My Amazon Burnout Experience

https://gist.github.com/anonymous/c1f6419d54d80af6c079

by amzn_throwaway • 11 years ago

120 77 11 years ago

gist.github.com

joezydeco• 11 years ago

I know Bezos had to come out and say "gee guys, nothing's wrong here, I've never seen any problems", both for the sake of positive P/R spin and for his shareholders who would rather not see a brain drain happen.

But to double down and claim nothing is wrong is just inviting a flood of anecdotes from current and ex-employees, like this one and like the one from an Amazon spouse yesterday.

http://qz.com/482080/dear-jeff-bezos-i-wish-you-had-asked-fo...

legitster• 11 years ago

I'm familiar with a high-level executive assistant at Amazon, and they are well aware of the "burnouts". It's very intentional. Amazon is acquiring young talent, extracting as much value from them, and making no efforts to retain them.

Among the local tech scene in Seattle, there's a quiet view that Amazon is kind of a boot camp where young workers get experience then move on.

smrtinsert• 11 years ago

Cheap labor and nothing more. In my career I've learned "experience" 9/10 means experience working at that specific company. Different organizations use different tools, processes, and division of labor. I find time at non-prestigious X is as valuable as time at prestigious Y.

omouse• 11 years ago

Among the local tech scene in Seattle, there's a quiet view that Amazon is kind of a boot camp where young workers get experience then move on.

That's the common view of digital agencies too; the turn-over will always be high and people are there just to gain experience because the projects are between 2 to 6 months long so within 1 year you're going to be working on at least 2 projects that will launch and be visible to the public.

It isn't a bad business model for the execs at the top; but eventually someone's going to eat your lunch. If you look at agencies, much of those short-term projects don't really increase revenue: I've yet to see any agency that does a retrospective with a client in the room and proves that they helped increase their revenues. In Amazon's case...well they're lucky they have a lot of cool projects to work on but others will eat their lunch eventually.

kps• 11 years ago

  > and making no efforts to retain them.

If you retain them, their RSUs will start to vest, and they might even approach the ‘total compensation’ dangled in front of them when they were hired.

waterlesscloud• 11 years ago

Cut off their H1B access, then. They clearly don't believe in a shortage of tech talent since they make no effort to retain it.

If talent is so plentiful they can dispose of it without care, they don't need to be importing it.

adekok• 11 years ago

FTA: I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve.

i.e. the managers goals are not in line with Amazons goals. If we believe the OP. this dissonance is costing Amazon billions of dollars.

I know corporate politics are bad, but that takes the cake.

shoyer• 11 years ago

As a lower level employee, you often lack the context to understand what the most important priority is. Even if you do have that context, you need to be able to convince management. Simply doing "what you think is right" is not a path to success in any company. So I'm not surprised that this turned out poorly for the OP.

calbear812• 11 years ago

The author definitely did not consider that there are goals outside of saving Amazon money that could be important from a strategic perspective that they would have appreciated his/her help on.

jedicoffee• 11 years ago

"there is"...

dmourati2• 11 years ago

"Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths"

That is a damning statement that unfortunately has the ring of truth to me.

buckbova2• 11 years ago

To me this also rings of "I'm too morally superior to engage in corporate politics."

Suck it up and kiss ass, suppress information when necessary, make allegiances, and whatever else is if you want to move up in that structure.

If all this is beneath you, then time to work for yourself.

fapjacks3• 11 years ago

... Which perhaps is a big part of what's wrong with that structure, culture, and way of life. Not the least of which is that it consists of sociopaths.

angersock• 11 years ago

If deceit, politics, and treachery are what's required to "get ahead" in a company, it should be no surprise that anybody who has an alternative (e.g., put skill points into engineering instead of sociopath biz bro) will look elsewhere.

dmourati2• 11 years ago

Agree, ya. I have a hard time kissing ass but I realized what I needed to do to advance was a little different.

In my case, the key was to stop actively pissing people off. Maybe just a change of perspective but it has helped me a good deal.

People who say they don't play politics just reveal themselves as unable to perceive and react to the daily goings on.

irl_zebra• 11 years ago

Sounds just like the world of large law firms, actually. They hire top people from top schools, most burn out within 2-3 years and leave, occasionally someone is sociopathic enough to make it to about year 7 where they're made partner. No efforts are made to retain the people, they're just worked crazy hours until they either crack or, rarely, make partner.

