I have been with Amazon Japan for a year now. I have worked with many teams and have been a part of two different teams.
Attitude:
Mostly everyone have a type A personality. Its really hard for Type B's and C's to survive a workday without getting hurt.
Everyday is judgement day:
Pretty much everyone is judging each other all the time on every interaction and back-bitching about people when they are not around.
Leadership Principles:
Amazon Leadership principles although made with good intentions are severely misused by the people at higher cadre to deny people of opportunities. People at the lowest cadre (like SDE1) get the brickbat. Talks with managers on career growth and feedbacks from peers revolve around lack of leadership principles, and provide no actionable way to work on them. It sometimes feels like being a part of a cult.
Work life balance is a joke:
Being new and at the bottom of the ladder is the worst. Delivery expectations are very high. New joins are asked to deliver singlehandedly on projects worth millions of dollars. Not enough time is given to new-joins to ramp up on Amazon tools before they are expected to start delivering like a code printing machines.Nnew joins like me spend all night and weekends trying to get up to speed only to be judged negatively my peers and managers.
Customer obsession is a joke:
Although quality of softwares written and deployed are extremely high, the ultimate value/delivery to the customer (merchant or the buyer) is never taken into consideration. Seller Central is one example where the user experience is pathetic and near to useless and hundreds of engineers work tirelessly on adding functionality to it (in hidden pages and dropdown menus) everyday.
All in all everyone looks very happy from outside but the environment is too toxic to work on.
