Everytime I hear these stories, there are 2 things that go through my mind.
1) I'm never going to work at Amazon
2) If you're judging a company based on the experiences of those who are dissatisfied, isn't that always going to be heavily biased?
At any large company, there will be many people who are unhappy and dissatisfied. If you go out looking for stories from such people, and compile them into a single digest, it's going to make any company look dysfunctional.
Using a glassdoor-esque rating system seems like the best way to judge a company. And Amazon's rating there is 3.4 (https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.h...). Which is nowhere near Google (4.4) or Facebook (4.5), but it isn't horrible either. It's even slightly above average (3.3) across all companies in Glassdoor.
Which does kind of make sense... no tech company can churn out great technology products over many years, if the work-culture is dysfunctional. Purely for that reason alone, I'm sure Bezos would put a lid on how bad the work culture at Amazon can possibly get.
All of which is to say... I get the feeling that Amazon is probably an okay place to work. It's not great. It's probably a little below-average for the tech industry. But it's probably not as dysfunctional as these reviews and horror stories seem to suggest.
1) I'm never going to work at Amazon
2) If you're judging a company based on the experiences of those who are dissatisfied, isn't that always going to be heavily biased?
At any large company, there will be many people who are unhappy and dissatisfied. If you go out looking for stories from such people, and compile them into a single digest, it's going to make any company look dysfunctional.
Using a glassdoor-esque rating system seems like the best way to judge a company. And Amazon's rating there is 3.4 (https://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Amazon-com-Reviews-E6036.h...). Which is nowhere near Google (4.4) or Facebook (4.5), but it isn't horrible either. It's even slightly above average (3.3) across all companies in Glassdoor.
Which does kind of make sense... no tech company can churn out great technology products over many years, if the work-culture is dysfunctional. Purely for that reason alone, I'm sure Bezos would put a lid on how bad the work culture at Amazon can possibly get.
All of which is to say... I get the feeling that Amazon is probably an okay place to work. It's not great. It's probably a little below-average for the tech industry. But it's probably not as dysfunctional as these reviews and horror stories seem to suggest.