[legoviking]

I think the thing to keep in mind is that Amazon is a company of extremes. There are parts of the company, maybe a large fraction of the company, that are at least in the direction of what you described (although the drug dealing bit is a one-off if it’s true). However, there also parts where there are many people that have been at the company over a decade (namely AWS). I’ve been working here a few years, and I won’t deny that I got lucky with what team I work for, but outside of maybe being a college hire you should really get some idea of what you’ll be working on and who you’ll be working with before you actually work there. I work on things that are really interesting to me, and yeah, there are some crappy parts like oncall and occasional bad management, but the first gradually improves and the second tends to resolve itself.

Also, my experience with people leaving/coming in my part of AWS is that people who leave the company entirely almost exclusively weren’t doing very well. The more experienced people tend to just transfer elsewhere within AWS. Also, Amazon hires a huge number of ex-Microsoft employees, whereas I only know of one person personally who left to go to Microsoft.