I read the NY Times article about Amazon when it first came out. I also read the highly predictable comments, which almost uniformly condemned Amazon. It is very likely that Amazon is a horrible place to work, for most people. But part of me thinks it might be a great place to work for some people, particularly the knowledge workers there, as opposed to the warehouse workers.
Amazon sounds like some of the startups I worked in--an intense and highly focused work atmosphere where laggards are quickly thrown out. If you have a good management team, the employees that remain are mostly quite smart and hard working, and the productivity is very high. In the right company, the opportunities for advancement are incredible. I was in one such startup in my mid-20s, and I was in charge of designing some of the world's largest computer networks simply because we were growing so fast that there was nobody else to do the job.
People who have never worked in such a fast growth atmosphere simply don't understand the incredible high you can get from the intense work. And when you go home, you go home happy. I don't remember anybody getting divorced for example. The right startup environment is like an addictive drug that startup people go back to again and again, typically until they reach their 40s and naturally slow down a bit.
This startup mentality also typically goes away once the company gets beyond a few thousand people. Only a few companies seem to manage to keep it after growing much bigger.
