David Streitfeld has written a number of strident, highly-critical articles on Amazon. What he's writing here doesn't reflect my experience as an SDE in a couple of different divisions in the company. I can't speak to what people in marketing or vendor management experience.
Take the first paragraph for instance:
> They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs
I don't recall anyone telling me this
> When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported
I don't recall hearing either of these phrases used.
> To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.
The leadership principles are repeated pretty frequently, although I think most people take them with a grain of salt. The quiz is called 100% Peculiar, not "I'm Peculiar". I don't recall it being about leadership principles at all. I recall it being about things like how Amazon doesn't delete negative customer reviews because the company sees it as being in its long-term interest for reviews to be trustworthy. The other thing on the quiz I remember is that Amazon likes to use informal language with customers, like "Where's my stuff". [Edit: I should also point out that it's not a mandatory thing and nobody cares if you don't do it or don't do well enough on it to get the little badge on your page in the company directory.]
I have heard repeatedly that potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles. I wouldn't call that "taken with a grain of salt." Anecdotally their turnover rate is high and a larger proportion of tech workers have to be on call than other large tech companies-- this could be due to the nature of tech, clouds and probably the largest web portable on earth. Different divisions are going to be different, and the article focuses on more extreme cases, true, but Amazon is a "tough" place to work, no question about that, at least compared to Google or Netflix.
If Amazon is not a nice place to work, honest people writing good journalistic reporting on it are going to write negative stories, no way around that. As negative stories, this particular article isn't bad. At least it puts a leadership-principle spin on it.
> potential workers are asked behavioral questions during their interviews about the leadership principles.
Interviewed for AWS. Got asked "behavioral" and "leadership principle questions". There were very few technical questions except for some stupid whiteboard "sort this thing..." questions. (Read more about my experience in a top-level comment) But it was all "tell me about your worst failure". "Tell me about a time...". Basically you are supposed to learn their leadership principles than parrot those back to them using your own experiences.
That sounds like standard affairs. I read your interview experience, it is almost funny. Amazon has a body-shop quality to it. Once someone told me he failed an interview, then changed his email address and phone number and got another interview and failed again, and on his third try he finally got an offer. I don't remember whether he accepted the job, probably did. He is a foreigner needing visa sponsorship, so he would be gone after a couple of years.
That's exactly how my own AWS interview loop went. The individuals were pleasant and professional but it was all about asking the canned questions to see if I parroted back the leadership principles correctly. A big yuck.
What a fantastic way to trigger self-esteem issues in the middle of a high-pressure environment! It sure weeds out the people to weak to work there! /s
Yeah I was asked that question. I answered honestly and it wasn't a happy or pleasant memory, but I guess they wanted me to somehow integrate it into their "leadership principles" and show how I applied those principles learned something or "risen above" or other such bullshit.
Yes, it's true that as part of the interview process they ask behavioral questions to try to use the leadership principles to evaluate a candidate. An example might be, "can you tell me about a time when you had to build something but you had very vague requirements". So I think the leadership principles are taken seriously, but I don't think they're treated as gospel. Bezos usually says something in the all-hands meeting like "these are our leadership principles unless you know better ones". People usually roll their eyes at the "frugality" leadership principle - the term "frupid" is used pretty frequently.
The high on-call load is a pretty frequently complaint.
I haven't worked at Google or Netflix, so I don't really have a basis for comparison.
In general, I think Amazon is a pretty demanding environment, but I think if the environment was as Streitfeld describes it, I wouldn't do well. I don't think I have that great a work ethic and I don't think I handle stress or workplace conflict particularly well, yet I've managed to be successful at Amazon.
Sorry, untrue. Literally several examples of offers turned down because of this even when apart from this 'raise the bar' person everyone were strongly in favor of hiring. This happens all the time and employed engineers are none to happy about this. BTW from the number of your posts here, would that be an unofficial job requirement ?
Calling them behavioral questions makes it sound like a psychology experiment. What it actually is is a way to get candidates to talk about specific situations they've encountered in their careers and how they handled them. Different interviewers have different principles to focus on, so it prevents them from covering the same territory.
Amazon has its problems, but the interview process has always felt pretty fair to me, and I've been on both sides of it.
That said: I would never, ever, ask a candidate to tell me about their biggest failure. Jesus fuck that's a landmine. What happens when you expect them to say "I championed the use of TCL as our primary systems language", but they actually say "I got drunk, crashed the car, and killed my fiancee". Yikes.
It's formally called "Targeted Selection" and is a superset of behavioral interviewing, with some additional structure wrapping it. It works well and is much better than what most companies do.
Interviewed twice with Amazon, had an offer the first time decided to not continue the second. I don't recall any particularly blatant behavioral questions. The one I do recall (and was part of a writing sample) was writing about one of the hardest challenges career-wise and how I handled/approached/etc. the problem. It could have been technical, but I went with a non-technical issue (delivering for a customer when it was out of scope). It was actually one of the better parts of the interview -- in terms of back and forth.
Both times I've decided no on Amazon was due to commute and flexibility first, narrowness of the role in the first occasion was the other issue.
Typical interview questions often take the form of 'imagine the following hypothetical situation X. what would you do?' Candidates tell people what they want to hear, and all the question does is establish that the candidate knows what the interviewer wants to hear. Psychology research shows us that people assign themselves better positive traits than their behavior would indicate.
Behavioural interview questions have the interviewer ask a question of the form 'Tell me about a time when X happened, and what you did.' By asking for a personal anecdote, people are less likely to bring that positive trait assumption with them to the interview, and interviewers get a more honest appraisal of future behavior.
