When you work in PacMed, where the entire company was basically located at the time, you pretty much rub elbows with people across all departments (literally, you're stuffed in there so close) and so you can make sweeping generalizations about the engineering team behind Amazon.com. Without making any comments about warehouse workers and the like.

Which is what I did.

This is also not one persons perspective, but a common perspective in Seattle, so common that I knew about it in 1996, repeatedly heard horror sorries for the next 10 years ,and still went to work there after hearing horror stories from other ex-employees. Yeah, they caught me at point where I was a bit desperate.

In seattle, the horribleness of working there is pretty widely known.

Not sure why its so shocking and unbelievable here on Hacker News.

I'd say most people here are concerned about the engineers. The culture around the warehouses is pretty well understood, from my experience.

Even if we were talking about 100,000 engineers, though, I think it's fair to make a generalization about the culture. Companies have a lot of autonomy in deciding the nature of interactions between the employees as a group, and especially between employees and their superiors.

Also, people make similar generalizations all the time around small towns and neighborhoods (with often dubious accuracy, sure), but the only difference is one's structure develops bottom-up, and the other top-down.

And culture comes from the top. Right from Jeff Bezo himself.

One of the things that has since become a red flag for me is that Amazon is very cult like.