When I first joined Amazon in 2017, I felt very fortunate to work there. As a program manager working with the company's middle and last-mile operations teams, I had a great boss who knew Amazon's culture inside and out. I loved how our senior leaders valued evidence and logic over status; if you had the data, no matter your level, people listened.
I loved that we spoke in the language of Amazon's leadership principles in the hallways and in meetings. "I really loved your Bias for Action there," a colleague would say, referring to the value placed on speed. I could see myself continuing to "work hard, have fun, make history" at Amazon for years to come.
But in January 2023, in the middle of a personal health scare, I was one of the 18,000 employees laid off. Scared and angry, I took a 12-week severance and a small health insurance stipend. I'd dreamt for years about taking a career break but didn't feel financially secure, so I began doing part-time instructional design work as a sole proprietor while I figured out what was next.
A year later, I got the opportunity to return to Amazon as a boomerang employee. I took it, but I quickly realized that the innovative, exciting work environment I remembered was gone, replaced by what I felt was ineffective leadership and a disproportionate focus on share prices.
Eleven weeks after rejoining, I resigned. Here are the four red flags that told me Amazon's culture had changed.
The interview process lacked purpose and empathy
In January 2024, a former colleague reached out to me about a role that would be opening up on his team. Despite my poor layoff experience, I was enticed by the idea of rejoining Amazon and began looking for other roles on LinkedIn.
I made it to the final-round interview loop for a senior product manager role. Four of the five interviews felt familiar, but my interview with the "bar raiser" — an Amazon employee specifically trained in interview skills to advise the hiring team on how to raise the bar with each new hire — felt different.
At the end of the interview, I asked her how things had changed after the layoffs. She responded, knowing that I had been laid off, that the layoffs were a positive challenge for her team as they had to do more with less. Her response was a punch in the gut. So layoffs were a good thing? I'd always been told that a value at Amazon was to treat "the candidate as a customer," but didn't experience that.
About a week later the recruiter shared that the team felt I would make a stronger program manager than product manager and asked me to do another interview loop for that role. I declined and told the recruiter that a second full round of interviews was duplicative and unnecessary.
I ended up being offered the role and declined it because of my sour interview process. Looking back, I should have seen my interview experience as a sign of how Amazon had changed.
RTO implementation was inconsistent
A few weeks later, in May 2024, I accepted a different offer from Amazon for a Nashville-based role on another team I'd applied for. I was living in Atlanta and moved to Nashville to adhere to the 3-day-a-week in-office policy. Relocating was a big decision, but I felt excited to rejoin the Amazon I knew and loved, despite the interview process hiccup.
Even before my first day of the new job, I saw another example of how Amazon's culture had changed: uneven implementation of return-to-office policies.
I couldn't pick up my computer at the office; instead, I had to get it shipped to a non-office address. There were no assigned desks, only "agile seating." Each day I was in the office, I had to find an open desk on my assigned floor and if I wanted to store stuff at work, I had to get a locker. My onboarding that first week was entirely virtual, and I never saw any of my teammates in the office, as they all worked in different cities. And there was a two-year waitlist to get parking at my office building — my recruiter called it a "parking hellscape."
It made me question: Why did I relocate my life for an in-person office experience that didn't exist?
My team seemed to lack leadership and accountability
I joined the newly created content team, which my boss had taken over nine months prior. In my third week, my boss mentioned that another person on another team might take on the content strategy work he'd hired me for. In my fourth week, I was invited to a last-minute meeting, which felt ominously similar to my layoff call one year prior, and was told that the whole content team was being dissolved.
I was told that my group's leadership team had been considering this move since Q4 of 2023. Despite knowing about the team's likely demise, my boss still hired four people in the two months leading up to the team being disbanded.
In my previous six years at Amazon, I had never encountered these sorts of pivots. It seemed like Amazon's burgeoning bureaucracy had created an environment of no accountability.
Employees seemed to be going through the motions
The Amazon I joined in 2016 prided itself in being "peculiar." Instead of making PowerPoint presentations, we prepared for monthly business reviews by writing six-page narratives designed to help us make data-driven decisions. Each meeting started with everyone, including directors and VPs, reading those documents for 15 to 30 minutes before starting a line-by-line discussion.
When I rejoined this year, I found that people were still writing six-pagers, but they didn't seem to understand the purpose anymore. The documents didn't have the polish or data to allow in-depth discussion of the facts. Instead, the conversation would veer to topics the leaders were interested in.
It seemed documents, and all the effort behind them, had become the epitome of make-work rather than a unique way to produce essential decision-making tools.
I lost my trust in Amazon and quit
A few weeks after my team was dissolved, I met with my new team leader and teammates to map out our work. I realized I saw very little of what I'd signed on to do.
My layoff should've been the writing on the wall — this place has changed — but I clung to the idea of the Amazon I'd once respected, not wanting to recognize what it had become. Over and over, I hoped things would improve, but I grew tired.
I knew quitting would come with a high financial cost — I'd have to return my sign-on bonus and pay for my move to Nashville — but in October 2024, eleven weeks into my Amazon return, I resigned. I decided I'd rather have no job than work for a company I didn't trust or respect anymore.
In his recent letter about the five-day RTO plans, CEO Andy Jassy described reducing layers of leadership to increase employees' ability to move fast, take ownership, and increase innovation for customers. That only solves half the problem. Amazon has too many layers of management and too many ineffectual leaders.
The Amazon I joined in 2016 thrummed a "fail fast and often" mentality, encouraging risk-taking that led to delightful innovations. The Amazon I rejoined in 2024 slogs along play-acting the peculiar ways, creating an environment of process obsession instead of customer obsession.
I hope they can right the ship, but I won't be around to find out.
In response to Business Insider's inquiry, Amazon spokesperson Margaret Callahan said that Amazon was ranked second on LinkedIn's Top Companies list this year and first in LinkedIn's Top Companies in Technology and Information.
Stephanie Ramos writes about life and finance as a corporate escapee and single, child-free woman on Substack.
If you would like to share your experience working at Amazon, email Jane Zhang at [email protected].
