I started in a worse-off team, but I moved to one since that succeeds and is insulated from politics. We're on the margin of the dependency graph and own our whole stack from pageview to database. We also have end-user customers, which gives us a North Star that seems to help.
Without denying any of your experience, there are many Amazons inside this big umbrella. Probably hundreds of autonomous (more or less) teams. The good and bad about working at a place like this are not evenly distributed. From what I've seen, when it's bad, it's really bad. But it can be good too.
My advice to job seekers would be: get some inside scoop on the right/wrong teams to join. Failing a person you can talk to, ask about the level of pager activity and how independent your team is. With high visibility and high rewards come high pressure. It was wrong for me and it could be wrong for you too.
I have a friend who worked at Amazon Fresh and enjoyed it, and I hear AWS is good. Amazon has some really neat technology and an awesome business, it's a shame that so much of the company is broken.
I'm suer you're right. I can only speak from my team[1] up the chain to Bezos, all of whom at that time I personally witnessed making really stupid decisions. (EG Bezos deciding not to fix a bug 2 months before Thanksgiving then the day before thanksgiving he decides it needs to be fixed right then, at 3am.)
I did find a better team within Amazon. I had an offer from one of the groups in AWS to do something right up my alley. It was basically a dream job. My manager blocked it. I appealed to HR and they simply ignored the "rules" (as they are in the handbook) and wouldn't let me leave.
So, one of the things-- the claim that you can go to another team if your manager doesn't perform-- turned out not to be true.
Rather than stay with a company that wasn't keeping its promises, I left. So, I can't speak to other teams. [2]
[1] Though 3 of the sibling teams at the same level, who reported to my bosses boss, were also run by bad guys, which cut off most of the obvious lateral transfers.
[2] It is possible things have improved, as it has been more than 3 years.
I totally buy that there can be unhealthy leadership throughout an org. The story sounds familiar to me. It only takes one bad grand-manager to ruin the show for a lot of people.
If there's one thing that has gotten on my nerves at Amazon, it's this insensitivity to employee retention. I don't know you, but I'm confident Amazon would be better off with you having fun on the right team rather than poking you until you leave. Not letting you leave for greener pastures would be a huge red flag for me. I would ask for the manager logins to avoid.
I've seen other situations where a bad policy followed strictly caused good engineers to walk out the door. Not because they couldn't hack it, but because the policy was arbitrary, or restrictive. Maybe this is endemic to big companies in our industry. I know I prefer a little more anarchy and humanity.
My experience has been one of more regular movement. I had a somewhat unusual move early on, about six months into my tenure. I spent a couple years on a great team and then moved laterally to emerging projects in the same org.
I know our mileage has varied but I think these are two very recognizable portraits (including crisis management) of the company.
I started in a worse-off team, but I moved to one since that succeeds and is insulated from politics. We're on the margin of the dependency graph and own our whole stack from pageview to database. We also have end-user customers, which gives us a North Star that seems to help.
Without denying any of your experience, there are many Amazons inside this big umbrella. Probably hundreds of autonomous (more or less) teams. The good and bad about working at a place like this are not evenly distributed. From what I've seen, when it's bad, it's really bad. But it can be good too.
My advice to job seekers would be: get some inside scoop on the right/wrong teams to join. Failing a person you can talk to, ask about the level of pager activity and how independent your team is. With high visibility and high rewards come high pressure. It was wrong for me and it could be wrong for you too.