some great words from my manager - &quot; Leaders never sit quiet. If u hv nothing to say, then speak anything or just say i agree&quot;. One guy follows this religiously. Another say - &quot;Work on ownership aspect. If the guy reviewing ur work is not approving, its ur problem.&quot; I really wanted to quit right after this line.<p>6. If someone gives low Connections score, the whole team is reprimanded and huge &quot;discussions&quot; of pointing fingers happens.<p>7. All senior engineers and management give different advice on paper and verbally. This is because if the actions succeeds, they&#x27;ll be lauded for &quot;good management&quot; and on failure, they can point towards their messages of concerns. They&#x27;ve mastered the politics of &quot;gather all credit, divert all blame&quot;.<p>8. Deadlines are very top down where management promises castle in the sky and then asks the people below to achieve it no matter what. We&#x27;ve designed a whole cluster of services in a few hours and got some rubber stamp approvals as well. Most folks then get promoted and jump onto other greenfield projects not dealing with the aftermath.<p>9. People here are insanely subservient and those who aren&#x27;t are generally kicked or they themselves jump to other teams.<p>These are very contrarion to my previous jobs where most points were very normal stuff between coworkers.