10 year veteran explains Amazon's decline

When I started at Amazon 10+ years ago, it was a great place to grow a new career. There were lots of opportunities for me to try new things. When I found a good team and stayed there for a few years, it was very rewarding. I stayed for more than 10 years because the culture was results-driven and it seemingly rewarded experiments and risk taking.

Then the culture began to shift a few years ago. With significant growth across the company, the focus was no longer on customers. New employees were stepping all over each other and over old timers like me, resulting in tons of politics and backhanded "partnerships". Every new team formation resulted in more hours, more pressure, and especially more politics. The review system rewarded the wrong things: political savvy and being yes-men, not results and leadership principles (especially since no one in HR apparently cares if managers fake their own metrics positively and their political enemies metrics negatively). For me, it became not worth sticking around after that.