Don't count on learning anything

If you decide to make the mistake I did by joining Amazon, don't count on learning anything from your smart coworkers. Amazon has a deliberately darwinian environment which discourages collaboration and knowledge sharing. You also shouldn't expect to be given any training to perform your job or any assistance from your coworkers. Most of your questions will be answered: "go read the wiki page". This is useless advice because the wiki is always out of date and the original author is almost always no longer at Amazon. Amazon has the highest turnover rate of any large tech company so this shouldn't be a surprise.

Nobody bothers to put in any effort to fix any of this because everyone is always more focused on completing their own projects to get themselves promoted than in fixing anything broken. As far as management is concerned, who cares if developers have to work long hours to deal with this selfishness-driven chaos? They're here because they are smart - they can figure it out. 

With so many people competing instead of working together and then most moving on or getting fired after barely working there for a year or two, it's amazing that anything works at Amazon at all. The only reason it survives is the constant stream of new hires. Amazon makes a lot of big promises in terms of stock compensation but never lives up to them since most don't stay long enough to even get 20% of their initial stock grants.

There is not an infinite supply of new hires to replace the people who are leaving, so the current model is unsustainable. Amazon knows this and is trying to import labor from everywhere in the world to offset the difference, but it's not helping and they're getting in trouble for immigration violations, like in Vancouver. Just like on this website, the word is getting out about what it's like to really work at Amazon and there are only so many bright engineers willing to put up with this. Amazon is not going to be able to continue expanding endlessly, so I expect a massive crash and burn in the near future once the supply of willing and qualified candidates dries up.