Of course, psychology also fundamental overattribution bias, which says we attribute behavior far too much to the person than the situation. For example, somewhere in this thread is an interview question asking about doing something for the customer that wasn't planned, and that the interviewee worked in hardware design, where unplanned features results in unplanned testing, unplanned Bill of Materials and ultimately an unplanned cost to your customer. When we learn that the candidate never did anything unplanned, we learn more about the situation -- customers bear all costs of design and production -- than the candidate.
I guess it comes down to your personal anecdotes versus those of "more than 100 current and former Amazonians — members of the leadership team, human resources executives, marketers, retail specialists and engineers who worked on projects from the Kindle to grocery delivery to the recent mobile phone launch". Strictly on the weight of the evidence...
(Not that everything NYT prints is true, but your can be certain that a front-page story trashing one of the most successful companies and founders in history has been vetted and fact-checked to a fair degree.)
I've had the same experience as the commenter your replying to did, as has most everyone on my team. I work at AWS, though, and no one from web services seems to have been interviewed for this article.
Could be. I just shared my experience, hopefully it is interesting to someone. It was at least to 10 people who upvoted it so far. I understand Amazon is a huge company and others' experiences might vary.
The author clearly had this format in his mind: illustrate Amazon's cruel environment by cleverly tagging each anecdote with a couple of leadership principles.
I'm a deeply frustrated engineer at Amazon on the verge of quitting, but even I like and respect the leadership principles. To me, they mostly represent what's good about Amazon.
What's bad about Amazon is better illustrated by the experiences shared in this thread than by the article.
Agreed, I noticed all those things as well. The article seemed to invent a lot of the new hire orientation stuff. Either that or it's changed quite a bit since I went through it a few years ago, which is certainly possible. And the "100% peculiar" thing really is just a game. It's a toy to add a little icon to your internal profile, and literally doesn't mean a thing. Other such awards are for things like having participated in broomball in 2002 or something silly like that.
The more I read, the more I get the feeling that Amazon has a divide between technical (dev) roles, in which is it's largely similar to any other large somewhat "hip" company, and non-tech roles, in which it sounds like something of a sweatshop.
I'm not surprised to see you disagree with the commentary on the "leadership principles" -- they (at com/principles) seem to me almost totally generic.
I'm a former Amazonian - things are definitely worse for non-tech roles, but I wouldn't say that on the dev side things are "similar to any other large somewhat hip company".
To put in context - Amazon's typical engineering tenure (when I was there) was 18 months - that's engineering roles only. I've worked many jobs since and by a wide margin Amazon still has the highest engineering churn rate I've ever seen.
My personal take on this article is that it seems a bit exaggerated based on my experiences at the company, but otherwise largely accurate. I haven't seen anyone cry, but definitely a lot of shellshocked people wallowing at their desks after being openly reamed out by managers in front of their peers. The general culture is extremely dog eat dog, and in my 2 years there I saw a whole lot of behavior lacking in basic human decency/empathy, justified under the notion that "we're doing hard work with hard technology and have high standards and if you can't keep up you can wash out".
In all my jobs since Amazon I have never once encountered the level of hostility routinely and openly displayed between manager/subordinate and between peers that I saw there. I didn't think much of it at the time - that whole type of behavior was normalized - but it's only once I got out and worked at much friendlier, more collaborative places that I realized how insane and aberrant it is.
There's also sometimes this curious notion that this sort of culture is a requirement for doing meaningful things, and that ditching Amazon for a place with less toxic workplace culture necessarily means you won't be able to achieve great things. This is laughably false of course, and makes me wonder if the people perpetuating it have seen what other companies are doing.
Oh okay, well scratch that then, that's interesting.
Yes I'm all for being "pushed to limits", but I don't think making employees feel like shit is the right way to do that.
I can't find it now, but what struck me most in the article was a quote about being pushed and pushed, finally achieving something great, but then it being nothing - like the best performance you can hope for is "acceptable".
Over-working for a crazy deadline is I think motivating, and an enjoyable sense of achievement for people that are in a position to do it (without dependents, etc.) - but that achievement at the end of the sprinted-marathon needs to be celebrated, and there needs to be a break before another. Otherwise it does just sound like a sweatshop.
I don't work at Amazon, but I have a friend who is on the vendor management side and whenever she talks about how stressful her job is and how terribly they treat people (not just their employees but also their vendors), she's on the verge of tears. I'm not exaggerating.
I didn't, but a coworker did when I wasn't in the office. Someone had just come out of a 1:1 with her manager and was sobbing at her desk, and no one was paying her any attention (this was an open plan office).
Take the first paragraph for instance:
> They are told to forget the “poor habits” they learned at previous jobs
I don't recall anyone telling me this
> When they “hit the wall” from the unrelenting pace, there is only one solution: “Climb the wall,” others reported
I don't recall hearing either of these phrases used.
> To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.
The leadership principles are repeated pretty frequently, although I think most people take them with a grain of salt. The quiz is called 100% Peculiar, not "I'm Peculiar". I don't recall it being about leadership principles at all. I recall it being about things like how Amazon doesn't delete negative customer reviews because the company sees it as being in its long-term interest for reviews to be trustworthy. The other thing on the quiz I remember is that Amazon likes to use informal language with customers, like "Where's my stuff". [Edit: I should also point out that it's not a mandatory thing and nobody cares if you don't do it or don't do well enough on it to get the little badge on your page in the company directory.]