I am a former Development Manager with Amazon Web Services and was employed with AWS for close to 2.5 years. I have over 23 years of work experience across multiple geographies and have never been unemployed. I forced myself into unemployment for the 1st time in my career when I resigned from my job with AWS without another job after having endured harassment and discrimination at work directly for over a year. It started in EC2 and ended in AWS Platform group. During the entire time, Head of HR of AWS, EC2 and AWS Platform VPs, took no corrective and / or disciplinary action and allowed the issues to continue fostering a constructive discharge environment.
Prior to me resigning, I wrote an email to Andy Jassy and few others. In Amazon’s own callous style, nobody spoke to me about this email until I was employed, but Amazon did not stop the harassment even after I resigned. After the email, Amazon made standard changes of adding Asian ethnicity employees as direct reports to Andy. A similar approach was also taken for my skip level as I was the only Asian ethnicity manager in his group which I joined AWS .
After I resigned and my employment ended, Amazon sent me 10 letters requesting repayment of relocation expenses that Amazon incurred despite me highlighting I resigned without another job as I was unable to endure harassment. Myself and my family relocated to Seattle at a time when Andy Jassy had announced in the media, he will not force anyone to come to work, but in EC2, we were asked to get deviation approval if we cannot come to work and I ended up relocating from a low-cost location to high-cost Seattle without a cost-of-living adjustment (COLA). The relocation process provided by Amazon in itself was subpar where I ended up spending thousands of dollars of personal money which Amazon never reimbursed me.
Amazon further had Private Investigators tail me in social media, public places both when I was employed and even after employment ended on multiple occasions. As the HR investigation was ongoing and I had a PI visit my house and take photos without my consent as I was looking right at them. This happened on 5-Jan at 1.04pm. This continued even after my employment with Amazon ended. A week later my manager whom I had not shared anything about my personal life including my place of living had all these details including how many are living in my house. Amazon knows who I live with, where I go to for groceries, where me and my family go for place of faith and in general everything about me. This happened both in the original location where I was hired and after I relocated to Seattle area.
As myself and my family are recovering from this harassment, I have written this so that any one experiencing discrimination and/or harassment you start by writing to Andy Jassy. Anybody below, VPs and Directors take all the decisions unilaterally irrespective of it not being aligned with code of conduct and or HR Laws. Document everything and trust no one. End of the day you will be your best and only friend. HR is as ineffective as it can be and cannot even stop retaliation which is against Amazon code of conduct and law.
I am not the 1st to report in public forum and I will not be the last either, as there are systemic issues within Amazon on multiple fronts from people processes to product delivery and execution.
After reading this, I hope board of Directors in Amazon get involved to read the email I wrote to Andy Jassy and all other evidence with HR from the time HR investigation started on my manager in EC2 until the time I resigned. Define a mechanism to establish accountability to S-Team, VP and Directors, take corrective/disciplinary action and finally ask why Andy Jassy have refrained from taking any corrective action and also share what a “Cr-ppy approach document” would mean which my manager and my skip level requested for a week before I resigned.