Amazon is a tricky beast. It's a huge and unusually horizontally-structured business, which basically means that your experience will vary wildly between managers and teams. It's also shockingly common for people to just hop between roles in the organization every couple of years when they get bored or frustrated. Hiring is hard, and I guess providing that flexibility helps tame the high turnover rates.

Some things do remain constant across teams, though. Amazon is about as much of a dystopic evil empire as Facebook or Goldman Sachs, and of course they have broad global corpirate policies. But it's not really fair to say that they treat their employees unusually poorly, by industry standards.

Look, sometimes I feel like the tech industry is the closest thing we have to a modern-day Trade, like blacksmithing or cobbling in past centuries. It's a fairly safe path to a stable life, because you learn a skill that lets you work in more or less any industry, anywhere, which helps prevent the worst kinds of workplace abuses. But you do still work for a wage most of the time; not many middle-aged engineers are living off of their own capital. Still, considering the state of the average citizen of Earth, it feels churlish to complain.