There have been quite a few surprises, let me give you a quick rundown.

1. Based on the stories I had heard I was expecting a much more aggressively micromanaged workplace and much stricter metrics on performance. Overall the warehouse managers have been pretty accommodating about allowing us a grace period to get up to speed on what’s expected of us and really aren’t hovering over our shoulders all the time. So long as you get your work done we are mostly left to our own devices. I was expecting a much more “authoritarian” culture.

2. Many things are run surprisingly inefficiently. To be frank, whatever opinion I previously held about Bezos has certainly gone down, and it isn’t because of the way employees are treated. There are a host of things that seem really poorly optimized here and that were apparent to me within a few weeks of starting, and I have zero previous warehouse or logistics experience, and I'm not a smart person. I’ve heard stories that Bezos is extremely hands on but I can’t imagine he would like some of the problems going on.

A few examples for you: the devices we use for stowing packages(this is the process of taking them off of a conveyor belt and placing them inside large bags or shelves for the drivers to pick up) are constantly suffering from hardware and software errors. In fact at the moment, due to the number of people we having working the night sort, I think it’s around 180-200 right now, we often don’t have enough scanners to go around. The conveyor belts are also constantly jamming resulting in work having to stop. We are starting to do so much volume, last night we did around 82k packages from 10pm to 5:45am, that we literally are running out of space to put things in our aisles, and running out of bags to stow into.

There are also some issues regarding the payroll and HR systems. Our shifts are frequently changing due to the warehouse needing more man hours and this isn’t always reflected accurately in pay or time off accrued. When this happens you need to pay a visit to HR, which btw has always handled things quickly and professionally, but we are told to stay clocked in during this time, as we should be. Sometimes I’ll end my shift and see 20-30 people queued in line for HR. Amazon is paying for this time and it seems to be the result of really poorly implemented back end systems.

3. It’s the freaking night shift at Amazon and like I stated earlier, I myself was unemployed and homeless when I first started, and I was definitely surprised by the quality of my coworkers. Most of us are coming from areas of south LA like Inglewood, Compton, Hawthorne, it doesn’t seem like many of us have any education beyond high school, everyone seems to be living paycheck to paycheck, I'm fairly certain I'm not the only one living out of their car, and many people are working multiple jobs. One of my close coworkers usually arrives after his shift at Walmart ends. Yes, there are slackers and down right mean people, but most people just show up and do a competent job. There is however a rather large group of people who really work their asses off. I suppose it might be down to human nature but when you see your coworkers working hard it makes you want to work hard as well, if for no other reason than so they don’t have to pick up your slack. Really many of us could be taking things a bit easier, management wouldn’t be the wiser imo, but we work so that the guy next to you that has to take his kid to school in the morning gets done on time. I’m somewhat embarrassed to say that things like that surprised me.

4. The free coffee and hot chocolate that comes out of a vending machine is much better than I had anticipated.