Best decision I ever made was repeatedly ignoring emails from Amazon recruiters while they were allowing remote work around the pandemic. Fuck that place.
One of the better decisions I ever made was not ignoring emails from folks recruiting for Amazon in 2003. It was a different place back then, and truly like "the world's largest startup." The other thing that was different back then was that the people I worked with were all so blindingly smart. I'm pretty smart, but in 2003 I often felt like the dumbest person in the room[1]. In 2025 that feeling was rare, and not simply because I had 20 years more wisdom.
I left Amazon for the third and last time a couple months ago and have no regrets.
If you're still there and reading this, Amazon still has a lot going for it as a place to work. But it's not the electric place I recall from 20 years ago. I'm not sure if there is any company that can match both the startup-like freedom of action with massive scale of early 2000s Amazon.
[1] In case it isn't obvious: this is a desirable condition because it means you get to learn something.
I never worked for google (interviewed but was rejected) but I have suspected this is true -- that there was a sweet spot where google was a magical place, but that time has long passed.
I don't necessarily need an electric place to work. Smart people and a boring mission/tech stack is fine. I just think their layoff(s) in disguise when they forced everyone to RTO is/was a slap in the face. Instant, permanent loss of trust.
It's still easy to feel like the dumbest person in the room at Amazon... until you cut through the bullshit and realize everyone else in the room is a complete impostor skilled in maximalization, social engineering, politics, and nothing else.
There's a bunch of milestones, for me the standout one was managers starting to abuse marking tickets for large events as "secret" to stop people from reading their screwups. Someone leaked that the cause for some large AWS outage was someone oopsing some CLI command, and it seemed to trigger a pretty large shift.
Then their information campaign is working. They need bodies for the grinder, not free thinkers with agency and autonomy. Much like the obvious spam scam messages with glaring typos, Amazon signals to the market that driven corporate cogs that will shiv someone to get ahead need only apply.
