Hunger Games

I just had a nice conversation about this website with an old friend who worked at Amazon for about 8 years. He said that over 95% of what he read was definitely accurate.

It is very tough to work at Amazon and the politics are cut-throat. Although this depends on your org within Amazon and even moreso on your manager (which is true most companies these days), it is much more true at Amazon. 

Employees have to routinely put in 12+ hour days and then take work home. They are also on call 24/7 and have to always work on weekends. 

Management does perform stack rank and yank throughout each org, resulting in a quarterly cull of lower ranked people. This does foster a "Hunger Games" mentality within all employees and managers as everyone looks after their own skin even if they have to lie, cheat, and steal to survive.

The main thing my friend highlighted was that this model was not personally sustainable for any employee. The most important thing for any Amazonian is to figure out when to leave the company. The golden handcuffs of RSUs are the reason most tend to stay longer than desired, purely because of the stock price. Still, the average tenure has been stuck around 1-2 years for over a decade now, no matter what Amazon PR claims. At Amazon, people have to weigh increasing pain against increasing cash, it's as simple as that.