Re-org chaos

You can't stay for more than 3-4 years at Amazon. Re-orgs are always going on and it's complete chaos. A single re-org can really set your career back and they happen 2-3 times per year in every org.

There's no clear path on lateral promotions or career changes. There's no clear path on promotions that can occur in the same level. They don't care much about retention since they can pay crazy amounts to fly recruiters around the world to find people and then even crazier amounts to relocate them to Seattle (or wherever HQ2 ends up). After a few years, any manager can hire someone for the same position starting out making more than you. You basically have to boomerang outside to get what you're worth (i.e. leave the company and come back.)

Due to the re-org craziness, any sense of a company culture seems to be fading away. There are now just a bunch of empire-building middle managers using Amazon's infamous manager autonomy to build their own local personality cult. Once in a while, they go really bad and Bezos takes notice and re-orgs from the top down (like the recent firing of Gunningham and most of his business VPs), but for the most part, they just fester and never get better.

Every time there's a re-org, someone is left holding the old crap and then they eventually get fired for not inventing anything new. For everyone else, there's too many new products which come and go and they claim they are doing business experiments like Bezos likes instead of admitting what they actually are: random shots in the dark for middle managers to try to get themselves promoted if anything even sticks in the market for a few months. What a waste of good engineering talent...