Amazon is not going to change from the inside for anyone making $1M. If you go in thinking it is, you're deluding yourself and will be much less effective than if you just accept that Amazon is what Amazon is and you're whoring yourself out to them for $1M/year.
Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.
I know a guy in there (who most likely isn't making anywhere near 100M), who transferred into the HR org to try to make a dent into the problem of employee turnover, PIP BS, etc.
Last I heard, he was giving middle managers a hard time for perpetuating the sorts of bad behaviors that give Amazon its bad reputation as an employer.
Maybe Amazon is a lost cause, maybe it isn't, but you won't know if you can fix it unless you try. </two-cents>
PIP culture at Amazon comes from the very top. Bezos was a huge fan of it and so is the new CEO. There's no way your friend is going to be able to fight institutional power like that.
Too high. A small handful of CEOs have started making >100M in annual comp recently[1], but outside of the very highest paid CEOs, even top executives don't make that kind of money. (Although they certainly might see a capital gain in excess of that amount on their stock and options when the share price goes up.)
Yeah, I assumed that was TC (in which case for a CEO the majority of that will be shares not the base salary) - but of course most CEOs don't run Apple/Google/Microsoft/Amazon/etc.
Your paygrade needs to be at least $100M/year to have a reasonable shot of changing the culture of a large company. Most likely, by the time you get up there you realize that companies are what they are for reasons, and if you try to change that you will end up changing yourself out of that $100M job rather than changing the world.