There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive. A lot is expected from you. The perks are nowhere near a Google's or many SV shops.
But corporate and micromanaged are the furthest thing from the truth. There are VERY few "top-down" directives. (we call them S-team goals for the SVP team). And each and every team is given a TON of autonomy, independence and ownership.
This of course has its own problems, and why sometimes some teams breed awful internal cultures that lead to NY times articles. It's why the AWS console is built with 23 different web technologies and each one is slightly inconsistent from the other. It's why most of the company's internal services are still not on native AWS (though we are essentially 100‰ on EC2).
But this ownership and independence is 90% Fabulous and genuinely freeing. You are given a tremendous amount of autonomy over your technical decisions. You get a chance to decide on the working culture and attitude towards software development that makes sense for the people on your team, depending on your strengths, preferences, projects, and customers.
Amazon is not for everybody. But it is far closer to a group of a few thousand startups than a corporate behemoth.
Also, the SDEs here put a stop to all that Proctor-driven interviewing, though sadly Amazon PR doesn't want to make a public declaration as such. Oh well.