The way my offer worked, at the end of the first year some stock grants vest come due, and I would end up working for less money per-month for the next year unl

The way my offer worked, at the end of the first year some stock grants vest come due, and I would end up working for less money per-month for the next year unless I stayed for my next stock grant a year later. I am not generally happy working in a corporate environment, but that's more about me than about Amazon in particular (I prefer being an entrepreneur; that's why I read HN). And I wasn't willing to work for another full year, even though the compensation was amazing. But it wasn't because of poor working conditions; instead it was pretty standard fare for big corporate salary jobs, like not being able to work on my own projects in my free time without restriction. After one year as a full employee I was deluged with job offers from just about every other major company. I'm sure many of them would have offered to increase my compensation. I said no to all of them because I wanted to go back to consulting. I assume that after your second year, you probably get a similar set of offers. A typical employee in AWS sticks around for about 2 years. But at the same time, tenure at tech companies is getting short just about everywhere these days -- and I knew people in my group who had been at Amazon for 4-5 years. My own personal tenure at companies rarely exceeds two years, with one exception where I stayed for nearly six. So again, I don't see how Amazon is terribly different on this axis. One of the most annoying things at Amazon is the "on call" policy where all developers need to put in time "on call", which includes answering a pager in the middle of the night, sometimes for poorly designed alarms that are poorly documented. I knew one developer who quit, with no notice, right after the first week he'd been on call. The frustrating thing about it was that my team did client work: Android, iOS, and Windows clients for an AWS service, so none of us knew the first thing about how to fix anything on the server side, so it was particularly painful to be put on call. So no, not everything is perfect, and I'm sure that some managers are downright awful. But not everything is "Work harder! Damn your family!" and "We'll be watching your performance after having a personal tragedy strike!" either, which is what the articles imply. I did really feel that if I'd seen something like that I could have taken it to HR and it would have been addressed.