"Strive to be Earth's Best Employer" coming from Amazon leadership is maybe best understood as a joke. Amazon is a meat grinder, even more so since the big tech layoffs started.

(This kind of comment always elicits current Amazon engineers who disagree because they haven't personally experienced this. To them, I say: Stay at Amazon long enough and it /will/ happen to you. To those currently in the grinder: I hit the eject button at L6 and found a much better gig; it gets better!)

I had lunch with the Amazon leader most responsible for ensuring all staff in the fast-moving-cardboard half of the company had health insurance from day one of employment, no waiting time. Of a decades long career, that was the one thing I saw most animate her—care for fellow humans.

When the 90th percentile employee has a GED and works warehouse or delivery, actions to earn “best employer” may be invisible or worse to the 5% who are software people. I’ve worked at Meta too, and Meta absolutely had better coffee. And WAY better health insurance. But Amazon’s health insurance is uniform for all staff, and that means something.

In Seattle there are some developers who call Amazon employees AmHoles. It's part their general arrogance, punctuated by things like their tendency to walk down the sidewalk four abreast and not notice that they are pushing people going the other way out of their way.

I worked a short contract there and I've seen the 'meatgrinder' bit. I joked (not really joking) with my fellow contractors that maybe the reason they walk four abreast is shell-shock, not arrogance. A couple days a week we went to lunch in a daze.

It's clear there's not enough quality control in their 'culture', by almost an order of magnitude. I've known two different people who quit after less than 2 weeks. One after being called on Sunday asking why he wasn't at work. On his second fucking week at the company.

In many ways they are the best employer, just for shareholders and not employees.