Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
Amazon doesn't actually pay mediocre, they are very good for FAANG standards. But yes, when you have already cut out the slackers and still are required to PIP x% of every team despite everyone being competent, everyones' coworker relationships automatically become competitive, not collaborative. The culture starts to become a rat race of people working nights and weekends, each trying to not become the one whose family and children might have to get uprooted and leave the US within 60 days because of a PIP.
Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
Amazon pay had a 30% negative revision for most tenured staff this year. It’s unclear how it plays out with new hires - there are likely still a few very strong Covid era grants out there.
It’s not bad pay, but most mid-caps should be competitive with the pay band in 2025. Amazon paid very well in 2023-2024, and paid well up through 2022.
The back dated pay structure with a 15% YoY stock growth assumption means that unless Amazon grows at 30%+ per year you would be better off at any other medium to large tech company.
I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
Amazon pays pretty mediocre. After their boosts during the pandemic they’re solidly middle of the pack above Apple and Microsoft but below Meta and Google.
We are an Amazon/Google family, and I'm surprised how close Amazon comes to Google salary even for a non-dev UXD. It is definitely competitive (same market, about the same level, dev vs UXD).
I find it insane there are folks who unironically claim Amazon's pay is mediocre when there's only a handful of companies that pay more and Amazon's pay L5/6 is 2+x of the higher end of the the average for a senior eng.
Good for them, I guess, but also has nothing to do with the reality
Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
I'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
They take huge personal, family and financial risks to move for a job. When you are getting rid en-masse people, you are ruining local communities. There is a real societal cost.
It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive. Not to mention that once the company has established a reputation of a revolving door, then nobody gives a shit about it. They will exploit it for the short term and let it die.
Layoffs should the absolute last resort for a company due to the disruption they cause. If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
I absolutely agree with your assessment that it should be the last resort option due to the societal cost of a large number of people losing their job. On top of the risks you mention, there's also the mental hit that often accompanies layoffs not just for the folks who were fired, but the increased feeling of paranoia from the people who are left.
But can it not be the case the this /was/ the company's last resort? There's another option of moving people around and retraining them to do another function. What if that was considered and then rejected because there weren't enough departments growing to warrant that? Rhetorically, if they don't have the ability/opportunity to re-assign people, then what?
> If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
Look no further than the economies of France and Germany… both of those countries have very stringent regulations around layoffs. And none of whom have the dominance of American companies or breadth of unicorn startups.
Making firing difficult makes hiring difficult, which disincentives risk and innovation.
The leave/fire at-will contracts of most tech jobs in the US is a feature, not a bug.
> It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive.
Sometimes, but sometimes not. Layoffs are important to get rid of low performers who could be replaced with better talent, and they’re important to help companies adjust their labor to market conditions.
Neither France nor Germany have access to the high-risk capital that American startups enjoy.
Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.
If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.
Even if it is the most stringent, California is still an at-will state. You can fire people for any reason at any time, minus protections for discrimination or retaliation, etc.
France and Germany require a lot more bureaucratic red tape (documentation, severance pay, notice periods, and justification). I have not seen this personally in France, but I have in Germany and it was a nightmare. I will be very careful about hiring in Germany next time.
An incredible amount of capital is in the United States for a reason (you're on a website of those capital providers). While termination protocol is obviously not the only reason, it is undeniably one of the many that contribute to the States having the most favorable environment to build a high growth, innovative company.
14k is massive layoff, even for a company as large as amazon. it isn’t about the “employees who aren’t necessarily doing the work you want done” for sure (all the while they are off-shoring by the more thousands while “america first”-run government is bailing out argentine :)
That's 4% of corporate employees going by Reuter's 350k corp employee count[0]. Sounds well within the trimming-the-fat numbers. The rest of your comment alludes to an obligation towards improving the domestic economy. That can be done through regulation, but then there's a balancing act between under/over regulation. Too much and you end up in an EU situation that hinders small tech business growth.
So we come back to my previous statement/question. Above what profit amount should a company be obligated to keep (in their eyes) unproductive workers?
They’re people, not disposable objects. The alternative would be to distribute the cost of the layoffs evenly across the employer and the employees. Right now employees pay a disproportionate portion of the cost.
The cost you're referring to is fairly abstract - I'm not sure how it can be implemented for the employer. The cost to the laid-off employee is a loss of income, mental trauma, potential loss of residence. What would your ideal solution for the employer be here?
Loss of money? Layoffs normally have severance packages that are paid out to the employee - this can be seen as the company taking a monetary hit - though not proportional like you said. But what's the alternative here? 5x/10x'ing the severance package? I feel like that would make the job market even rougher as companies would be even more conservative with who and how much they hire.
Mental trauma? I mentioned it in another comment, but the employees after a layoff normally do have an increased fear of future layoffs which impact morale which would result in lower productivity.
