(No)Life@Amazon

Recently there has been a chain of thoughts on stressful life of Amazon employees. I might be wrong but it's just my view.

Starting off, like everyone said working at Amazon is hard and stressful. Agreed! Amazon has lots of work and high expectations. A little screw up and your perf shows up with it. That screw up may involve not working properly, not paying attention at work, not keeping peers happy, even taking extra vacations, getting sick for long time and so on.

I do NOT know one person who is happy at Amazon. Everyone is tired and stressed, all the time!!
People work during the weekends. I have seen my friends working for 100 hours a week. People say its the worst professional experience of their life. Most of my friends have moved on to other companies. Few are afraid about bad feedback from their peers. I have known a team which reduced from 8 to 3 in an year and a half. 5 of the members quit and moved to different companies.

One of the employee experiences - I was working on some project in some team which I liked. After a while I decided to take a few days off and go home for vacation. As soon as I am back I see my project has been taken over by someone else and I have been assigned something else to work on. It would have been really nice to inform me before doing that? If it was urgent (which it was not) someone would have told me to finish it then go home? No one talked about it before my vacation and after I come back lo and behold. Transparency is one thing which is missing at Amazon.

If you are trying to make us work hard, fair enough. Please compensate us also accordingly for those extra hours put in? Please don't misuse the term 'frugality'.

Another BIG thing is oncall. Ask any Amazon SDE, he or she will tell you how stressful it is. You get paged at odd times at night for some issue in some other country for some code which you did not write. Okay if there was a problem because of my code, fair enough. I won't mind waking up. But most of the times (almost all the time), its not my code and hence I sleepily try to figure out the problem, if unable to do it page someone else, wait for his/her response, and then take next steps. In short I am unable to get a good night's sleep during my oncall days. Here is a small suggestion - Can we get paid for our oncall hours which we serve outside of our working hours? (and if you want to add more constraint to it lets say only for pages which are not because of my code). It will make one feel lot better. Atleast we should be compensated for waking up at night and fixing things. I have seen this practice at other companies. Why not here?

IF YOU ARE PUSHING US HARD TO WORK, PLEASE MAKE SURE WE GET AWARDED FOR IT.

I hope someone at Amazon hear this and work on making life of employees a little better and less 'frugal'.