Really Horrible Managers

Amazon has a very top-down culture. Power is highly concentrated in managers, especially senior leaders. Due to the anonymous peer review feedback process, your manager has total control over your performance review. Employees aren't valued. You're constantly told that you can be "replaced at any time" and "how you performed last year is irrelevant" if you are suddenly surprised with a undeserved bad review or PIP.

Amazon technology is dated and should be thrown out. Most employees get a 3 to 5 year old laptop and a weak desktop to run your development environment. It took years to convince management to give everyone a second monitor, even though it was asked for to Jeff at nearly every all hands meeting for the past 5 years. 

The stock vesting schedule is every 6 months after a year, at 5%, 5%, 10%, 10%, 15%, 15%, 20%, 20%. This design is intentional, because many employees quit or are pushed out after the first year or two. The NYTimes article last August was 85-90% true. Most of the articles on this site are similarly accurate. 

The core problem is bad management back by a very weak HR department.  Most of the managers are really horrible to work for and the worse they are, the more likely Amazon is to promote and keep them around.