Ex-Amazon employee says it was a ‘horrible place’ to work: ‘But I really liked Jeff Bezos’

A former Amazon employee – one of the company’s earliest – has opened up about his time at the e-commerce giant and his experience of working with Jeff Bezos. Steve Yegge spoke to Business Insider about joining Amazon as a technical program manager in 1998 and working on a “secret project” commissioned by its billionaire founder.

Yegge, 56, was frank about his dislike for some of the company’s practices (he called it a “horrible” place to work), but full of admiration for Bezos’s vision and magnetism.

“Horrible place”

Steve Yegge, who is based in Washington, quit Amazon to join Google in 2005. In his conversation with Business Insider, he said: “I found Amazon could be a horrible place to work.”

The software engineer recalled how the work culture at Amazon irked him. Employees would avoid asking for leaves, he revealed, and there was “this pressure that everybody had to work all the time.”

The work culture was further marred by some workers berating others. “A friend of mine worked in a closet because that’s the only place where there was room for a desk,” he revealed.

Yegge said that he did not boycott Amazon for its business practices, and still uses the e-commerce website as a customer.

“I actually really liked Jeff”

Despite his less-than-stellar review of Amazon as a workplace, Yegge was largely admiring of its founder. He described Bezos as someone who was focussed on his mission and did not much care for anything that stood in the way.

“I didn’t like working at Amazon, but I actually really liked Jeff,” he explained.

“From what I could tell, Jeff is a hear-no-evil, see-no-evil kind of person who was focused on the mission. It didn’t matter if the toilet was dirty or if engineers were being paged all night long. He seemed to only care if it started slowing him down,” said Yegge.

He also described Amazon’s billionaire founder as a hands-on leader who rarely got mad or used curse words. “He had this electric presence, a magnetism to him that was unmistakable,” said the former Amazon employee.