Amazon reviews

If you can work somewhere else, you most likely should. To start with, the work environment is soul crushing and more stressful than working in an airport terminal. The noise level is so great that you will need to wear headphones throughout the day. I worked in buildings which were so overcrowded that you often had to wait for three elevators to find one you could squeeze onto. I am sure that they were in violation of the fire code. For scientists, you will drain your human capital and have little opportunity to learn new skills or deepen your knowledge. Don't even ask about getting Amazon to pay for journal subscription -- you are expected to scrounge papers from friends still in academia or off the Internet. The "mentors" I had were largely useless and it is virtually impossible to earn a promotion without superhuman efforts, i.e., having no work-live balance. In addition, there is a culture of micromanagement which comes down from the top. This attitude makes it difficult to research and to solve important problems which are costing the company millions. And, this is not limited to a single manger -- I had five in two years, all of whom were worse than any manager I had in my 25-year career prior to Amazon. When you attempt to make changes, it can take six months or more of politicking and fighting the Agile/scrum schedule to launch your improvement into production. Amazon takes the leadership principles seriously, but "Deliver Results" and "Bias for Action" trump everything, even correctness. No one seems to remember who made $50MM mistakes, but they do remember who didn't deliver the XYZ feature on time by giving up endless evenings and weekends. Next, read the fine print on everything you sign. Amazon has many pernicious ways of clawing back money from you when you leave, e.g., you must stay two years to avoid repaying relocation expenses and you will only receive matching contributions to your 401(k) if you stay three years. In addition, the infrastructure is "frugal" and often unreliable. If you work in retail and need to run a query in Q4, it can take a day or more to run. Finally, when the market turns against Amazon -- and it will -- the stock will take a major haircut because of the insane P/E ratio.

(Sorry this is so long-- I left my job of five years to work at home for Amazon and was fired while still in training. I want to let prospective employees know how very little it takes to get fired though, and how you may not even know it's coming. --During interview and recruitment, I was told I would be on a 'chat' team to assist customers with technical issues via instant message. This was not true and I was assigned to a frontline phone support team-- a horrible assignment and definitely not one I would have left my former job for. I really doubt it was intentional but it certainly something they should have told me. --They called me back a few days after the interview and asked if I could start two days later (!). I could not since I had been with my employer for about five years and wanted to give them two weeks of notice that I was leaving-- only fair since we had a great working relationship and they depended on me for many things. We're still friends outside of work. The recruiter agreed (or said they did, anyway) and rescheduled me for training so that I could give notice and I thought everything was looking good, until training started. --A little over a week into training, a situation with family came up and I needed an hour of personal time-- I asked for the time and was told how to handle these requests. A couple of days later, I was contacted by my manager (which is pretty funny because didn't know I had one until then) and they wanted to talk about my attendance issues-- surprising since I didn't know I had done something wrong (I didn't say this, of course). About 10 minutes into this call, my manager brought in someone from HR as well. It was immediately clear to me that this was a well-versed routine and that they were trying to pressure me into quitting (which I wouldn't). With the HR person on the call, my manager went on the offensive and immediately asked me why I punched in precisely 20 minutes early every single day--- a really strange accusation since it's completely untrue-- I signed in and out exactly when I was supposed to and I still wonder where this question came from. Did my manager have the wrong person, or was it just an attempt to throw me off or provoke me? I'll probably never find out. We were told in the training that we had a window of approximately sixty seconds to punch in and out, which is really not enough time since we had to use an RSA token and PIN to sign into their VPN (a little device that gives you a code to sign into their network), then had to remotely connect to our desktops, then finally login into a time-keeping site and hit the 'punch clock' button. After that, you had 4 minutes left to sign into four different communication platforms (email, group chat, instant message, and their knowledge bank. I can only imagine how many of the other trainees had similar experiences or worse... A shame since I was a huge fan of Amazon before I went through all this.