Escalate to HR? That's exactly what I did.

Jeff is spinning his typical BS. My boss was abusive, drove off %70 of the team and was dealing drugs to other employees in the PacMed garage. He lied to me many times, and I started documenting it.

I went to HR about it, trying to get support so I could transfer out to a team at AWS, where I knew the manager and he had offered me a job.

The HR person assured me that everything that I told her would be kept confidential. She insisted I tell her what was going on with my boss, and thus why I wanted to leave. I did tell her, and she then turned around and told my boss all of it. (I didn't tell her he was dealing drugs, I actually felt physically vulnerable to him because he had a violent temper-- his training was to be a prison guard and that's what he wanted to be before somehow he was hired at Amazon to manage programmers despite having difficulty even with simple things like spreadsheets and Excel.)

The HR at Amazon is an organization that is a big part of the problem. After she told my boss they started coming up with sudden complaint about my performance and scheduled a meeting with the HR person.. who then talked bout the things I had told her in confidence, in front of my boss (though I knew he already knew) as if there had never been any reason for me to expect confidence.

Also, I worked with Jeff Bezos on enough occasions that he knew who I was, and would say hello by name in the hallway. The idea that i could have gone to him directly with a complaint about my boss is asinine in the extreme. He would have passed it on to HR and it would have been the same thing.

He might have cared about the drug dealing thing ,but only because it put the company at risk.

The lack of empathy, and the rest of the employee hostile corporate culture ORIGINATES with Jeff Bezos. HE is the source and the cause and to him -- and this is a libertarian speaking-- everyone's existence is the sum total of the money they make him.

In fact, I think Jeff Bezos is a pathological liar and a psychopath. He's very charming, heartless and able to fake warmth. Clearly he has had PR training too. But he's the evil at the core of Amazon.

I've had extensive dealings with Microsoft and Apple and other big companies-- none were any where close to as toxic and heartless as Amazon. Jeff really sees people as resources to be exploited and could not care less about employee development, or retention.

In fact, the back stabbing, competitive nature that makes it such a toxic environment is designed in some sort of "survival of the fittest" delusion-- the product is regularly sacrificed (and amazon.com is pretty much a joke how broken it is-- still is, in fact) as a result.

You win at Amazon by playing politics, not by being good at your job.

PS-- why was I stupid enough to go to HR? I've worked mostly for startups, and it was the job previous to this that was my first real experience with an HR "department" which was one person, who was damn good, and exceptional at mediation and conflict resolution, full of integrity and trustworthy. I didn't have experience at large companies to know that HR was mostly filled with drama addicted flunkies.