The role of management is not to get every last drop of work out of you. With the risk of being redundant, management is really about management. You need to

The role of management is not to get every last drop of work out of you. With the risk of being redundant, management is really about management. You need to recognize when to push them and when not to. From the looks of it, it's push all the time in the team that this person was over at Amazon. That's a failure of management. It costs a lot to train a new employee, and reduces productivity and morale. So managers worth their salt would do one of many things to prevent this type of burnout. Predictability is what management wants as well as employees, believe it or not. If you are an effective manager, you either create predictability and a good work/life balance or you might as well not be there. You're basically a fire fighter in that case, and it doesn't help with long term predictability. Managers who worth their salt will go to bat to get people the time they want/need. If also need to recognize when it is time to walk away, and that's what I tell people when I do interview. If I don't correct the predictability scenario in terms of meeting business needs, I should be fired. If I don't get the tools that I need to get the results, it would be on me to walk away after informing them of the structural problems (and solutions to help them). I suspect that Amazon has a number of people who are purely focused on the bottom line of velocity and don't care about burn out. I'm sure though, that there are good groups to work for at Amazon, but the ratio might be lower than at other tech companies, from what I gather.