Having worked for Microsoft and Amazon, there is a reason that so many engineers go to work for Microsoft, or Google, after working at Amazon for awhile. It isn't just that they offer better benefits than Amazon.

I do not think this program will compensate for everything else when it comes to associates. Associates are not respected by management.

Frankly, this is because Amazon does not respect employees. Full Stop. (or suppliers, or anyone really. They only treat customers well because it is profitable. It is kinda funny that Zappos got bought by them, since Tony's ideology is the polar opposites of Bezos, but maybe Tony is just propagandizing the way Bezos makes himself out to be a visionary.)

Amazon is like the cult of scientology: It sounds really great on the way in, but well before you get to the verbal abuse, the death marches, denial of sleep and the beatings[1] you realize it was all a lie.

They do roll out the red carpet treatment in the early days for people that a manager insists need it.

But they operate on stack ranking, are completely political, anti-innovation, and really they are very much like a cult, with their own reality distortion field and magical sayings. "Its day one!"

For contrast: Over the 25 years of my professional career, I have worked for a lot of startups. Many of them were poorly run, simply because the management was in well over their heads. There's a huge difference between management being well intentioned and over their heads and what I experienced at Amazon. Management at amazon is pathological, because Amazon is designed as a Lord of The Flies experiment, not a company.

I've also worked for Microsoft and a number of other big companies. Big companies have Big company suckage syndrome, and Microsoft has management problems. But again it is sorta like management ends up being a bit incompetent in areas where they shouldn't, not evil. Microsoft was also a little bit of a cult but a pretty mild one. Both companies practice the "once you've turned your back on the cult you're unclean" police though.

One important lie: "If you don't like where you are at amazon, you can move to another department." Despite getting an offer from the cutting edge part of AWS, my manager naturally blocked it because he was losing too many people (%60 of the team left by the time I left, because he was a total abusive asshole who knew nothing about computers, let a lone programming.) So, I resigned. (This was also after I'd tried to resolve the issue by going to HR, only to discover that HR told my manager everything I said, despite offering confidence, and thus he knew I wasn't going to lie to cover up his misdeeds.)

Just FYI, my manager at Amazon was a drug dealer who dealt to other amazon employees in the parking garage next to PacWest. He's had a wonderful career there because his boss is also incompetent, and the incompetence goes all the way to the top, and he's really effective at blaming others for his problems (like, you know, being a drug addict and forgetting to tell his team to do stuff.)

Incompetence is irritating. But that said, I had great experiences at a lot of companies, and at least perfectly fine ones at almost all the places I worked. I don't particularly like Microsoft, really, but I would never warn someone off working there.

Amazon is the only place I've ever taken the time to warn people against. Some people work there and do fine because they end up working for a manager who knows what a loop is. There are even largish groups like that (namely AWS). But that doesn't change the fact that there are whole divisions run by asshole bozos as well.

Amazon's crime is not in hiring an asshole bozo and putting him in charge of programmers. It is in letting him drive out %60 of his team and then promoting him. It is the culture that lets such a terrible person thrive. That culture is what makes Amazon a terrible place to work, because it is completely up to chance whether you will be treated decently or not.

[1] I wasn't beaten. If I had been, I would have sued. Everything else is an accurate description of the experience.