Insider's Take: Being a Veteran at Amazon

Behind the t-shirts and slick PR, how do veterans fare at the big retailer?

Amazon and the US military. Two of my former employers. Two of my enduring fascinations. Two subjects I write about incessantly. Two pieces of evidence I’m a glutton for punishment.

So this post caught my eye.

Ex Forces in Business (EFIB) singling out Amazon as its top veteran employer surprised me. In my 7+ years in Amazon’s UK ops network, I felt veterans were underrepresented. My admittedly biased impression was our workplaces needed way more of them.

The data bears that out. It’s been 12 years since Amazon UK began energetically recruiting veterans, yet a mere 3% of its 72,000 workers have service backgrounds. The average management team might have one veteran, many have none. That doesn’t exactly belt out “we love veterans.”

Contradiction breeds curiosity. So,I looked more closely at the criteria and process for the award. And it got weirder.

EFIB assembled a 45-person platoon of businesspersons with military service. Impressive people, one and all. That panel reviewed company submissions and picked winners.

That’s the whole story.

No detail says what criteria they used to score submissions or how a rubric was applied. We don’t know why Amazon was deemed the finest pig on market day, or what panelists saw in it.

The award citation is basically a lift from Amazon’s recruitment literature.

Development opportunities are cited, but not how they matter. In any case, development isn’t a tendon-stretcher for an employer. It’s more like breathing. Something it should be doing all the time.

The citation mentions bespoke onboarding and training tasks to aid transition. Whoever wrote the Amazon submission either has a great imagination or a drug habit. This is pure hallucination.

Across my tenure, recommendations to beef up onboarding or create a flavor variation for transitioning veterans were routinely dissed and dismissed. If they do exist now, I could find fruit flies who’ve been around longer.

The citation celebrates a policy giving reservists time off for training. This is worthy of one-handed applause. It’s the minimum expected of any company choosing to employ veterans.

What speaks loudest is what I don’t see in the citation.

No mention of retention rates, probation survival rates, promotion rates, or average tenures. No data on veteran job satisfaction, stress levels, or safety sentiment. Not even a mention of how many veterans at Amazon would recommend their family, friends, or fellow vets work there.

No useful detail at all. Certainly nothing that would make an objective evaluator confident to assess Amazon as a “great” veteran employer.

So what made the panel choose Amazon, and indeed bestow it a #1 ranking?

It wasn’t the panel’s own experience. None of them work for the company. So unless they interviewed people who do, the panel will have made its judgement purely on the basis of information supplied by Amazon.

In other words, purely on the basis of a PR packet ghost written by the company’s military recruitment team. It’s not the first time I’ve wondered about how Amazon’s trophy cabinet gets stocked. Seems like a self-licking ice cream cone.

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It’s not uncommon for Amazon to wear its veteran credentials like pieces of flair. It has successfully cultivated an impression over the years of being a safe port for transitioning servicemembers.

In the US and UK, where veterans are warmly supported by populations, this reputation is huge and important. No doubt it makes the company appear more socially responsible, and almost certainly generates a certain amount of investment.

There are some facts which make this reputation feel correct. The company’s operations network features big teams solving dynamic challenges in a fast-paced environment. Pressure and stakes are always high. Getting the most out of a team is essential.

Military veterans, particularly senior NCOs and mid-grade officers, are well suited to such an environment.

But is Amazon a good environment for them?

My verdict is no.

I’m going to explain why.

This is me at Amazon’s London fulfillment center in 2020. The t-shirt I’m wearing here is pretty much the whole of “veteran-centric” workplace features I experienced in my seven peak seasons.

It’s important to balance the public image curated by Amazon. With a steady string of impressive-sounding laurels, it magnetizes the veteran and military spouse populations.

But the truth of working there as a veteran is a lot more complicated.

Here’s a few thoughts.

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Leave Your Integrity in the Amnesty Box

Veterans know about building bonds of trust within teams. They know this comes from a series of promises made and kept, until character is proven.

Amazon takes a different view on the whole honesty thing. The company will often avoid breaking promises by simply not making any. But I saw many instances in my tenure of straight dishonesty.

One particular peak season, the UK network was short on managers. So we temporarily promoted dozens of frontline employees to manager roles. They closed a critical skills gap, understanding that if they did well, they could vie for permanent promotion.

Opportunity was the bait. Then came the switch.

