[blindhippo]

The funny part, I wholly agree with you. But none of this applies to Amazon, at least at the level that I work at.

I work in a remote office in a country with sane labour laws (not the US). My work/life balance is never under threat. In fact it's far better with Amazon then it was with the start-up I used to work for, where 60+ was expected all with a mantra of "we're a startup, therefore we can't pay you but we're CHANGING THE WORLD!". At Amazon, there is zero pressure for employees to work more then 40 hours unless something is truly going wrong with our areas of responsibilities, and then everyone on the team is expected to pitch in to get things back to normal. Show me a functional workplace where this isn't the norm.

The day to day for a lower level engineer is quite relaxed at Amazon. The only pressure I feel comes from my own drive to succeed, not from upper management.

But please, disregard everything I can tell you from first hand experience because it doesn't fit your predetermined bias about the company.