annual review process is ridiculous

I spent 2 years at Amazon and then left to join Google, which is much better in pretty much every aspect including work/life balance, compensation, appreciating employees, work culture, etc. The main problem at Amazon is that teams are pretty autonomous so your experience can vary greatly depending on your manager and management chain. As a manager, I can tell you that the annual review process is ridiculous because most managers in the room didn't know anything about engineers outside their teams, so they were supposed to compare people based on really biased data which is rattled off in 1-2 minutes. The whole process is set up to favor the few engineers who suck to the most managers rather than the engineers who actually did the best job.

Also, whenever I gave feedback to my upper management about an issue, their solution was always to push harder, even when it made no sense to push a brute force solution for what really needed a smart solution. There was never any concern of engineers getting burned out. The overall management attitude was that if anyone didn't like their job, there's a line out of the door of more people who want the job.