After delivering peak, they were sent back to their prior roles. No promotion panels. Some executive who wouldn’t know execution if it poured him a cognac had a bias against employees becoming managers.

The company broke a promise. And when challenged, was unopen to reconsideration.

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Non Una Famiglia

Veterans come from a place of team unity. Mutual support. The bond can be strong, like that in a clan. While periodic shuffles and turnover are inevitable, losses from the clan are not casual matters.

When someone leaves a team to support another team or pursue a hard-earned opportunity, it’s okay. When someone is removed from the team for failing to meet standards of conduct or performance, it’s accepted.

But because veterans have learned to actually care about teammates, even accepted losses hit hard. As for elective or casual losses from the team, this is where you’ll lose veterans. Because they understand people need to feel safe and included in a team to get anywhere near their best.

For Amazon, chopping people out of a team is the first card out of the deck. The instant there is the vaguest whiff of financial pressure, the long knives appear. The company hires a lot of people, yes. But it also builds a constant string of professional gallows, and keeps job placement offices in steady business.

Because of the company’s endless layoff spasms, Amazon leaders can’t do what military commanders do. Which is tell your people you believe in them, and that they are safe with you so long as they work hard and follow the rules. You can’t make even that basic promise.

Every talent cycle, at least 5% of every salaried team is targeted for dismissal. Even in teams without under-performers, people will be voted off the island. This is a choice to be disloyal without proper cause, and is a fundamental incompatibility with the veteran heart and mind.

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It’s the Recruitment, Stupid

Amazon hires a lot of veterans, having set and later met a goal of hiring 100,000 veterans and spouses company-wide. Veteran-focused talent professionals, most of them with military service of their own, do amazing work. They bring levels of energy and engagement you don’t see elsewhere.

But how often do Amazon’s military hires work out well?

I’ve noticed the company uses its people data much as a drunken veteran uses a lamp post: for support rather than illumination. Basically no relevant questions are answered, no knowledge gained.

How many veterans make it through probation? How deep are veterans getting into their careers? Are they getting promoted at expected rates? How many are making it to executive level? How many of the 100,000 hired are still with the company?

Same questions for spouses. Because the picture painted by spouses in my network is a modern art masterpiece. I know many who can’t manage to wedge a toenail in the door despite being elite at what they do with the CV to prove it.

Which arrives us at an important question.

If Amazon is committed to hiring veterans and spouses, why don’t they get an actual preference in the hiring process? Why not a guaranteed phone screen or interview? How many veterans and spouses does Amazon actually turn away without any human interaction?

If you’re a dog lover, you love all dogs. Doesn’t mean you take every dog home with you. But it means you don’t neglect any dog, especially if it only comes to you because you brandished a soup bone and whistled.

While we’re at it, there is another fair question. Does Amazon have a cultural bias against military reservists? Some say there’s a problem with careers suffering due to service obligations.

If so, that would be a violation of federal law for a company already on the wrong side of state prohibitions on secret quotas and previously sued for discriminating against pregnant employees.

To be a great veteran employer, Amazon can’t just be skilled at recruitment. It needs to love reservists, honor families, and be honest with people about work obligations. There is an evolving narrative calling all three of these things into question.

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Okay, We Recruited Them, Now What

Amazon’s veteran strategy ends at recruitment.

Once you’re in the company as a veteran, there’s no targeted boost in development. No tailored program or support. There is no special designation which helps you at promotion time. You don’t fill a diversity quota.

I’m not saying any of that should be the case. In fact, I think it shouldn’t.

But Amazon wants the impression out there that veterans have a leg up. On the contrary, much of what veterans carry into Amazon ends up being dead weight rather than ammunition.

In my time, I saw bias. Senior leaders assumed veterans had strong leadership skills (pejoratively labelled “soft skills”), but also assumed they were weak analytically. In talent reviews, promotion panels, and hiring processes, the burden was on a veteran candidate or their advocate to convince others they could offer something beyond “just leadership.”

This exposes twin misapprehensions.

First, it misunderstands the technical nature of military service. Most disciplines require plenty of quantitative skill. Military problems require dense analysis, breaking a mission into segments, solving each one, and rejoining them into an executable plan.

I never met an analytical challenge at Amazon that would break the top fifty of my Air Force service. What Amazon is really looking for is someone who can sift through ridiculous oceans of data and locate something useful, then persuade others why it matters. It helps if that person can also establish mental suasion with its unnecessarily cumbersome and overcooked labor planning process.

