Amazon reviews

TL;DR-- Golden handcuffs are more of a monkey's paw. In my career, I've prided myself on being positive, constructive, helpful, and generally a strong team player. In my 6 years at Amazon, I found all those traits to be a liability. Good teams don't last long at Amazon, good people disappear faster. They are the exception not the rule. I watched colleagues I knew from before Amazon join and slowly become more and more self-serving and toxic (correlation may not equal causation, but their careers at Amazon generally seemed to benefit the more colleagues they backstabbed). There is a certain degree of bureaucracy and dysfunction you expect at a large company, but the degree to which inept middle managers are protected and even continually promoted is breathtaking. It's a sea of Catch-22 Colonel Cathcarts and General Dreedles. I found most of the actual work got done by L4/L5 employees burning out to prove themselves. Above that level, people are often too busy working on their promo doc or playing politics to actually contribute anything meaningful. At some point, this will catch up to how slow the behemoth is to catch up to innovations happening around them (my last projects were "how do we stuff an AI assistant into this?" with no real strategy or customer focus). After a couple years of watching strong ICs get put on "Focus" or PIP'd while mediocre, blame-shifting managers & VPs continue to thrive without ever providing real direction or leadership, I was done. I've had to spend that time unlearning how to be "Amazonian" which is a pretty insufferable state most healthy people find draining to be around.