Amazonians of Reddit, how often do you find Amazon employees crying at their desks?

Little over 2 years now, I have seen nothing like this. However, I will say this much...

I work in the Technical side of the company. I do SDE work. Everyone I work with is a programmer or scripter by trade. Our hours are pretty set. Outside of the occasional on call. Even with on call, you only get paged if your product breaks. Which for my team, is almost never. For some teams, its a little more common. The tech side of the company is a pretty damn good work place.

Now, of the 100 people who complained about Amazon, I have a feeling most don't work on the technical side of the company. A lot of the posts I saw on the initial article and what not are warehouse workers. They have it rough, I am not going to lie. And I think a lot of them inflated the issue by bashing on Amazon and saying how bad it is.

The group of people I imagine have it hard are on the business side of things. They are working in a faster moving environment. They have to keep up with changing numbers, expectations, dealing with maintaining customer traffic, managing products and consumer experience. I imagine they are the ones who are put under a little more stress.

But again, nothing I haven't seen before. I worked at Microsoft for about 5 years. When under the reign of Balmer, things were SHIT in comparison. I had a huge management chain (where as Amazon is "flat" meaning very little space between you and a VP). There was a more corporate feel and it felt more demanding because we were working on products that needed to deploy because they were announced and advertised. But other teams did not have the same pressure mine did (especially people on the Xbox teams), so they had a better experience.

I think a lot of it also comes down to who your manager is. 180,000 employees. Roughly 12-15 employees to a single manager. You are going to have a shit head manager who came from another company with these "tactics" he learned at his previous employer, and he brought it over to Amazon. These few managers may be the ones ruining these peoples lives. And if people don't speak up about it, not much will change.

But its also not easy. If you get a Manger, whos own Manager is happy with the results he is getting because they make him look good, he may turn his head. So it can be hard getting the help you need.

To any Amazonians reading this though, I will say this. This company is a GREAT company for making a move to another team or another part of the company. In my two years I have made a few lateral moves leading to where I am now, and I am happy with it. My previous team was not what I was looking for, but my current manager and previous manager were fine with the move. Very few managers are going to refuse to let you go, because they would rather have some one motivated to stay, and other teams are always growing for more help. So if you are unhappy where you are, go to HR, and try to find a position that suits you on another team. Theres thousands of people happy with what they do, and there are people who want to make sure you are happy here also.

/r/amazon Thread