Even the incentives are kind of the same: Great pay and looks great on a resume. The latter allows one to move over to things with much more reasonable hours if desires, albeit for lower (but still very decent) pay. Not sure how interesting the work is for an entry level position at Amazon, but I can say at large firms, the work for first years is mind-numbing and useless, basically reviewing documents for minor things.

archimedespi• 11 years ago

Good grief, this is the first time I've seen Github rate limit anything.

codazoda• 11 years ago

Glad it wasn't just me. For a minute there I thought that I had done something to get rate limited personally.

chrismarlow92• 11 years ago

http://pastebin.com/q0YYj7RY

thoughtpalette2• 11 years ago

I get

"Whoa there! You have triggered an abuse detection mechanism. Please wait a few minutes before you try again."

When trying to visit the page. Can anyone post it in the comments?

chadillac• 11 years ago

Same, gists are rate limited?

niuzeta• 11 years ago

Same. I guess sudden inflow of traffic triggered it. Considering it's on front page of HN on a sensitive/popular topic, I'm convinced.

martin_• 11 years ago

Me too, luckily it's in google cache: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

thoughtpalette2• 11 years ago

Thank you!

bernardlunn• 11 years ago

me too

Hydral1k• 11 years ago

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:kti7jV2...

There you go buddy.

BuildTheRobots• 11 years ago

Ditto. They seem to be triggering off the referer header -if you either copy/paste the link into a new tab or right click + "open in private browsing" it then loads for me.

ericjang• 11 years ago

Link is down due to Github's rate limiting. Mirror anyone?

tostaki• 11 years ago

http://pastebin.com/taccdWUn

tsunamifury2• 11 years ago

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospective naiveté smacks of narcissism.

I'm not saying Amazon is a great place to work -- but its clear this person isn't a great person to work with.

slunk• 11 years ago

I stopped reading a few paragraphs in when all the author had managed to convey was how great they are. I also find it strange that someone so competent who wants to remain anonymous would reveal so much information about their situation in the company. What little I read seems like it would be enough to pinpoint them within the organization.

Tobu• 11 years ago

Hopefully enough has been altered that they can't be identified too easily. That said, it looks like they can, maybe should find better elsewhere.

enraged_camel3• 11 years ago

You should read the whole thing. The author may come across as a narcissist at the beginning but that wanes rather quickly - he is also quite honest and forthcoming about his own shortcomings.

Everything he writes will resonate with anyone who has worked in large bureaucracies.

enraged_camel3• 11 years ago

Your post is a prime example of what is wrong with Amazon - I'm not sure if you were aware of the irony when you wrote it.

If the author is capable of developing systems that save the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year, why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"?

dragontamer5• 11 years ago

If the author is capable of developing systems that save the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year, why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"?

If the author is a narcissist, they would be mistaken about saving the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Remember, this is from the author's point of view. Allegedly, he was working with PH.Ds and others who disagreed with his metrics. A man who within his own rant claimed to be smarter than everyone else in his team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Dunning Kruger effect is real. A man who says nothing good about his own team (that he admits has PH.Ds that were disagreeing with him) is hard to believe. The author is probably honest about _believing_ that he was saving millions of dollars per year. But perhaps he was an idiot and his metrics were wrong.

And based on my experience, when a rant begins with: > I love to solve real world problems, and in many ways am the perfect type of person for Amazon's culture

You can almost certainly believe the guy is on the "Illusory superiority" side of the Dunning Kruger effect.

therobot243• 11 years ago

> why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"

Cause no one wants to work with an asshole, no matter how smart they are. There's plenty of other engineers out there that can build systems and save money, maybe not to the specific degree that OP claims to be able to, but unlike OP they'll work with their team.

mildbow5• 11 years ago

Surely I'm not the only one who can see that section for what it was? That is: letting us know that pure competence wasn't the issue? FOllowing from that: if pure competence isn't what works in a meritocracy, then what does? Maybe your answer is: "team work", whatever that is?

Since we are saying "this person isn't a great person to work with", let me say the same about you. If you can't read someone else's accomplishments without the need to put it down/skim, then you probably have self-esteem issues. Consequently, you are probably not that great to work with. Additionally, you seem to support propping up "team work" at the expense of actual work (so you tend to favor status quo when it collides with competence), so that's a double no :)

Ah downvotes. I guess I am the only one.

nsfyn554• 11 years ago

What if merit isn't defined by "technical competence" but the "ability to deliver results in a defined context" and by "results" we are talking about "what the company(e.g. managers) defines as results".

So often engineers and quants take it on themselves to define "results" but is that fair? As an engineer these are lessons hard won over my career. I am a component in larger system. What if the alternator in my car took it on itself to improve engine efficiency, fuel economy, or safety at the expense of the job I expect it to do?

One of the most important things an engineer can learn on the job is humility. Understanding that the don't have all the information and accepting the tasks they are given. The author admits this is not what they did and they deserve poor marks as a result. No promotion? ... color me surprised.

calbear812• 11 years ago

It's surprising that someone who is so smart would be so complacent with accepting slotted into a low rank and accepting of it after two years of that situation not changing.

enraged_camel3• 11 years ago

Not sure why it is surprising. Analytical intelligence (the type that can build systems that save the company hundreds of millions a year) is different from social intelligence.

