I joined Amazon on May 2016 and work as Tech Support Associate (North America region) for Amazon. I work out of Amazon Development Center, Hyderabad, India. Our site looks after all Amazon International marketplaces like North America, UK, IN etc. for all roles like Customer Support, Seller Support, IT and Software development, Transaction Investigations, etc.
I provide technical support for Amazon AppStore, Fire devices, Alexa devices, Amazon Music, Prime Videos, Games and Softwares sold on Amazon, Amazon Drive etc. I work as a Tier-2 Support who are required to provide end to end support for Amazon products and services mentioned earlier. If any issues are not resolvable by existing troubleshooting, it is my responsibility to escalate it via a ticket on behalf of the customers and follow up with them till it gets resolved.
Following are first hand experience I've as an associate working for Amazon :
- Zero caring for employees who are working at entry level positions.
Entry level positions are Level-2 and Level-3 employees. Level-2 employees are basically customer support associates (Phone, Email and Chat), Fulfillment Center associates and Level-3 employees are certain associates at Tech Support roles and other support functions like QA, WorkFlow etc. Each level has pay scales. Higher your level, higher the pay.
In US, the minimum wage is around $ 7.5 per hour. In India, we don't have such minimum mage per hour laws. This makes every company local or international take advantage of the people.
Amazon pays around INR 400 to 450 per DAY to Indians. Which means $6.4 approx. PER DAY !!!!
This amount is calculated based on the CTC offered by Amazon. This CTC gets even lower sometimes. Amazon already gets to hire an Indian for 1/8th of the cost they incur on hiring an American. Still they look for cost cutting by changing existing Level-4 job roles into Level-3 and Level-3 job roles into Level-2.
This way, they make the same work done by a cheaper person. This is how they get to be profitable after years and years of losses in business internationally. I'm referring to Amazon.com. Please don't mistake it with the profits which comes from other Amazon businesses like AWS.
Remember, the change in Levels are done only with non-leadership positions. They won't ever do it to a person or team in the leadership position. They know that if they lower the money offered to persons in the leadership, the people will just quit. It is very difficult to hire a person in the leadership, so they will always keep them happy. Thus the happy reviews by others. I mean how many associates leave Glassdoor reviews anyways.
When someone questions the reasoning behind downgrading levels, they just say 'business requirement' like it actually explains everything.
- They treat you like you're nothing. Make sudden drastic changes to the policy, your team, team roles, responsibilities etc and say it is as per 'business requirement'.
- Amazon expect you to be professional with their customers but when it comes to the leadership, zero professionalism. Bunch of pathetic people who join the company to fulfill their own agendas and use the associates for their own professional gain and growth within the company.
People in Level-6 and higher positions are Operations Managers, Sr. Operations Managers, Program Managers, Site Leaders etc. They're people with MBA's from A-grade business schools in India. They have to prove their mettle to move up the chain of command. They do this by taking up projects. This projects could be anything. Usually they're supposed to make a lot of meaningful difference in the working of Amazon. If it results in huge cost savings, they're usually accepted. The person who offered the idea and the project is then offered a overseas position at Seattle or someplace else in US. This is what everyone is after. Everyone in the senior leadership wants to go to US and settle there with their family.
They could throw a team of 1000 associates under the bus to achieve it. When this associates demand answers, they get 'Business Requirement' as a response.
- H.R is useless. They're just there to recruit people and they just listen to people from the Operations. No point in reaching out to them.