But honestly, when Amazon recruits former consultants and investment bankers into managerial roles, it swats a fly with a jackhammer. If it can’t get what it needs analytically from veterans, that’s an Amazon problem, not a veteran problem.

It both amused and worried me that many of Amazon’s senior leaders seemed captured by moldy stereotypes. Like the notion veterans served for lack of enough intellect to do something else. Or the caricature of minions lined up neat, marching around with rifles. A “great” employer would understand this population better.

Second, it shows Amazon doesn’t know what it needs. Which is a shitload more earnest human engagement and a lot less tendency to reduce complex problems to data-laden spreadsheets. Amazon loves metrics that require outsize intellectual investment to generate low actionable yield. But getting world class results isn’t about numbers. It’s about elevating human performance.

Still, Amazon will take an MBA over a veteran every time. Because why wade through the messy, non-linear nuances of leadership when you can simply reduce a team to its financial summary?

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Judo

Amazon’s culture has a way of turning veteran energy and commitment into liabilities.

Initiative and ownership are fantastic qualities baked into people who’ve had successful military careers. Amazon seeks veterans for these qualities. Which, without bridling, makes them especially susceptible to over-commitment and burnout. It’s a sadly common outcome for veterans who dive in gung-ho and crawl out broken.

Earning and keeping trust is another veteran habit. It plays well at Amazon until it doesn’t, which is typically when a veteran points out that behaviors expected of individuals are also expected of Amazon. Which makes elusiveness, opacity, dissembly, and other forms of bullshit unacceptable.

Corporate messaging becomes most Orwellian on hot issues like pay and unionization. Being vocal about how those things are communicated is not permitted.

Disagreement with peers is fine. But too much plebeian vocality with superiors leads quickly to accusations of not being a team player, being self-important, or not thinking big enough. Pushing back against such tarring leads to further tarring as overly tetchy and defensive.

You know those crazy veterans. They’re all mad, bad, or sad.

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The Steinbrenner of Veteran Employers

Amazon isn’t alone in firing people like it’s a bodily function. But if we were prosecuting a cartel, it would be the kingpin.

It only took a few weeks into my first operational role with Amazon before I was threatened with losing my job. The reason wasn’t the reason given by the toxic jackass who uttered the threat. He was mumbling about a pallet out of position or some other seismic fact.

The reason was he had taken a kicking on a network call and chose to kick the rest of us. Now, I’m not averse to the occasional transitive kicking. Shit will always roll downhill. We’ve been passing inflicted grief along to collateral victims for longer than we’ve been able to write it down.

But threatening someone’s job is low. It’s beat someone with a rubber hose territory. And much as I’d like to say otherwise, such threats are more feature than bug at Amazon.

When you view human beings as interchangeable commodities and you believe coercive control is a valid mode for workplace relationships, certain pathologies will become culturally normalized. Like threatening to slay livelihoods when the pressure comes on.

Threats to fire are pure hate speech to veteran ears. Severing a team bond with someone is as serious as it gets. Reducing it to a cudgel for ritual abuse or a cheap motivational ploy just pisses a veteran off. It removes any doubt they’re dealing with a clown.

Hailing from an authority culture, they recognize abuse of power. Holding someone’s livelihood at risk to squeeze what you want from them is cruel and abusive.

In my time working for and observing Amazon, I’ve known six leaders who threatened to fire people as a motivational tactic. One left the company. Four were promoted multiple times.

One is the CEO.

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Speed Dating

Veterans in Amazon ops stumble at a common first obstacle, which is the simple act of getting to know their teams. Veterans know it’s important to learn each person, know their story, and connect with them. These are baby steps on the road to a relationship.

But it takes time. Let’s say a manager has 100 people reporting to them, which is not uncommon. A five-minute chat with each of them on a weekly basis adds up to about 10 hours of investment.

This time is not directed, budgeted, or even assumed. The instant a manager is observed doing more than exchanging pleasantries with an associate, they’ll be scolded for letting some other cosmos-defining task languish for perhaps as many as seconds.

Later, when an associate struggles or fails, the manager might be asked why. Saying they don’t know would be self-immolating, so they make up a story which is readily slurped.

