Amazon

You get to work with some of the brightest and kindest engineers you'll ever find. Projects are completely collaborative, impactful, and rarely (if ever) involve office politics – which is a very rare combination.

Management has lost its head and stopped focusing on long-term strategies in a desperate attempt to compete with other tech companies. Engineers in my org are regularly encouraged to "work nights and weekends," while also being asked to include multi-hour commutes into their daily routine. A focus on productivity, quality, making decisions based on data rather than intuition, and building something you can be proud of used to be the norm. It's what made Amazon special.

But that's no longer the case. Now it's just about meeting arbitrary, unrealistic deadlines and flogging engineering teams until something that technically meets the requirements (mostly) gets produced. Many engineers are struggling with the whiplash.

Living the Leadership Principles should start at the top. Changing policies abruptly and focusing on near-term, competitor-based goals makes it seem like the LPs are just cheap words that apply to the little people but not senior management. It destroys the trust and esteem you once enjoyed from your workforce.