I've been a developer at Amazon for about 3 years, and I've stayed for the following reasons:
- Reasonable work-life balance. In my 3 years here, there have only been a few "crunch times" the whole team has had to work weekends. We viewed it as a failure in planning and conducted a post-mortem to understand what went wrong.
- Nice people. Honestly, I've never experienced poor treatment like that which was highlighted in this article and the NYT exposé. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but in my experience, Amazon has no singular culture. It's more like a federation of start-ups with distinct cultures; if one team isn't a good fit for you, it's pretty easy to switch.
- Competitive pay. This is partly due to timing (the coincidental soaring of the stock price when I joined), but in general, my experience has been that Amazon offers strong stock compensation.
- Fascinating, hard problems. Pick _any_ specialty within software engineering or data science, and there's a team within Amazon at the forefront. I'm always learning, and I never feel like the smartest guy in a room. I get to work on "moonshot" projects that few other companies would have the resources to finance or the risk tolerance to stomach.
I'm not writing this comment to brag or imply my experience is representative of everyone at Amazon. This is just one perspective to even out the chorus of voicing saying it's a terrible place to work. In my experience, it's the polar opposite.
I would say it's to construct simple enough systems, and the hallmark of skill is a developer's ability to define enough.