[paxunix]

To counter those objecting to your statement of "Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry":

Everyone likes to pick those nits. I also work in the retail org at Amazon and have only had a crunch time twice in the almost 11 years I've been here (and it lasted two to three weeks both times). Software is hard and planning its implementation and development is hard. Get over yourselves and accept occasional imperfections in the process. (If they are _not_ occasional in your work environment, consider that a suggestion that you get out--Amazon or otherwise).

Anyone saying Amazon is uniformly this or uniformly that is as full of shit as anyone saying it about any other company.

People who read these threads and decide "well, now that I've seen this, there's no way I'd work for Amazon" are doing themselves a disservice, just as much as if they substituted any other company for "Amazon". Collect your data; talk to people that work there--you will get a variety of opinions. Bash-posts on HN and Reddit suffer from severe confirmation bias.

People that like working at Amazon and have had an overwhelmingly positive experience (like me), often don't wade into these threads because separating their signal from noise is really tedious and we have other more fun things to be doing.