Not sure I agree. The tone from the top varies quite a lot across big tech companies, and sets the tone for the culture of the teams. Then within that context,

Not sure I agree. The tone from the top varies quite a lot across big tech companies, and sets the tone for the culture of the teams. Then within that context, a lot depends on your team, your manager, your ability to connect with stakeholders in the company, and the problem you’re working on. I work at Shopify, and while we have had intense projects, I haven’t experienced anything like what’s described here about Amazon. Shopify, culturally, is quite different than other large tech companies I’ve worked at. It’s opinionated about tooling instead of dozens of things that do the same thing. We emphasize sustainably doing work and not burning people out. After all, why would we want to burn people out when we want to retain them? We emphasize “building for the long term” and to do that we do seem to put people first. One example, a colleague of mine has been out nearly 10 months on parental leave. And nobody has batted an eye.