Inside Amazon's engineering culture: Lessons from their senior principals
58 comments
·October 28, 2025darth_avocado
dheera
Amazon doesn't actually pay mediocre, they are very good for FAANG standards. But yes, when you have already cut out the slackers and still are required to PIP x% of every team despite everyone being competent, everyones' coworker relationships automatically become competitive, not collaborative. The culture starts to become a rat race of people working nights and weekends, each trying to not become the one whose family and children might have to get uprooted and leave the US within 60 days because of a PIP.
Meta is another dumpster fire. The highest level you can receive at a promo cycle is "Redefines Expectations". Congratulations, you have worked so goddamn hard, your reward is a redefined expectation and the next cycle if you work equally goddamn hard you will only "meet" that newly-redefined expectation. You're on track to a PIP!
lumost
Amazon pay had a 30% negative revision for most tenured staff this year. It’s unclear how it plays out with new hires - there are likely still a few very strong Covid era grants out there.
It’s not bad pay, but most mid-caps should be competitive with the pay band in 2025. Amazon paid very well in 2023-2024, and paid well up through 2022.
The back dated pay structure with a 15% YoY stock growth assumption means that unless Amazon grows at 30%+ per year you would be better off at any other medium to large tech company.
darth_avocado
I’m not sure what you mean by FAANG standards, but Meta and Netflix both pay way more and Google and Apple pay similar if not more with waaay better work culture. Tech companies of the last decade like Uber, DoorDash, Block, Snap, Airbnb, Snowflake etc. all pay more than Amazon while the new generation of AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are not even comparable. The only way you would consider Amazon pay to be very good is if you come from Microsoft or one of the old school companies like Cisco and IBM. I would put Amazon pay as middle of the pack or mediocre.
saagarjha
Amazon pays pretty mediocre. After their boosts during the pandemic they’re solidly middle of the pack above Apple and Microsoft but below Meta and Google.
seanmcdirmid
We are an Amazon/Google family, and I'm surprised how close Amazon comes to Google salary even for a non-dev UXD. It is definitely competitive (same market, about the same level, dev vs UXD).
vandyswa
With Amazon layoff blood running in the gutters today, I'm sure their PR people shook the tree to get something nice to drop onto the interwebitudes.
ncr100
14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today.
palmotea
> 14,000 corporate jobs, laid off, today.
Hey, cut them some slack. They're barely getting by: they only made $18 billion in profit last quarter. They gotta cut some dead weight to stay solvent.
speff
I'm not sure I understand this viewpoint. Just because a company made a big profit doesn't mean it has to keep positions it decides is unneeded. This isn't the first time I've seen this type of attitude and I'm genuinely curious about the alternative. Once you make above $X in profit, you're obligated to keep employees who aren't necessarily doing the work you want done?
ge96
some of you... may die...
alephnerd
The Amazon culture that exists today is nowhere comparable to the culture that existed 5-7 years ago.
A lot of the Amazonians who had a "mission first" mindset at the mid- and upper-level rungs of engineering and product management all ended up become leadership or executive management at other companies, or founding their own companies.
That said, it is important to highlight the mindset that did help Amazon during it's golden era.
harshalizee
5-7 years isn't that long ago and it was just as terrible back then. Yeah, the same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry.
alephnerd
> 5-7 years isn't that long ago
It is from a career perspective - at least at AWS, a large portion of high calibre Engineering and Product Leadership left during that time period and the backfills for those roles just plain sucked.
> same "leaders" now have infected other tech companies with their culture and are actively ruining the industry
In what way? Demanding that people who are being paid $200k-400k TC need to execute and show that they can execute is something which needed to be done in the tech industry.
kaonwarb
An oddly gauzy piece. As an ex-Amazonian, I recommend the (complimentary, insider-written) book "Working Backwards" for those interested in a substantive look at how Amazon ticks.
A_D_E_P_T
> At Amazon, customer obsession isn’t just a value—it’s a constraint on every technical tradeoff.
