Amazon’s team culture made the job harder than the work

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 0:36

   You ended up unemployed. What was going on at the time? Yeah, it's a funny story, I guess, now in hindsight. But basically, like I started working, I got my full my first full time offer at Amazon. I'd heard it was like, you know, like a pretty tough environment from like the online stuff, the things that you see on Reddit are blind. But for some reason, I just wasn't like nervous. i just thought like okay it'll be fine and like as much as i would use like the word intense i think it was more so that it was like a culture shock for me which is like i was very like introverted didn't do like too many activities or extracurriculars and then so being in a place where it's not really academic it's like there's a lot that goes into like having like a full-time job and like working with people and like all those other things that was really really tough

2. 1:24

   for me and so um among like other reasons like amazon was not like the the ideal environment in hindsight i probably could have survived if i had to redo it but i just didn't really know things at that point and so for whatever reason i just decided to quit after like a couple months and it was just a really dumb decision because it's not like i had like a backup plan or i was like like i was broke like i couldn't afford to quit but i still did it anyway so it was just I'm glad it worked out, but I wouldn't probably recommend it to most people.

3. 1:54

   What did you see at Amazon that made you want to quit so quickly? Yeah. So it was, like I said, a very intense environment. But I think many people have dealt with that. I think there's intense environments that are like people are still happy. People are like trying to perform like at the top of their game. And it's like kind of like a almost like a sport, I guess, where people are super competitive and they want to do the best that they can. But there are other environments, I think, that are like super cutthroat. And it's not people trying to do their best. It's like people, you can tell people are not like rooting for each other. Like people are, I wouldn't say they're trying to like screw each other over. I wasn't really there long enough to judge that. But you can tell people are not friendly. Like there

4. 2:36

   were some like meetings, like icebreakers that we had. And like nobody, like all, it was like 10 people, like five of us were like new grads. Literally, we all had joined within the first month. The other half were like super burnt out, experienced people like mid-level and seniors and stuff. And they were just like very unhappy. And that like spreads pretty quickly to the rest of the team. And like I said, like I think every other new grad on the team probably survived that experience. Like I didn't really keep in touch with them. I don't think they probably got pipped or whatever but it was clearly like most people left that team i think like within a year like i have them all added on linkedin so they were not happy there either i don't think what gave you the confidence to just quit your job so quickly yeah i think it was like a very