The author clearly states that their smartness did not extend into the social realm. He cites the friend he referred to Amazon, who got hired and quickly started rising in the ranks by kissing ass, sucking up and going so far as to show fake data in meetings to make his superiors look good.

mildbow5• 11 years ago

Smart and intelligent are different things. If a person has succeed up until a given point by just being intelligent/workign hard, and relying on higher ups to notice to get promoted, I don't see why s/he wouldn't continue that previously winning strategy a little while longer. It's easy to fall into the trap of "I just need to work harder" when working harder has worked before.

So, either his feedback loop was lengthened because it was input that didn't match his past experience.

Or, maybe he wasn't/isnt that great on picking up social cues (something he eludes to).

bduerst3• 11 years ago

That's a pretty bold psychological assessment based on an anonymous post.

They seem to be writing about the gap between the reality for promotion Amazon and how they thought they thought they had fit the expectations - the latter of which involves talking about themselves and establishing why they think they qualified for promotion.

amzn_throwaway• 11 years ago

I wasn't planning on responding to anything, but your comment has enough truth that the criticism is worth responding to.

I am aware that I don't work as well as I could with others, especially those who hold lots of power but little technical aptitude. Its not out of a smug sense of superiority...I recognize these people are very much my superior in other ways. It is probably limitations of my vocabulary and inexperience at conveying complex ideas with common language. I have no problem claiming to possess numeric and analytical intelligence, but social intelligence is a daily struggle. I even recognize that I was probably hard to manage from a higher-than-direct level, especially when I let my frustrations get the best of me.

Regardless, I find that to be beside the point I am trying to make.

I was sold on a meritocratic position under a boss who believed in a meritocratic ideal, and I thought I could do that job well. As the job was described to me, and as I was told of my criteria for promotion, I actually did do that job well. However, I was judged by a standard that was opaque, never communicated clearly (in fact, some internal rules prohibit a more clear explanation), and I languished for several years in absolute naivety and ignorance while believing every line they fed to me hook, line, and sinker. It took someone who actually cared about me as a person to open up and explain how it all really worked before I got it.

My story absolutely is one of being hard to work with, having naive expectations, and going about things all wrong. But it is also one about being lied to repeatedly about how to do my job right, destroying my quality of life in the pursuit of the game as it was communicated to me, being cast aside for people who played the deliberately obscured game better, and getting burnt out by it. And given the recent statements by senior level executives about how Amazon is so meritocratic, it is a story of how even those who rise to the high performance meritocratic expectations that they talk about can get obliterated by aspects of the company culture that those same executives claim do not exist.

I'm not perfect, but I knew well before I started that political intelligence was a weak spot for me...and if I had any indication of how insanely political the promotion process was, I probably would have never accepted the offer. I wanted the meritocratic Amazon that was sold to me.

tsunamifury2• 11 years ago

I've been in an identical position, at a more tradition place. I worked on the Wells Fargo/Wachovia merger and I couldn't figure out if everyone around me was an idiot or if I was.

The best thing that ever happened to me was that I was fired. I did a few critical things during that transition for their IT, but in the end I didn't really matter, even though I could claim hundreds of billions of dollars in new transactions.

Wells wasn't wrong and I wasn't either -- we were just wrong for each other.

buckbova2• 11 years ago

I was sold on a meritocratic position under a boss who believed in a meritocratic ideal

I've found in the places I've worked there's a ceiling on a meritocracy in the workplace. Being the smartest, fastest, best worker doesn't get you through to those high level promotions.

You need to play the game. If you refuse, then be happy you are getting as much pay and good work as you are getting. Or, work for yourself.

mildbow5• 11 years ago

For what it's worth, I completely believe your story. Probably because I went through pretty much the exact thing. The only diff would be: I learnt "managing up" when I missed my first raise and so decided to play the game for fun and profit.

Anyway, sucks that middle management sucks and lives to only forward their existence.

Have a good one and thanks for the read. Hope it was cathartic for you.

rrss11222• 11 years ago

At large companies like this there will always be politics you need to play to get ahead. It sucks but that's the way it is. The meritocratic ideal will remain an ideal unless you're in there on the ground floor.

There's a lot of books out there on corporate and office politics. Might be a good idea to read at least one.

rrss11222• 11 years ago

The impression I got was, he tried to be manager before being promoted. This gave his managers a convenient scapegoat when he axed his coworkers projects and they needed someone to be angry at. This reminds me a little of The Gervais Principle. This person is a de facto clueless manager (by The Gervais Principle's terminology) who takes the fall for upper management's decisions, and his managers didn't even need to promote him.