Gauzy because the author simply fed his notes into GPT-4o or 5-instant. If the line above ain't rock-solid proof of this, I don't know what is. And I don't think that our, uh, author gave the model enough to work with.
vachina
Didn’t feel like it offered any insights honestly. Guy is feeling holier because he finally gets to work at Amazon.
dwb
> The word balance never came up.
Hope you Deliver enough Impact before you burn out. Honestly sounds like a corporate brainwashing effort more than anything. “Senior principal engineer”? What’s next, “Senior staff principal engineer”?
the_panopticon
I think the subsequent level is 'Distinguished Engineer.' That's terminal AFAIK. Maybe they'll need a 'Sr DE' someday?
teeray
“Grand Engineer”
“Ascended Engineer”
“Transcendant Archengineer”
“Their Excellency Prime Engineer”
throwaway439080
The thing I learned from Amazon's senior principals is that actually it's good and normal to turn red in the face and scream at your junior colleagues that they're fucking idiots when they have the temerity to politely disagree with you.
damn_trolls
They get it from senior management, and pass it down like generational trauma. This was a problem even in 2013 when I worked there. Once, I was new and actually pushed back against a Director level person's poor behavior in a 70 person meeting, because I didn't know better. I was approached by multiple individuals afterwards telling me how "brave" it was of me.
At Amazon, unkind and downright unprofessional behavior by people higher up the chain is normalized, and has been for a very long time.
b00ty4breakfast
shit runs downhill
darth_avocado
There’s a reason Bezos decided to bulk up. Gonna need some of that when people decide to throw hands at all hands.
tekla
I've never worked directly for Amazon, but for a consultancy that was an AWS Partner.
I got an invite to a team skip level meeting once, and holy shit I could not believe the asshole and bullshit crap those seniors were tossing at each other, at the Partner manager, and also us.
seattle_spring
Some people might take your comment as a joke or exaggeration, but I can confidently say that the worst coworkers I've had by far were all ex-Amazon.
nine_zeros
The lesson you learn is that screaming is a one-way street, can be done only in one direction of the org chart.
A junior engineer embarrassing a senior principal is a big no no.
wetpaws
Asserting your dominance is part of the leadership /s
sys_64738
A horrible company that treats their employees like dirt. We'd be better off if this company never existed.
illusive4080
Two things can be true. They treat their employees poorly and they have invented many things which have vastly benefited millions or even billions of people.
vachina
Invented what, precisely?
null
pvelagal
They all want GPUs and they are all trading off engineers for GPUs. That seems to be the culture right now :)
saagarjha
One would think you’d have more tact than to post this today.
samrus
Its damage mitigation. I was waiting for actual insights but its all pr fluff
ruben81ad
Amazon was an innovative, day 1 company, but it is not any more. They are becoming an IBM.
Enshitification is here: they are doing mass layoffs periodically, and you don't hear innovative news from AWS any more.
Additionally, companies are realising that they are pretty much using a minor offering of the AWS products, competitors are catching up, and every day there are lessser reasons to pay the AWS premium.
yahoozoo
> There was only talk of customer obsession and solving problems at scale—imagining the biggest problem possible, then multiplying it by ten.
cringe
constantcrying
I am sorry, but none of this is about engineering culture, it might as well apply to Walmart.
It again is pretty clear that Software development has no engineering culture. If you are faced with a problem in hardware, you can not patch it, so much of an engineering culture is about how to define what different parts of the organization want and how they can be fulfilled and validated. This also becomes clear when the article talks about the director, in any hardware company he is the person who must be informed about the processes and who must himself communicate about his state in the development process.
The article brings in the word "Craft" which I think is very descriptive. Software development has a culture of craftsmanship, which values individual contributions of craftsmen, not processes.
(Also a hardware company can not fire 14.000 of their engineers, without becoming non-functional)
> The word balance never came up.
Probably why it’s considered one of the worst places to work for. Works well when you are a small company that is trying to attract talent to build great things with the promise of big rewards. Doesn’t actually work that well when you’re trying to keep an established company stable and don’t offer much in return. If all you can offer is mediocre pay and a threat of PIP if I don’t work 60+ hours, I’d rather stay unemployed.