Amazon has always had a different culture than other bigtech cos. I have plenty of friends at Google, Microsoft, Snap, and Facebook who work 36 hours at week, don't stress at all about their jobs, and are paid really well.
The story wasn’t from Amazon... but yeah they do have a burn and churn culture.
I think it depends a lot on the group you’re in and where you land in the office politics. Microsoft used to be a nightmare in certain orgs and Intel used to be worse. I hear complaints about Google and Facebook at times, but those companies do seem to be more relaxed about things.
The roles I like tend to be well coveted and so are often the target of undermining. There is a process where one org wants to subsume the responsibility and budget of another org and so they will undermine the other org to ensure its failure. I was once forced to buy thousands of computers that were way over spec in order to blow out the budget and make it harder to justify the investment in the project. This is why we can’t have nice things.
