I finally built up the courage to put this down onto “paper”. I was so worried that speaking out on the culture of one of the largest tech giants would sabotage my career but after working for Netflix this past year, I’ve realized not all tech companies are alike.

It was great at first…

The company flies you out to their Seattle headquarters for orientation, and at age 25 this made you feel extremely special. The office was huge, had great architecture, and DOGS! I mean ✅✅. You also got stock (which vested incrementally over the next 5 years). So really after 2 years, I walked out with 10 shares, and that was only because my husband advised me to pay the taxes on year 2 out of pocket so I could keep all 9 shares versus using half of them to pay the taxes on the other half. 🤷🏻‍♀️Very grateful for him.

Anyways, I had a great manager, I had the best client (love you Bose), I was learning so much, and I was not micro-managed which was 🙌🏻 Now fast forward to the looming goal of promotions. And here is where I started catching on to why there was such a high turnover at the company.

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Poor Culture 🚫

We went from one manager to the next to the next. Every time I was surfacing the same concerns. I was burnt out, overworked, and constantly covering for other people.

Vacation Coverage

You could only take vacation if there was someone willing to cover your accounts while you were gone. Listen, I know this is common for many companies, but the problem here was that I took the pressure onto myself to ensure that I had all my work done previous to vacation so the coverage person was truly only there for EMERGENCIES. Others took advantage of the vacation coverage to essentially hold off on doing any work until the assigned coverage would have to do all the work. So here is an example (it still makes me furious):

So as a senior member of my vertical/grocery aisle I often times was left to clean up other’s messes. In this particular case, I wanted to avoid this from occurring AGAIN -especially because Christmas time was the only time of year I got to see my family. So I set a meeting with (1) the person I was covering for, (2) my manager + the person I was covering for (3) my manager alone & (4) a final check with the person I was covering for again. Okay so at this point I have made it extremely clear that I do not take long vacations (even skipping Thanksgiving) just so I can have some time with my family ONCE a year and will therefore only be monitoring campaigns that are G2G.

As the email is sent to me with all of the coverage information, I start to notice… no work had been done on this Oscars campaign for Microsoft 🤬 WHAT. THE. HELL. So I start to furiously work on it because it is a $750,000 deal and knew I was about to hear from everyone looking for updates sometime soon. I start CC’ing my manager on everything because she was specifically aware this was NOT supposed to happen. And guess what… she was OOO and never responded. So guess it’s not her problem HUH. I finally tell the project managers that this is highly at risk to not launch. And that was when I start getting help from a program manager on the IMDb team to get some approvals done faster. I ended up locking myself in my room, working 12 hour days, and nervously sweating the entire time I was home. ENTIRE. I barely saw my family.

When I get back into the office, I confront my manager and tell her this was not okay, which she agrees, but takes NO ACTION. Instead I go to the post-mortem, and everyone thanks the Microsoft CM for her “hard work” on the campaign. OKAY, I am done. And this was when I realized one more thing about Amazon culture:

Hard work is not rewarded but rather taken advantage of, and there is no accountability for those who are barely working.

Gender Inequality

To only reinforce the quote, I had worked my ass off to get promoted and was up for promotion around 1yr & 7 months of me being tenure at Amazon. There are only a certain # of people who could be promoted, but luckily there were never any questions on my promotion document. I was so excited because one of my good friends said he had gotten a 13% increase + more stock, and another friend said he had gotten a 10% increase + stock (and he was fired within months of his promotion). Then I received my increase… it was 10% ONLY. 🤬It was the principle of me knowing my male counterparts were receiving more compensation for equal or less amount of work to be quite honest. I set a meeting with my manager, and I ask her why I didn’t receive any stock as part of my compensation… and get ready for her response

“you were promoted too quickly, and therefore are not eligible to receive more stock”

Umm excuse me. I over-performed and therefore I shot myself in the foot. I was floored. Because I had not vested my 2 year stock yet, I was compensated less. NO NOPE. I was so frustrated I started crying. My manager continued to tell me

“It’s a standardized #. I can’t do anything about it. It is above me”

Which only made me realize, I was never going to be anything more than a number to the company. Who was either an A, B, C or D performer. Which by the way as a top performer only received a 1.6% increase my first year… which is the lowest I have even heard of. Please someone tell me of lower - because I lost sleep over this.

