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Amazon Web Services

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Unfair Practices: Unregrettable Attrition Targeting - Senior Account Manager Amazon Web Services Employee Review

1.0
11 Mar 2023
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Easy to sell the best technology in the industry.

Cons

After laying off 18K employees, Amazon continues with a secret blood letting hiding attrition from stockholders. AWS is the wild west. The Unregrettable Attrition program targets good employees based on how much they cost the company (thanks to data driven metrics). This policy targets older and expensive employees. AWS burns 'em, and churns 'em. There is absolutely no loyalty to employees. Favorite abound. Sales leadership is heartless. They take good employees meeting targets, and through the UA program give them impossible tasks to dance to. One example is an employee asked to increase sales by 300% in 20 days. This physically and mentally hurts the good people that were smart enough to get into AWS in the first place. The culture is completely toxic. They are the farthest from the Worlds Best Employer there has ever been.

Explore other reviews about Amazon Web Services

5.0
4 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Chill, learn a lot, fast paced. Friendly

Cons

Nothing lol. No layoffs too at Annapurna labs (aws)

4.0
12 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Operated in systems that had real scale, operational constraints, and production consequences.

Cons

Working at Amazon Web Services gave me strong exposure to distributed systems, operational ownership, and production-scale infrastructure, but there were definitely tradeoffs as well. One downside was that, like many large organizations, ownership could become fragmented. You often own a subsystem or workflow rather than an entire product end-to-end, which can limit exposure to broader architectural decision-making unless you deliberately seek it out. There was also significant process overhead. Design reviews, operational processes, dependency coordination, and organizational alignment were valuable for learning rigor, but they can slow iteration compared to smaller engineering teams. Another challenge is that large internal ecosystems can abstract away infrastructure complexity. AWS has extensive internal tooling, deployment systems, and operational platforms, which are powerful, but some of that experience does not transfer directly outside the company. I also found that operational work could dominate engineering time at points. Handling production issues, retries, integration failures, and on-call responsibilities teaches reliability engineering well, but it can reduce the amount of time spent on deeper technical exploration or greenfield development. Finally, there is the perception aspect. AWS is a strong name, but experienced interviewers know there is wide variance between teams and roles. The company name opens doors, but ultimately you still need to demonstrate technical depth, ownership, and strong engineering judgment independently of the brand.

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