Internally, they’re thinking how ridiculous it is that they’d be expected to understand an employee’s performance without being given time to do so. Externally, they’ve begun demonstrating the skill of crafting decent bullshit on the hoof, which will serve them well in later times.

Veterans come from a culture where connecting with a new team is a genuine task given genuine investment. They find at Amazon it is a performative gesture measured in seconds and clocked with a managerial speed gun. It’s not isolated individuals pushing such a mindset. It’s the company culture. It’s baked into the labor planning construct and therefore part of the business model.

A business model which considers human connection wasteful is not a great environment for veterans.

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Thank You For Your Service, Now Please Forget About It

In spring of 2020, Amazon invited me to compete for Site Leader, which at that time required panel interviews with five senior leaders as well as a case study and math assessment. I did really well and I knew it.

The feedback came a week later. Sure enough, I’d nailed the process, aced the interviews overall, and neither my readiness nor potential were in any doubt.

But I was declined. The official reason was something about needing to broaden and raise my profile before going again. This is what happened, and I succeeded on the next attempt.

But the unofficial reason I was passed over was daring to reach back into military experience in answering one of the panelists’ questions.

Fielding some query or another, my mind went straight to a story from Afghanistan. It was topical. It was genuine and unrehearsed. It was a lived example that provided unvarnished evidence of my grasp of the leadership principle being assessed.

Rather than being seen as a positive, the fact I had drawn on experience prior to Amazon was unwittingly self-damaging. The panel would rather have heard a dumb story about a perfunctory operational anecdote gathered in the prior two years than actually gather my candid reasoning from a much more consequential story lived a few years earlier.

They then had the gall to construe this as a trust problem. Because they couldn’t falsify my story, they chose to be skeptical about it. There was a veiled accusation that I had chosen something they didn’t know about so I could avoid detailed questions on subjects where they had direct knowledge.

I was tempted to quit Amazon in that moment. An earnest effort to demonstrate what I had to offer had been cheapened. I wasn’t interested in joining a senior leadership team which couldn’t see me for what I was, and questioned my honesty without foundation.

I hung in for a few more years. But I was never again open with senior leaders about my military experience. It never left my mind that a panel comprised of VPs and Directors didn’t give a toss about how I had grown into the leader I was, even when sharing openly with them was relevant and revealing. If anything, they seemed threatened by the idea someone could learn leadership beyond the walls of their fiefdom.

What I didn’t know going in was that I had no chance of winning. The winners had been preordained. They would pass unless they brandished a serrated weapon and removed a limb. For me, it was an audition. The authorized response was to be grateful for the chance to be manipulated.

Which made the choice of artifice employed to justify my failure that much more insulting.

All of which illustrates a problem for trust-driven individuals making their way in a fundamentally dishonest organization. It’s an uneasy peace.

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Don’t Tell Me, Show Me

I recently interacted with a military spouse who’d been hired into a role requiring relocation from the Midwest to Seattle. For her to accept the role, her active duty husband needed to request reassignment to Joint Base Lewis-McChord, just outside Tacoma. He was able to get approval, she accepted the role, and they moved their large family a couple thousand miles.

They did what you do, taking on a mortgage, resettling kids in new schools, and irrevocably altering their lives in myriad ways. No sooner they started to exhale, Amazon laid her off. No performance issues. No conduct issues. No warning. Less than six months after being hired, she was fired.

It wrecked their lives.

All by itself, this kind of example exposes Amazon’s pro-military spouse rhetoric as pure bullshit. In a company where you care about something and your people know it, stuff like this doesn’t happen.

I know another retired Air Force officer who joined Amazon only to be pushed right back out the door less than nine months later after he dared to disagree with dishonest treatment of his team. Rather than actually hear him out, senior leaders paid him to sign a gag order and go home.

I know another retired officer who competed for an Amazon role, got hired, then got told the role didn’t exist anymore, got offered a different role that permitted remote work, then had that offer revoked and was offered another one requiring relocation. This individual was a retired Colonel with a top 5% service record and worlds of capability. Amazon would have been lucky to have him. He walked away believing the company was a joke.

I watched a particular veteran leader within Amazon lead a 40-building national operations network for several months in his manager’s absence, artfully navigating several crises while delivering strong results. He’d come up through the company, launching and running several buildings himself. He’d effectively managed big teams for many years, and understood the power of vision and inspiration.

