Amazon

I really enjoyed my last team and working under my last manager. She was really supportive and always listened to my voice, especially if I was raising it for a data-backed reason. I feel lucky that I got to work with her because she has a great reputation. I got put into a role that was a level higher than the one I was in, and that helped me get fast-tracked to a promotion.

There's no such thing as Amazon company culture. The company has 500,000 employees, and there are different companies within the company. The culture depends on your team and your hiring manager, in that order. Technical roles usually have a worse work-life balance because they're on call for different issues. AWS is very much like a startup in its culture. The teams are pretty small and have a lot of autonomy. There are few established policies, so you have a chance to build your own path. My hiring manager was flexible and upfront about how she has a son and she doesn't expect me to work very long hours. She established the culture for the team and for our relationship.

The promotion process has not been transparent. They ask their managers not to dive too deep into the discussions with the people they manage. I learned that you have to be in a role for two years before you can get promoted, and I wasn't aware of this for a long time.

I submitted my application in February, and then I heard back for the first time in April. I had interviews in May and early June. They have a policy to let people know within a week, so then I got my offer in Early June. At Amazon, all the questions are based on leadership principles. There are 14 tenets that everyone at the company recognizes. For example, I got assigned “dive deep.” When doing the interview, they ask you to answer in STAR format, so it helped that I practiced those beforehand.

Every year, we have a thing called a Forte, where you can ask a team member to review your work. The Forte impacts your PCS, which determines your compensation. You have to write a promotion document, and people vote on whether or not you deserve a promotion. I had an opportunity to switch teams, but I didn't want to because that would have reset my promotion process. I wrote my promo doc and gave it to my manager, and she shopped it around to get unanimous support from the team. She was able to take that promo doc and, together with the hiring manager, brought it to HR. Ultimately, I got promoted before the standard timeline. But for others, the process is much less transparent and you have to wait about 2 months before you find out.

For the promotion process, you have to meet the role guidelines for the role that you're trying to be promoted to. You have promo docs and you have to get recommended by other people in cross-functional teams or within your team that are above or at the level you want to get promoted to.

I'm a huge extrovert, so I don't limit my personality in front of anyone. That may or may not change with the role that I choose in the future. The culture at Amazon is very results-driven and people work to get promoted. It's very transactional and there's a lot of moving pieces happening at once, and everyone wants to take advantage of those pieces so they can get promoted.

For the promotion process, you have to meet the role guidelines for the role that you're trying to be promoted to. You have promo docs and you have to get recommended by other people in cross-functional teams or within your team that are above or at the level you want to get promoted to.

They've been great. I haven't had a bad experience since I started at Amazon. People are constantly switching roles at Amazon. Since I started, I had four manager changes, but I've had the opportunity to have a professional relationship with my immediate manager but also their manager as well.

Being in food safety, something I wish would change is the ability to communicate with the operations team that supports us. One of my managers describes it as a ‘no-error culture'.

While the relationship has been healthy overall, I've had to go to bat for myself in ways that I would expect my manager to do for me, which is the sentiment I get from many Black employees at Amazon.

Due to the lack of technical tools and mechanisms, D&I teams ultimately lack necessary resources so the weight is put on Black employees or POC employees to drive diversity efforts.

A lot of the process is driven by the employee. There's a lot of documentation that's required, and you're likely working with your manager over several months to compile and complete. At the end of it, your manager goes into a meeting with superiors to make the decision.

They've been good and healthy. I've had one manager since I've been at Amazon, which I think is pretty unique since people are encouraged to change roles and try something new.

We don't necessarily have the mechanisms to know if the work that we're doing is actually impactful, which is surprising at a tech company that's building solutions to solve the world's biggest problems.

The culture is super data-driven. There's not a decision that's made without data, so you need to be comfortable diving deep into data. You need to clarify how the assumptions that you make are data-backed and how they're impacting the next decision.

On a scale of 1 to 5, it's a 3 or a 4. There's a lot of opportunity to learn and grow within Amazon. There's a lot of movement within teams if you want to learn something new. They'd rather you switch within your team than leave the company as a whole. Job-specific training is very difficult. Sometimes i'm looking at reports from a year ago, and things change so quickly that the way we look at the business just isn't the same. You have to be able to deal with the ambiguity and figure it out. There's a lack of standardized processes, and you can't build a training program over something that isn't standardized.

There's definitely a lot of opportunity for mentorship from anywhere that you want to get it. There are more organized mentorship programs that are led through the affinity groups, and they have mentor programs within your corporate function as well.

I had three phone interviews, and then I had a super day that was five interviews back to back. Amazon is really good about timelines, so I had a decision 72 hours after my super day. At the beginning of my process, there was a lot of confusion about the role I was recruiting for, because I'd applied for one role and the recruiter had matched me up with another. It was frustrating because there's so many levels of recruiters, so I had a hard time getting clarity on making sure I was interviewing for the right role.

I do think that you can be yourself. You can bring your dog to work. There are a lot of things that allow you to be yourself, and I don't think that I've ever stepped into a space where i can't be myself. Amazon has a very particular culture, and not everyone is as warm. Some people are more iviting and some are more socially awkward, but even with that, it's nothing that would keep me from being myself."