Amazon Syndrome

I just met up with a friend who is a former Amazon colleague after we both left Amazon a year ago. At lunch, we started talking about some of the things we missed about Amazon. Then we start telling each other about some of the "hidden secrets" from each of our departments and the things we *really* didn't miss. And then my friend made the perfect comment which I had to share here: we are all suffering from "Stockholm syndrome".

Amazon was our hostage situation - we all had to deal with various amounts of abuse and put up with it as long as we could before we had to "break out" despite the financial costs (repaying sign-on bonuses, lost stock). This situation doesn't seem to exist for any other tech company, so I'm soon we will soon be reading about "Amazon syndrome" in the media where hundreds of thousands of former employees will be sharing their "war stories" for the rest of their lives and this will shape their world view forever.

This website seems to have been ahead of the game when it launched because the flood of former employees fleeing seems to continue to increase as Amazon's overall employee count exceeds 300K and yet people are still only staying 1-2 years on average. We are all scarred victims...