As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company,

As someone who had a very positive experience at Amazon, but knew people who did not, agreed. In a way, it's better not to think of Amazon as a single company, but as hundreds of startups under an umbrella organization. You cannot generalize from a single one of those organizations. It is impossible, IMHO, for a company to have as many employees as Amazon and maintain a normalized employee experience. Really the poisonous thing that stands out for me is the Visa experience. Amazon (now) has a pretty liberal internal transfer system that I have seen work really well for a lot of people. But a truly vindictive and sufficiently interpersonally skilled manager can still pin down an employee with what happened to the OP. In such a case, a citizen can walk away and find another company that's a better fit for them. But when they're in H1B land, it is so much harder. It would be so much better for the industry if the system were much more flexible.