My apartments fire alarm went off during my virtual on-site with Amazon too. There was about 10 minutes left and the interviewer said I should go and he had what he needed. Got an offer the next day!
Exactly. I’ve been here for two years, not a long time by any means, and I don’t personally know a single instance of anyone getting pipped.
I’ve never felt pressured to work overtime, haven’t had to race to meet an unreasonable deadline, and I’ve been rated exceeds on both of the performance evals I’ve been though.
The Amazon I’ve experienced is much different than the one I read about before joining.
It can be drastically different from team to team.
After I joined Amazon in 2007, I referred a friend from Uni who joined a few years later.
I had a fairly laid back experience - after a good start, I became depressed and burned out, but somehow none of my managers seemed to care all that much since I was at least getting some stuff done, until I finally got put on a PIP several years in - which I think was probably deserved, although the handling around it was crap. And even then, when that manager moved to a new team, my new manager told me I was doing fine and not to worry about it.
My friend, on the other hand, who was the most diligent and hard working of my entire friends group in Uni, was assigned to a different team a few desks over. She fell afoul of stack ranking (the idea that you should rank everybody in a team and fire the worst) and was pressured until she quit.
I also heard a bunch of horror stories from devs across the company - unreasonable deadlines, regular Sev-2s and firefighting when on-call, a manager evading blame for a disastrous project launch and dropping it all on one engineer.
I think the main problem that I saw was that there wasn't much training for managers on how to be a good manager, and bad managers never seemed to face consequences.
I finally quit after eight years (funnily enough, after ending up working for the manager who made my friend quit) and I'm a hell of a lot happier nowadays. Amusingly, I'm still facing tight deadlines and sometimes random overtime, but I have a great boss who is willing to fight against these things for me, and that makes a big difference.
So, here's an interesting question: I recently got an email from a recruiter for Amazon saying I could interview for whatever org and whatever team I wanted. What are some sane, reasonable teams? Which teams are the most insane and unreasonable?
There is no easy way to answer this question. The best you can do is talk to people working on that group and ask the question. However, even with this knowledge there is no guarantee, because Amazon is always changing and doing reorgs, so what is a great group today can become a nightmare tomorrow.
