Like all of Amazon, depends on the team. Pretty much all engineers at Amazon have on-call rotations which is what most people talk about when they complain about work-life balance here.
On-call can be good or bad, but if you're a manager and your team's on-call is awful then soon all the developers move to other teams (it's pretty easy to transfer around in this company). Upper managers know this fact, and push their managers to improve this. My current team, I have never been paged outside of work hours since I joined 6 months ago.
In terms of working hours, when I first joined I'd let myself work crazy hours and my work-life balance was unhealthy. I soon realized that A: I didn't need to do this to get my job done and B: this was killing me. I work 9-5 now, plus delta (get in at 10, work to 6, get in at 8:30, maybe leave at 4:30). On occasion, I'll put in a crazy night or something to get a big project done but I take the hours back on another day to make up the difference.
If I was in Seattle, I'd be doing the same thing. I'd make a little bit more money and I'd have better beer available.
I worked at Amazon for four years and absolutely loved it.
I never understood the work/life balance problem people had.
Usually those that struggled were just weak engineers to begin with and felt like they had to put in 10-12 hours a day just to avoid being put on a performance improvement plan / laid off (i.e. wrong fit to begin with)
I'm sympathetic to the idea that people have different experiences with companies - especially large ones with a lot of variance between orgs and teams, but this:
> "Usually those that struggled were just weak engineers to begin with"
just seems like an awful thing to say that is almost certainly untrue.
Full disclosure: I spent 2 years at Amazon and knew many extremely strong engineers who struggled, as well as some who had great experiences.
On-call can be good or bad, but if you're a manager and your team's on-call is awful then soon all the developers move to other teams (it's pretty easy to transfer around in this company). Upper managers know this fact, and push their managers to improve this. My current team, I have never been paged outside of work hours since I joined 6 months ago.
In terms of working hours, when I first joined I'd let myself work crazy hours and my work-life balance was unhealthy. I soon realized that A: I didn't need to do this to get my job done and B: this was killing me. I work 9-5 now, plus delta (get in at 10, work to 6, get in at 8:30, maybe leave at 4:30). On occasion, I'll put in a crazy night or something to get a big project done but I take the hours back on another day to make up the difference.
If I was in Seattle, I'd be doing the same thing. I'd make a little bit more money and I'd have better beer available.