When you have a toxic manager at Amazon-- and I did-- you can't change teams. I had an offer from the manager of another team, but was fired when I attempted to change teams.
The idea that you can change teams is kinda a fallacy... sure it happens sometimes but it's more like horse trading than anything else
This sounds like something out of Mike Church's blog.
In the real world, I knew plenty of people who switched teams. Sure, there are pathologically bad managers and it may not be possible all the time. But it's definitely the rule, not the exception, for internal transfers to be possible.
Yeah it's a big enough company that I wouldn't be surprised if some middle managers are forcing the devs/employees to do a lot of work. It's kinda like Microsoft, I heard there were just a few good teams or departments that were really good and the rest were meh.
For me I quit rather than switching teams because I felt like I was in a lousy position to switch. Level 1 SDE, didn't want to lengthen my time before promotion and didn't want to go be the ops bitch on another team. Decided to look outside the company and wound up getting a job with higher pay, promotion, and a nicer company overall.
Right, that's basically why I left. Amazon is bad to mediocre in my experience, but it's nothing like what this article describes.
It was more poor business decisions, boring projects, and laughably bad tools/environment compared to other famous "big league" software companies. I worked 40h weeks and got along with everyone. Only one time in two years did my manager ask me to work on a Saturday, to finish a project that had VP level visibility, and he felt extremely awkward and apologetic about it.
The idea that you can change teams is kinda a fallacy... sure it happens sometimes but it's more like horse trading than anything else