Why I Left AWS

Why I Left AWS

I debated this post quite a bit. I've lived by the "never burn bridges" rule for my entire career and it has always served me well. But I've never quite had an experience like my time at AWS, and I feel it warrants a cautionary tale to inform others.

I am the first to admit that my morals have often been "flexible." I have simultaneously worked for the Republican and Democratic parties, I have done work for sketchy governments and I've helped design weapon systems that's primary role was to kill people. This post isn't me getting on some faux high-horse. I'm certainly not perfect. It is, however, about ethics, or the lack thereof and how that the lack of ethical behavior has detrimental impact of many AWS employees.

About 2 years ago I was having coffee with a colleague. We had worked together some 20+ years prior and this person had ultimately landed at Amazon and had worked there for 10+ years. Over the two years prior to our conversation, this person had been at AWS. He said something that helped solidify a problem I had been having a really hard time articulating.

He started by noting, "Amazon's greatest strength is its ability to self-correct...". This is something really important that people outside of Amazon really don't always understand. Amazon's leadership principles combined with their mechanisms and systems creates a self-righting system. Perhaps the easiest way to understand it is by example. Let's take the Amazon Fire Phone. If you don't remember it, that's because it only existed for about a year. Rather than deem it a "marketing failure" or blame they customers for "not getting it," they accepted that it wasn't the right idea and shut it down. In essence, the system corrected itself.

In contrast, I was at Microsoft for both the original Windows Mobile and Windows Phone years, and in both cases Microsoft continued to pour money into a failing product believing they could buy the market. And as most now know, they couldn't.

But back to the conversation. My colleague continued - "... and AWS is the only business I've encountered at Amazon that fights that self-correction."

And that was exactly it. The thing I had tried so hard to articulate, but couldn't find the words for. The leadership at AWS does, in fact, fail to self-correct. At every reInvent I've attended you could attend sessions that gave contradictory advice on the same topic. And at every reInvent I attended multiple people, employees and attendees, raised this as an issue. You could build something - a product or a program - and have a different team build a different version of the same thing and watch as leaders built up their stove-pipes instead of deduplicating effort. There is confusion over roles and responsibilities, constant duplication of effort, and no consistent messaging around any major topic. Enterprise marketing employees have quit in mass because of the challenges of poor leadership and the inability to forge any kind of consist messaging. While these are bad, they are not the reason I left. They are just indicative of what one Glassdoor reviewer notes as "AWS' ability to get B-quality performance from C-quality leaders".

So why did I leave?

I have personally heard an L8 leader using homophobic language. I have seen leaders "poison the well" when they learned an employee was looking at other internal roles to prevent that employee from moving to those other roles. There is a well-known incident in Professional Services where a leader told a diversity group that they needed to stop making excuses and "integrate better". There is another famous incident in Professional Services where members of a women's forum started raising issues concerning the same leader and were shut down by HR rather than actually addressing what was a well-known systemic issue with the person in question. I have had people confide in me that they wanted to file HR complaints but feared for their job, as they had seen other people pushed out after airing issues. I know people who have filed HR complaints which were substantiated, but where there was no real follow-up action. I have seen people hired for a roles that magically changed on hire, and then watched as they were penalized in the review system for circumstances outside of their control. There are managers that I know have had multiple HR complaints against them substantiated and are still with the company. I saw a manager get promoted at a time when literally 75% of his team were looking for other jobs because he was such a poor manager. And only 75% is probably an undercount. Think of the message that sent to his team.

Like many companies, AWS had the idea of "good attrition" - when a poor performing employee leaves on their own volition and "bad attrition" when a high-performing employee leaves on their own volition. I've watched managers with high "bad attrition" tag high-performing employees at risk of leaving the company with "performance plans" so their departure won't be held against that manager. I've also seen managers attempt to abuse the performance management system in an attempt to push people out of the company. One such incident caused Amazon to settle a case out of court due to the overwhelming evidence that substantiated that employees claims of being unfairly targeted. Oh, and the leaders who were shown to have lied about the whole situation? They are still employed at AWS.

As I considered leaving I started to talk with lots of other employees. This was akin to opening Pandora's box. I had been blind to how bad things really were. The incidents above were just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. One of the hard things for me personally was learning that some of leaders I respected were complicit in covering up the problems and making excuses for the people who caused them.

In the end, I'm lucky. I have the financial means to be able to leave AWS in the middle of a pandemic and pursue a personal passion project. But my heart lies with the 14 different people I talked with prior to leaving who would love to be able to leave, but are forced to endure because they can't afford the risk to their finances or benefits.

Sadly, since I've departed the issues continue. I get calls and texts weekly from people fighting through these types of issues. And AWS still shows no interest in addressing the issues.

Hopefully AWS will learn to self-correct like the rest of Amazon does. Fighting that self-correction is destroying the company internally.

And to any AWS employee that needs an ear. I'm here to listen.

I am having issues at Amazon Akron Ohio too. Been wrote up in every department at Amazon Akron

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Ashish Chopra

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

3y

The executive suing Amazon Web Services: ‘I wouldn’t want my worst enemy working there’. Cindy Warner saw a promising career at the cloud computing company. What she found, she says, was ‘toxic’. But just over a year after she joined, the promising job had become a nightmare. Warner, a tech executive with 30 years of experience, said she had faced pay discrimination and an underlying culture of sexism and homophobia. She sued the cloud computing company in May 2021 – alleging that male executives at AWS treated her with “open contempt, insults, and hostility” and upheld a “white boys’ club” – and claims she was fired shortly after. “I truly would not want my worst enemy to work at Amazon,” https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/nov/16/amazon-web-services-lawsuit-sexism-claims

Ashish Chopra

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

3y

https://www.geekwire.com/2021/amazon-plans-investigate-discrimination-within-aws-hundreds-employees-sign-petition/ More than 550 employees signed the petition of discrimination and retaliation within AWS as this report. The petition, posted on an internal company website and seen by The Washington Post, alleges that AWS, and specifically the professional services group known as ProServe, has “an underlying culture of systemic discrimination, harassment, bullying and bias against women and under-represented groups.” The Post reported that more than 550 employees had signed the petition as of Thursday, calling for an independent probe of “employee concerns that there is a non-inclusive culture.” They also seek the creation of an employee council to work with an external investigator.

Thank you for sharing Laudon.

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Ashish Chopra

Senior Software Engineer at Infosys

3y

Amazon and it's subsidiaries are all bad. Worker suppression and exploitation of customers. The moment an employee speaks up, all the bad things are gonna happen. https://www.quora.com/Why-is-the-attrition-rate-so-high-at-Amazon-Is-it-true-that-many-people-have-seen-employees-crying-at-their-desks-while-working-at-Amazon

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