Are you under the impression that company cultures don't change over time? Of course they do. "nothing has changed in the last month or last quarter" is a ridiculous statement to make, as it's demonstrably false. As just one simple example, the company culture of many companies, including Amazon, has drastically shifted from allowing remote work over the last several years to now not allowing it.
Company culture can change over time but that does not mean it will change for the better over time. The problems I mentioned - cutthroat culture, stack ranking, PIPs, forced cuts, high attrition - have all been a thing at Amazon for at least the last 15 years.
I guess I don't really see the point of your comment in context of this article. The article doesn't mention most of those things you mentioned - it doesn't mention cutthroat culture, or stack ranking, or PIPs. The article is almost entirely about RTO and layoffs, which _is_ a demonstrably large shift in Amazon's culture if you compare, say, the period of 2017-2021 where remote work was encouraged and the company was was rapidly growing, to now.
The mass layoffs were 1.7% of the company, and the author himself says they didn't have much of an impact. It's no different than what every other big tech company did, and their numbers were a lot worse. The rest of what he talks about ("Making them miserable and silently sacking them.") is what I'm referencing. RTO might be the latest instance of it, but it isn't some big cultural shift. Amazon has never been an employee friendly company. Forcing people to quit when a department's salary gets too much or when they are nearing their 3rd or 4th year vesting periods is basically part of the manager handbook over there.
From personal experience: yes. But I don't really see what that has to do with anything, because even just looking at during the pandemic (remote work culture) to now (in-office culture) is a demonstrably different culture, so I still have no idea what you're arguing.
Culture is how people in the organisation think about work. Are they desperate to take credit? (Individual or team) Assign blame? (Individual or team) Overwork? Do they care about developing the employees' skills? Is the pay fair, are increases given to retain talent?
Amazon's long had a culture of high pay, work people very hard, accept the high churn.
This is just arguing semantics over the word "culture", but I'll bite.
The culture of Amazon during 2019-2022 was that people throughout the organization "thought about work" as something that could be done remotely (yes, even before 2020 there was remote work at Amazon), but required different working styles. There was more focus on employee engagement, encouraging things like taking online training or organizing team meetings that were focused on team connectedness. Teams were less overworked because there were always new people being hired to pick up the extra slack.Pay was constantly increasing, and especially so during the pandemic (Amazon famously removed its salary cap in 2022, and readjusted its entire pay scale to be higher).
Post-pandemic, but pre-layoffs, Amazon encouraged work travel to go and see coworkers in-person. You didn't even need a reason to do so, but book the travel and your expenses would be auto-approved. Expense budgets were large, and planning team events or happy hours were encouraged. Pay increases continued. Rapid hiring and team growth only got more rapid.
After layoffs happened, that all changed. Work travel began to be actively disallowed, pay increases slowed (or stopped). Team training became restricted unless it was free (and even then, only a certain amount of days were allowed). Hiring slowed to a crawl, so teams were more overworked, and overall mindset was more negative because you knew no help was coming.
All of the things I'm describing are vast culture changes that I personally saw happen between 2019-2022. You can go ahead and call these "policies", but policies are an important factor that shapes culture.
