[jsolson]

For what it's worth, this is nothing at all like my experience at Amazon. I'm about a year and a half in. My management is technically competent and, in general, has a good feel for where that competency ends. They don't interfere beyond that point.

I don't work nights or weekends unless I want to. Sometimes I do -- I like some of what I'm working on, but nobody is there cracking the whip.

I do know the experience varies dramatically from team to team, but in the last 18 months I've met and worked with people from many other teams (we're a newish group that's integrating with many parts of existing Amazon infrastructure), and absolutely nobody I've encountered has given any indication at all that their team was like the one you describe. There have definitely been teams that I wouldn't want to work on, but that always came down to a giant chunk of legacy code that nobody wanted to maintain (this is actually a pretty big problem -- there is a lot of scary Perl Mason around Amazon).

I don't know when you worked at Amazon or which team you were on, but either the company has changed, yours was an isolated hellhole of a team not representative of the general experience, or you are vastly overstating things. My team is far from perfect, mind you, but I could do a lot worse.