Amazon reviews

I have seen too many full time employees transfer out of a dept or leave the company. All blame work/life balance. There seems to be this "boil the ocean" mentally with leadership. People I know including myself, worked 10-12 hour days and weekends just to keep up with the demand. This was just peaks and valleys based on project phases. This was constant. Its all about driving results with no consideration to the toll it takes on the team.

I will speak for AWS because that's what I know. One word can sum up the work here - pager. Responding to the pager is what engineers are hired for. You do get to code snippets now and then, but in all likelihood, you will write more code during the interview than in your actual work at AWS. There is an elaborate system to track who's supposed to respond to the pager when, who all that person can then page when he's unfamiliar with the problem (happens a lot), how many pages were encountered during the day, how many pages were encountered during the night, what to do if you see the same issue when you get paged next. Everything, expect how to fix the problem that caused the page. Yes, that's discussed superficially at meetings, but then there is no one to actually go and do the fix, because all the engineers are attending to the pager, or waiting their turn to do so. People keep joining and leaving the team every month ( it's a "revolving door"). At the end of my eighth month, I was the second seniormost person on the team. Most people who hang on beyond a year have under water mortgages or kids in college to pay for. If you do join AWS, don't at least buy that million dollar condo.