“Amazon is where overachievers go to feel bad about themselves.”

Becca Selah recounts her year at Amazon as a UX designer, walking through the level system, the badge colors, the high-stakes Andy Jassy meeting, and her eventual departure when COVID hit. The piece is essentially a catalog of Big Tech’s psychological traps: the status games, the outsourced life, the way the job colonizes your mind until you get what you wanted and realize it doesn’t satisfy. She quit after a year, stayed home with her kid, then went back two years later, which undermines the tidy narrative arc somewhat.