No Access to HR

On top of it all, I was having an extremely difficult time focusing at work because I had a coworker who would come in around noon, smoke a vape pen underneath his desk, and then proceed to constantly flip my headphones off to annoy me. I attempted to tell my manager of this behavior multiple times, but nothing came out of it. I attempted to reach out to HR since our manager left, and then we had no manager… but no response. It was moments like these where you really start feeling alone and defeated.

Crying was normal at the office

So yes, I cried a handful of times, but what was weird if that it was so normal. Every person in the office had stories of when they cried. And I saw at least one person crying every single day. The culture was beating everyone down. And I finally realized it was because

management was told to assign 1.5 person workload to each headcount

- yes someone told me this drunkenly at a happy hour. The “frugality” principle strikes again 🤪. Yes this is a BIG one at Amazon. Be prepared to have a budget of $130 max per hotel accommodation in Seattle (impossible). Which brings me to another fun story:

I had worked many hours and many weeks on putting together creative insights for Bose using data modeling with the shopper marketing team in London, and had fine-tuned a draft to present to my salesperson on the team. I got through 3 slides in the half an hour I had with her because she TORE my presentation apart, and every time I tried to explain anything she would cut me off. She said the deck was terrible, and if it had been her manager “Marcel” he would have ripped it apart. Although I thought she did a pretty good job of that. I of course got so angry because she was so condescending to me that I knew her attitude towards me would from then on it be disrespectful. You know when you are so angry you could either punch someone or you just start crying… yeah that was me.

Paula was covering for Bose AE because she was on maternity leave, and instead of being respectful of our AE and her right to take time to have a baby, she set a meeting with us to say

Listen Madeline is no longer here, so I am steering this ship now. And honestly guys, I don’t even know if she is coming back because this account needs fresh eyes.

I was mortified because people were talking about Madeline losing her job not even a month into her maternity leave. AGAIN. NOT OKAY. I attempted to escalate this behavior again, because my counterpart and I were being bullied- this was worse than the 3rd grade sheesh. But nothing. NADA. Thanks HR…

Feeling Depressed

As you can see from the above, there were several haystacks that broke the camel’s back. But what I don’t think I was noticing was how depressed I started feeling, and I am normally an extremely happy person. I guess after 2+ years of dealing walking around an office of stressed, tired, disrespectful, and sad people, you start to blend into the mix. I am so grateful for my husband, because he finally snapped me out of it. He began crying one night because he had never seen me so unhappy and so lifeless. Honestly our relationship was seriously suffering.

I will do ANYTHING for you to quit. You aren’t even yourself anymore. You are so unhappy and stressed. Please quit. This isn’t worth it.

And he was so right. You spend 40 hours a week in this place, or in my case 60+ hours, that you eventually turn into the toxic workplace. The majority of your week is spent at work, so make sure its a good one!

Even Quitting Wasn’t Easy

When I finally decided to put in my two weeks notice, I had a new “interim” manager (I can’t even tell you how many managers I had in my 2 years there LOL). I’m sure this wouldn’t reflect well on “her numbers”, but I was so fed up with being employee #7,888. She of course tells me

you owe it to your team to at least stay through your annual planning meeting

Okay. Hmm 🤨 I don’t think I owe anyone anything - especially not the salesperson who has only mistreated me since day one. But anyways I was already leaving, and I thought why not. Let’s fly to Seattle one more time for old times sake. She was confused as to why I was leaving and I tried to summarize that it was not a safe environment and I really needed time to recuperate and have time for myself since I was working 11 hour days and traveling at that point. So to that I was offered

How about raise in compensation? How about if we hire someone to help you out?

To which I knew was just an interim way to have me train my replacement. No Thank You. And also in the words of JoJo: “You know it's just too little, too late”

Oh and my favorite thing - truly the cherry on top 🍒. My salesperson was emailing me for a deck on my LAST DAY of work 🙄: