1. Near-constant reorgs. I’ve been a part of 14 reorgs in just as many months, and they aren’t well thought out or prepared for in advance, and it leads to unnecessary confusion. 2. Lots of leadership turnover. It’s hard to push for a promotion when your manager and skip-level leaders are constantly changing. 3. Lack of training for managers. I used to train leaders in leadership development soft skills and the lack of preparation here is astounding to me. It also shows up when managers have little to no soft skills, and no one is teaching them how…so I do a lot of coaching up. 4. Tough hours. I either have 4 hrs of work per day - or 14. There is no in between - and often those 14hr days come as a result of false urgency. Everything is not an emergency. 5. The doc-writing culture is such a waste of time. It can be beneficial for presenting big ideas, but they take a long time to write and then you present it, get comments, and it dies, never to be seen again. And, for a company that touts never using PPT slides, they use a lot of PPT slides. 6. Favoritism. There isn’t much you can do with this at the lower levels, since it’s perpetuated from the top levels. It determines who gets promotions and whose ideas are listened to. 7. Senior leadership is mega out of touch with its workforce. Unfortunately, they’re the ones making layoff decisions… 8. A culture of competition. This is the thing I hate most about working at AWS. There is a scarcity mindset instead of a growth mindset, and so everyone is competing against each other for resources (rather than working together to present the best possible product for customers). This causes duplication of work ALL THE TIME and a total waste of time and energy. 9. Lack of inclusion for people with disabilities. There’s a lot of lip service to this, but most managers see disabilities as only visible ones. I have several invisible disabilities and I constantly have to advocate for myself when it comes to requesting accommodations- and often the process is so difficult to request them that I (and many other PWDs) are deterred from trying. All in all, I would not recommend AWS to a friend- or if I did, I would share all of this info with them in advance.