When the time came to permanently fill the role he’d been stepping into, he was passed over and got a lateral move. Someone’s favorite, a lot less qualified, got the promotion instead. If Amazon wanted its veterans to have heroes to emulate, or at least wanted to be seen giving them a fair shot at the road to VP, this was a missed opportunity.

I’ve been shared dozens of other stories about veterans and spouses getting mishandled at the company’s hands. And of course, I have my own story.

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Fading Out

I had a great run with Amazon for many years, culminating in a performance review where my Director designated me a “role model” of Amazon’s leadership principles. But I had also, typical of an Amazon ops leader, experienced a couple decades’ worth of treadwear in seven years. The relentless stress of the environment started to have its inevitable impact.

But when my health started to fray from decades of operational sprinting, all I needed was a little space and time to recover. It wasn’t there. My boss dialed up the pressure. The company was in downsizing mode. She had a decent incentive to nudge me into fading out and no incentive at all to help me rally.

At the time, I was active in veteran hiring and development. I was mentoring a dozen prior service Amazonians. I was actively working to grow our military affinity group beyond a cool logo and into something with a material impact on inclusivity.

The company was losing someone making a real effort to improve its relationship with its own veteran community. But no retention effort was made. No exit interview was conducted.

As it does, the business shook me off like a mild case of fleas, and moved on.

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This all leads to a question. Because if we could answer one particular question, it would either validate my assertion that Amazon’s a poor place for veterans, or it would throw some cold water on that assertion.

The question is how successfully does Amazon retain veterans?

As I mentioned earlier, this data seems to be buried deep under Mount Confidential. Even as a senior hiring official working on a project to understand and improve veteran retention, I was disallowed access.

I can think of only one reason to conceal such data, and it is supported by anecdote: Amazon loses most of its veteran hires as soon as they figure out what they’ve gotten themselves into.

I heard from a recruiter once that in the US network, 80% of salaried veteran hires are gone within 2 years. This aligns to what I have seen.

If Amazon cared about improving this, they’d have supported me with the data to understand and influence our position. It occurred to me that I cared a lot more than they did.

Which is why it boggles the mind that this company is held out as a paragon of veteran employment.

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Conclusion

Amazon loves veterans. Or maybe just the idea of veterans. Or maybe just the idea of recruiting veterans.

They solve for yes. They tend to not complain. They keep working full bore even when they do grumble. Military leaders are skilled at getting people to want to do things they’d be naturally disinclined to do. So for many reasons, veterans are a strong fit for Amazon.

But Amazon is not a strong fit for veterans.

Their commitment to team building and teammates is not valued. The company abhors how resistant that commitment can be to authority, financial obsession, and executive fiat.

Amazon loves how veterans are tolerant of misery. But it’s not a fan of their insistence on honest and principled behavior, nor their courage to call things out.

It loves that they are calm under pressure. But with time, it resents their refusal to bleat and catastrophize with every errant twitch of a c-suite eyebrow.

Amazon won’t recognize veterans for their unique skillset, nor consider them sources of workplace diversity. But it loves having them around as novelties and PR ponies.

Amazon loves that it has an affinity group for veterans. It just doesn’t want that group having any material impact.

Amazon’s leadership principles attract veterans, who see in those principles lots of overlap with the best aspects of service life. The company wants them to be sufficiently drawn to its value system to join.

But particularly in the past couple of years, it expects veteran Amazonians to compromise or set aside principles whenever empowered figures command. This reminds them of the worst elements of service life.

Amazon’s habitual abuse of its leadership principles, most of all Earn Trust, will become a massive problem for veteran retention, if it’s not already.

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I hoped for much more when I joined. And there were moments it seemed bound to improve, which only buoyed my hope even more.

But it’s the hope that kills you.

I walked away with a couple lanyards and a really cool t-shirt which I still wear to the gym.

If you expect this and nothing more, you’ll be fine. I mean, as a veteran or spouse, you’ve been there a hundred times. If you assume the new commander will be an inept shitbag with a penchant for mass irritation, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by laissez-faire mediocrity.

My recommendation to veterans: proceed with eyes up, note the details, and understand what you’re getting into.

As for Amazon, my observation is that you currently have Van Gogh’s ear for veteran sentiment. Maybe less with the boasting and more questions about how you’re doing with this group of people.

TC is an American veteran and former Amazon operations leader.