What I read was someone who was frustrated with their position in Amazon. Someone who made a bad bargain, not someone who necessarily would not be a great person to work with.

What I found most curious was the need to anonymize. I imagine for upper management at Amazon, finding employees

dantillberg2• 11 years ago

If I wanted to accomplish my goals (which I am ostensibly judged on for promotion), I had to do it on my own time.

At a former job as a software engineer at a smallish (~250 employees or so) enterprise, I sat down quarterly with my manager to sketch out "my" goals for the quarter. I did my best to set my sights high, and I outlined technical goals (underneath most folks' radar but my own) that I wished to accomplish.

Ultimately, though, I didn't have the authority to set my own priorities. Generally speaking, I was assigned work to execute, and it was my job to complete that work; I was not supposed to choose, as the OP did, that my goals were ever more important. But I did. I still tried to make progress on my goals, either by delaying completion of assigned tasks, or by staying late and hacking away after everyone else went home.

Looking back, it would have been better for me (because you do get judged on this stuff in reviews) to just write down goals for myself along the lines of "do the work that is assigned to me", "keep management informed whenever I am unable to do the work that is assigned to me in the timeframe expected", and "report to the office during business hours."

It's great to have employees that are passionate about making your business succeed. But you need to wield that passion during normal working hours -- don't hope that it somehow seeps out of the cracks during evenings and weekends.

fapjacks3• 11 years ago

Amazon called me up one day trying to recruit. I haven't shuddered like that in a very long time.

nsfyn554• 11 years ago

Don't bother. At first you look at your inbox and think "Amazon? me really?" I responded only to find out this was a mass spam campaign. They found me via LinkedIn, said "Our senior management as indicated your experience is exactly what we are looking to hire", then proceeded to ask me what my experience was. Hashtag this company has become a joke.

fapjacks3• 11 years ago

Yeah, absolutely it's obvious. These days though it seems they send out "Your experience is exactly what we're looking for........... Come visit our hiring event in <bigass city>". I don't even read them anymore. Just straight to the trash.

chrismarlow92• 11 years ago

http://pastebin.com/q0YYj7RY mirror

fsloth• 11 years ago

Great text for all the green geeks moving into corporate world: not prioritizing the things your boss wants to prioritize is precisely the wrong thing to do. It's not evil, it's called building trust and trust is the key glue in all orgs.

Like in any relationship, first one needs to prove that one is trustworthy. Then, if there are these great projects they need to be sold to ones boss before moving forward.

While I appreciate the fact that Amazon might not have the best employer culture I think the OP would have been burnt at any big corp.

It's great to have vision and initiative - but the thing is, either you do those on your own time or then get management backing first.

I have the highest sympathies for burning out - it sucks. Perhaps there should be a "How to live in a corporate culture for dummies" book somewhere.

erickhill• 11 years ago

What a shame that someone flagged this article (who knows why?). I was finding the comments rather interesting enlightening. Then 'poof!'

dantillberg2• 11 years ago

Aye, this is the second time today a post that's interested me has gotten tanked.

The silence with which moderation on HN is wielded has been frustrating me of late.

studentrob• 11 years ago

It only takes a few people flagging to kill it. Say, a few heads at Amazon. Quite annoying when there is lively discussion, I agree

SiVal• 11 years ago

I had to laugh at how familiar this all sounded. I've observed again and again how there was an inherent conflict of interest in a hierarchy of ambitious people trying to climb the ever-narrowing tree between serving the company and serving those few who are responsible for your own promotion.

The bigger the company gets, the bigger the conflict, because as a company grows, your contribution is known to a shrinking subset of the company and your distance from the people at the top (whose compensation is most benefited by overall company success) increases to the point that you become invisible to them.

Your promotion will almost always be determined by your immediate subtree of superiors. If you want your contribution to the company overall to count for more, you have to work for a company where your personal subtree and the company itself differ less, e.g., a smaller company.

nsfyn554• 11 years ago

Polymath? Pshhhaw. And I thought referring to oneself as a "genius" was the pinnacle of self-aggrandizement. Sorry friend you are not a genius, you are not a polymath, and given amazon's volume a 6 or 7 figure savings is likely indistinguishable from a rounding error. And while we're on the subject. Why doesn't he share the nature of his advanced degree in a quantitative discipline that puts him on equal footing with the world's leading econometricians rather than pulling the old neo bullet dodge?

hartator• 11 years ago

I think it's weird that's not on the home anymore - 110 points in 6 hours as for now.

lazylizard• 11 years ago

our job is not to find the most efficient way to solve a problem. far from that. its to make the customer look good to his boss. - some previous workplace

My Amazon Burnout Experience

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