I worked in a role at Amazon that required me to interact with a different team every 1-3 weeks. I would often sit directly with the teams as I was doing work with them for the duration.
There are teams at Amazon full of some of the best technical and professional managers on the planet. There are teams at Amazon that are so brutally driven that they will sacrifice anything, even accepting an incomplete pentest audit and a forgoing week's worth of sleep, to hit a launch date.
I personally had a close friend on my team get PIPed and it was obviously a play from management to get rid of him. I have another friend who had to take months off after leaving because of the abuse she experienced. I have other close friends who have stayed for years.
It's such a big organization and the leadership chains are so decentralized that you get a wide variety of emergent patterns, and the decentralization makes it hard for people across the organization to know about the experiences of other teams.
Edit: in general I wouldn't say the horror stories are the norm at all from what I've seen.
There are teams at Amazon full of some of the best technical and professional managers on the planet. There are teams at Amazon that are so brutally driven that they will sacrifice anything, even accepting an incomplete pentest audit and a forgoing week's worth of sleep, to hit a launch date.
I personally had a close friend on my team get PIPed and it was obviously a play from management to get rid of him. I have another friend who had to take months off after leaving because of the abuse she experienced. I have other close friends who have stayed for years.
It's such a big organization and the leadership chains are so decentralized that you get a wide variety of emergent patterns, and the decentralization makes it hard for people across the organization to know about the experiences of other teams.
Edit: in general I wouldn't say the horror stories are the norm at all from what I've seen.