Don’t work at Ring. Please consider my feed as reliable because I worked at Ring for several years as a senior software engineer. First I will give you a reason to work at Ring. The Amazon comp is really good. If you are at a stage in life where money is a critical component of your job then you should explore the job at Ring, but keep reading and consider the rest of my feedback. Here is the downside. The work culture is toxic and at this point there is no product vision. I won’t talk much about the product issues. I assume you can review what Ring has been doing with its products over the years and draw a conclusion on that from your independent research.
One indicator of a toxic culture at Ring is high turnover. The open positions you see posted are due to attrition at both the engineering and product levels. The positions are not due to funding for new innovative product opportunities. This attrition was caused primarily by a culture of fear. At Ring there is a fear of failure as well as a lack of recognition for success. This culture spreads from the CEO down through the organization. There is no psychological safety for an engineer at Ring. In a healthy culture an employee can take risks and are free to learn from failures. At Ring you are required to take risk due to tight schedules. If you make a mistake you will be called out individually in large public Slack channels. As an example, I regularly saw engineers get called out on Slack for issues that were found during testing or in production. Even small bugs affecting only 1 or two users would need to be hot-fixed into production as high severity bugs. Most issues were overreactions caused by the culture of fear. Tagging individuals in large public Slack channels was a way to make everyone feel bad and to get quick responses and turnaround at the expense of their personal lives. The fear comes from each manager as they are afraid of what the higher up manager will do or say. Ultimately the culture of fear leads back to the way Jamie Siminoff leads his organization. He is well known for yelling and embarrassing his employees for their failure. Jamie is the proverbial boogie man
Ring is also organizationally dysfunctional. Every company I have worked for has had some issues, but the issues at Ring are seemingly unfixable. The dysfunction at Ring includes lack of trust, nepotism and negativity. As a senior engineer I could not trust leadership for so many reasons. For example, project deadlines were created for the purpose of driving teams to work hard. Teams were not estimating work and engaging in Agile project management. The leadership would set the date, scope and resourcing. The teams would ultimately work hard just to experience the failure of missing a deadline. The organization always succeeded in getting the most out of their employees and the cycle would repeat. I watched as employees would cut into their family time and defer vacation to hit these deadlines. The phrase “help is on the way” became a running joke. Help never came. Engineers were pulled off of critical understaffed projects to work on a different critical project.
Poor employee promotions and opportunity is another sign of a toxic culture. At Ring the promotions and influence were granted to the employees that were the personal friends or favorites of leadership. Engineers coming from outside the company had an impossible job of making it into the inner circle. Performance was not the driving factor in promotions. This caused a few engineers to give up and leave. Some of our morale issues were caused by this system. Lots of the technical leaders were over promoted due to nepotism. They were not competent in their roles. In order to handle their insecurity they behaved like jerks to keep others from challenging their technical direction and work. Leadership saw this as passion and technical correctness and it would go unchecked for years. I saw several excellent junior engineers leave the company because they were belittled by the over promoted tech leads. I also personally felt myself in a position where I needed to be a jerk to match the accepted mood in the room. If you’ve watched a mafia movie, you understand how this system works. Nobody is really happy. Nobody is really a family. Only the mafia don benefits from the family.
This leads to the next symptom of a toxic culture. Really low morale. Meetings were like funerals. There was just zero excitement about the work we were doing. We didn’t celebrate because we were always late on our crazy deadlines and even one small bug would be seen as a near total failure. Engineers had no reward mechanism for taking risk or innovating. It was hard to be around such a general lack of enthusiasm for the engineering process. A salary is only exciting for so long.
Finally, it’s important to know that exit interviews are not conducted at Ring. I know first hand of 15 people that left Ring that were not offered an exit interview. It’s an important statistic because it’s evidence of a broader unwillingness to receive upward feedback and make positive changes. I have also never participated in a project retrospective at Ring. We had sever initiatives fail without a willingness to learn from any mistakes that were made. The Ring culture is to punish mistakes or not admit they happen. This is true at the end of the employment relationship as much as it is during your years of work. Many of my colleagues raised issues and suggested solutions to various project and organizational dysfunctions, but just like the exit interview there was a vacant seat and nobody interested.
Finally, I have always found a few issues with my previous employers. You can’t expect perfection, but I’ve never written a negative review about any of my previous employers. Ring has been the worst company. I hope you found the feedback useful. This feedback is specific to Ring and not Amazon. In general Amazon is a very good company. I highly recommend shopping around for opportunities at Amazon. Each group within Amazon can be very different, so do your homework.
