What Is The Internal Culture Like At Amazon?
“As a former Amazonian the one thing that’s clear is each group is very much its own entity and each will behave very differently based on the type of person at the top,” writes Kevin Saito on Quora. “For example, the AWS team has a reputation for working countless hours and always being behind.”
Saito is among Quora users who have been discussing the internal culture at Amazon after one user posed the question “What is the internal culture like at Amazon?” One anonymous user writes, “For an engineer? It’s draining. Absolutely draining. The oncall shifts, constant technical debt, overwork… I never worked so hard and then made to feel guilty for not getting enough done. Good grief and good riddance. Stopped working there last year…”
Michael Chen, a former eBay employee writes, “Based on interactions with recruiters, friends who have worked there, and Amazon employees in the working world, a couple of things stand out, and I’ll contrast with eBay where I worked…It’s a very customer driven company; everything they do is with the goal of improving the experience for the customer (we were more revenue focused in the short term)…”
Jim Skinner, senior TPM at Amazon Instant Video, writes: “Having previously worked at a few different Fortune 500 tech companies (Microsoft, Cisco, AT&T) I can say with some degree of certainty that there is no other, large tech company that is as respectful of its employees and as customer driven as Amazon is. Employees are treated as absolute equals in the workplace and every single person has a significant impact on the final product. When you come to work at Amazon you know you are going to do some amazing things, and every one of your co-workers is going to support you (to the extent that their role permits).”
For more about Amazon’s inner workings, check out our post on what’s it like to work at Amazon.
