I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.
I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.
In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.
It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!
> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.
I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.
Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.
This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.
The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes need to be changed before I'd call the culture here awesome.