Loss of residence / food? I'm coming up blank here.
Yeah I’m not sure there’s an obvious/ideal answer.
I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.
The Amazon culture that exists today is nowhere comparable to the culture that existed 5-7 years ago.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.
5-7 years isn't that long ago and it was just as terrible back then.
Yeah, the same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry.
It is from a career perspective - at least at AWS, a large portion of high calibre Engineering and Product Leadership left during that time period and the backfills for those roles just plain sucked.
> same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry
In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
An oddly gauzy piece. As an ex-Amazonian, I recommend the (complimentary, insider-written) book "Working Backwards" for those interested in a substantive look at how Amazon ticks.
> At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff.
Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
Two things can be true. They treat their employees poorly and they have invented many things which have vastly benefited millions or even billions of people.
The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
They get it from senior management, and pass it down like generational trauma. This was a problem even in 2013 when I worked there. Once, I was new and actually pushed back against a Director level person's poor behavior in a 70 person meeting, because I didn't know better. I was approached by multiple individuals afterwards telling me how "brave" it was of me.
At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.
I've never worked directly for Amazon, but for a consultancy that was an AWS Partner.
I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.
Amazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM.
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.
I am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart.
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
> The word balance never came up.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.
Amazon doesn't actually pay mediocre, they are very good for FAANG standards. But yes, when you have already cut out the slackers and still are required to PIP x% of every team despite everyone being competent, everyones' coworker relationships automatically become competitive, not collaborative. The culture starts to become a rat race of people working nights and weekends, each trying to not become the one whose family and children might have to get uprooted and leave the US within 60 days because of a PIP.
Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
Amazon pay had a 30% negative revision for most tenured staff this year. It’s unclear how it plays out with new hires - there are likely still a few very strong Covid era grants out there.
It’s not bad pay, but most mid-caps should be competitive with the pay band in 2025. Amazon paid very well in 2023-2024, and paid well up through 2022.
The back dated pay structure with a 15% YoY stock growth assumption means that unless Amazon grows at 30%+ per year you would be better off at any other medium to large tech company.
I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
Amazon pays pretty mediocre. After their boosts during the pandemic they’re solidly middle of the pack above Apple and Microsoft but below Meta and Google.
We are an Amazon/Google family, and I'm surprised how close Amazon comes to Google salary even for a non-dev UXD. It is definitely competitive (same market, about the same level, dev vs UXD).
I find it insane there are folks who unironically claim Amazon's pay is mediocre when there's only a handful of companies that pay more and Amazon's pay L5/6 is 2+x of the higher end of the the average for a senior eng.
Good for them, I guess, but also has nothing to do with the reality
With Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.
14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today.
> 14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today.
Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
I'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
Hi, people are not widgets.
They take huge personal, family and financial risks to move for a job. When you are getting rid en-masse people, you are ruining local communities. There is a real societal cost.
It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive. Not to mention that once the company has established a reputation of a revolving door, then nobody gives a shit about it. They will exploit it for the short term and let it die.
Layoffs should the absolute last resort for a company due to the disruption they cause. If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
I absolutely agree with your assessment that it should be the last resort option due to the societal cost of a large number of people losing their job. On top of the risks you mention, there's also the mental hit that often accompanies layoffs not just for the folks who were fired, but the increased feeling of paranoia from the people who are left.
But can it not be the case the this /was/ the company's last resort? There's another option of moving people around and retraining them to do another function. What if that was considered and then rejected because there weren't enough departments growing to warrant that? Rhetorically, if they don't have the ability/opportunity to re-assign people, then what?
> If the market dynamics do not naturally lead to this, then regulation should shape the field.
Look no further than the economies of France and Germany… both of those countries have very stringent regulations around layoffs. And none of whom have the dominance of American companies or breadth of unicorn startups.
Making firing difficult makes hiring difficult, which disincentives risk and innovation.
The leave/fire at-will contracts of most tech jobs in the US is a feature, not a bug.
> It also sucks for businesses, because hiring & onboarding is so freaking hard and expensive.
Sometimes, but sometimes not. Layoffs are important to get rid of low performers who could be replaced with better talent, and they’re important to help companies adjust their labor to market conditions.
Neither France nor Germany have access to the high-risk capital that American startups enjoy.
Layoff protections and entrepreneurship in this case have a correlation but not a causation relationship.
If your thesis was correct startups would thrive in States with absolutely zero protections, yet the most successful tech startups are in the most “stringent” (for American standards) State. California.
Even if it is the most stringent, California is still an at-will state. You can fire people for any reason at any time, minus protections for discrimination or retaliation, etc.
France and Germany require a lot more bureaucratic red tape (documentation, severance pay, notice periods, and justification). I have not seen this personally in France, but I have in Germany and it was a nightmare. I will be very careful about hiring in Germany next time.
