rating for Amazon.com

Amazon, maintainance interfers with project work posted on October 05, 2006

I worked at Amazon.com from 2001 - 2002.

The highpoint of my time at Amazon.com was being told that I was less likely to lose my job if I did a newcomer's share of pager duty! This was at a particularly bad time as I had project work to finish and had only just recently done another lot of pager duty. (Pager duty is when you have to carry a pager and respond to any moderate to severe website problems immediately and also carry out a set list of duties.)

On the plus side, their PacMed offices on Beacon Hill are nice, I got to work on a variety of projects and I worked with people I respected.

On the minus side, new projects and constant refactoring often caused problems and I was often woken up at midnight and 6am (pager-duty) to fix problems caused by other groups. I remember being frustrated for weeks as my project work was slowed down by constant interruptions.

The management of our group was appallingly bad. When our sub-group was formed, almost all of the workers had their time assigned 100% to long-term projects. I was given a series of shorter projects, but was not assigned to them 100%. During one short project I was given seven other pieces of work! On each interruption I contacted the project manager to tell him the work would be delayed. My manager did nothing to help me. (When I was at Amazon.com, I had one fixed manager and a different project manager for each project.) In fact he made things worse by crossing his name off a rota and adding my name instead. For a certain type of work this doubled the amount of work I had to do and worse it wasn't properly spaced out. There was no attempt to equally distribute work.

Then at the end of the year I was blamed for the project manager phoning our group to ask what was going on with all the interruptions. There was no attempt by anybody to differentiate between real criticisms and total fantasy unable to stand up to the slightest enquiry.

My last few months there were absolute hell. One of my colleagues lost his job and I was handed his incomplete project work to finish. Before he lost his job, the manager that fired him made no attempt to find out the status of the work. I was just told to push out the work as quickly as possible, which was difficult given my pile of other tasks kept growing. Despite doing perfect work (I was thanked by one project manager) my manager kept up a constant stream of verbal and written attacks about completely meaningless and personal matters. Small things I said in a corridor about project work were twisted and then written up as an attack on me by my manager, despite the fact the project manager said he was very happy with my work. The fact that the project work launched without problems solely due to my work were irrelevant.

During my last 5 months I was allocated my whole share of primary on-call pager duty for the year. I heard one person who was likely to leave the company was allocated two lots of pager duty in one month before he left. Some of the time when you are carrying out pager duty you are responsible for keeping major website functionality going. Being overloaded with work and having a manager constantly attacking you while having a workload that keeps you up until the early hours of the morning and working at weekends doesn't make sense.

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