Amazon

"Spent 3 years at Amazon on AWS EC2. I left due to discrimination by my manager, which made my last 1.5 years pretty awful. Lots of being judged differently to others for the same work, got shouted at, told I was whining when I asked for more responsibility. I understand that there are bad managers everywhere, but my poor review comes from the way in which my complaints were handled by senior management. When I first spoke to my skip level manager about how I was being treated, he spoke a lot about how gender discrimination was still a big problem in the tech industry, but did nothing more with my complaint. When I took it to HR, we had a dispute resolution session. I waited more than 6 months for the results. When they came, it was that he had acted inappropriately. The repercussions? He was suggested to do a course about being a better manager if it became available in his location (in the intervening 6 months he'd changed teams and locations). No mention of bias. No mention of any larger problem. Since I left, 3/4 other women in the office of 250 (we were remote) have left citing similar issues. I'd put it down to culture in a remote office, but the senior members were from Seattle (and so was my awful manager). I learnt a lot of things while there, great operational experience, but man, I took a beating too."

"I worked at Amazon only as an intern. Interesting projects to work on, but not a very friendly culture for women."

"Amazon is largely male-dominated, and so at times, it can definitely feel isolating being one of the few women in the office (only 12% are women in my organization). Also, from my experience, team events can often gear towards male interests, and I feel that the upper management does not see supporting diversity in tech as a priority. There has been many times when a letter to the upper management regarding better environment for women employees goes unheard. As well, (unsurprisingly) it is not uncommon to see unconscious bias in the office and insensitive comments coming from male coworkers. The good thing is, there is a very large and supportive community for women in engineering, where such topics are discussed. Employees also have the chance to attend many events, like the Grace Hopper Conference. It is just that, oftentimes, it can feel like mostly everyone who cares are women. And so we don't see improvements to the workplace as quickly as other companies."

"make sure you find a good manager"

"I've loved my job, but I see how hard it can be working at Amazon as a woman and as a regular person with kids. Boundaries are important, but Amazon likes to recruit people who want to be successful more then they want to have good boundaries, so it can really drain people."