An incredible amount of capital is in the United States for a reason (you're on a website of those capital providers). While termination protocol is obviously not the only reason, it is undeniably one of the many that contribute to the States having the most favorable environment to build a high growth, innovative company.
Well, look no further than the American economy if you want to see what unlimited layoffs and outsourcing can do.
You mean... the economy with the highest developer salaries on the planet?[1]
Or the one that has the world's largest startup economy? Or the one that has almost all of the world's top 20 companies by market cap?
[1]https://codesubmit.io/blog/software-engineer-salary-by-count...
14k is massive layoff, even for a company as large as amazon. it isn’t about the “employees who aren’t necessarily doing the work you want done” for sure (all the while they are off-shoring by the more thousands while “america first”-run government is bailing out argentine :)
That's 4% of corporate employees going by Reuter's 350k corp employee count[0]. Sounds well within the trimming-the-fat numbers. The rest of your comment alludes to an obligation towards improving the domestic economy. That can be done through regulation, but then there's a balancing act between under/over regulation. Too much and you end up in an EU situation that hinders small tech business growth.
So we come back to my previous statement/question. Above what profit amount should a company be obligated to keep (in their eyes) unproductive workers?
[0]: https://www.reuters.com/business/world-at-work/amazon-target...
Except amazon trims the fat every year
A company's fiduciary duty is towards shareholders, which forces a mindset where Employees fiduciary duty should be towards themselves.
People will Unionize or create laws where companies's fiduciary duty should be towards both employees and shareholders.
Well, this is all until Elon's Robots will change everything :)
They’re people, not disposable objects. The alternative would be to distribute the cost of the layoffs evenly across the employer and the employees. Right now employees pay a disproportionate portion of the cost.
The cost you're referring to is fairly abstract - I'm not sure how it can be implemented for the employer. The cost to the laid-off employee is a loss of income, mental trauma, potential loss of residence. What would your ideal solution for the employer be here?
Loss of money? Layoffs normally have severance packages that are paid out to the employee - this can be seen as the company taking a monetary hit - though not proportional like you said. But what's the alternative here? 5x/10x'ing the severance package? I feel like that would make the job market even rougher as companies would be even more conservative with who and how much they hire.
Mental trauma? I mentioned it in another comment, but the employees after a layoff normally do have an increased fear of future layoffs which impact morale which would result in lower productivity.
Loss of residence / food? I'm coming up blank here.
Yeah I’m not sure there’s an obvious/ideal answer.
I do think there’s value in disincentivizing churn though. What we’ve been seeing lately is rapid hiring followed by rapid firing. I bet there’s some inflection point where the job market would actually benefit from less churn even if it comes at the cost of higher unemployment in the short term.
or you wait for the inspector's call.
some of you... may die...
The Amazon culture that exists today is nowhere comparable to the culture that existed 5-7 years ago.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.
5-7 years isn't that long ago and it was just as terrible back then. Yeah, the same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry.
> 5-7 years isn't that long ago
It is from a career perspective - at least at AWS, a large portion of high calibre Engineering and Product Leadership left during that time period and the backfills for those roles just plain sucked.
> same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry
In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
An oddly gauzy piece. As an ex-Amazonian, I recommend the (complimentary, insider-written) book "Working Backwards" for those interested in a substantive look at how Amazon ticks.
> At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff.
Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
> The word balance never came up.
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
I think the subsequent level is 'Distinguished Engineer.' That's terminal AFAIK. Maybe they'll need a 'Sr DE' someday?
A horrible company that treats their employees like dirt. We'd be better off if this company never existed.
Two things can be true. They treat their employees poorly and they have invented many things which have vastly benefited millions or even billions of people.
The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
They get it from senior management, and pass it down like generational trauma. This was a problem even in 2013 when I worked there. Once, I was new and actually pushed back against a Director level person's poor behavior in a 70 person meeting, because I didn't know better. I was approached by multiple individuals afterwards telling me how "brave" it was of me.
At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.
shit runs downhill
There’s a reason Bezos decided to bulk up. Gonna need some of that when people decide to throw hands at all hands.
Some people might take your comment as a joke or exaggeration, but I can confidently say that the worst coworkers I've had by far were all ex-Amazon.
I've never worked directly for Amazon, but for a consultancy that was an AWS Partner.
I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.
They all want GPUs and they are all trading off engineers for GPUs. That seems to be the culture right now :)
One would think you’d have more tact than to post this today.
Its damage mitigation. I was waiting for actual insights but its all pr fluff
Amazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM.
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.
I am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart.
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
> There was only talk of customer obsession and solving problems at scale—imagining the biggest problem possible, then multiplying it by ten.
cringe