[happypants23]

Ex-AWS engineer here. The Amazon experience can differ wildly between teams and orgs. Best thing is to find some peers that work there and get the inside loop on which teams are sane.

I worked on some really cool stuff there, and learned a lot. But then after a while AWS grew rapidly and I ended up spending most of my time on pretty boring stuff, such as operational firefighting, endless deployments, config updates, and of course that oncall thing.

That said, in my experience, Amazon was still a bit of meat-grinder. I've come to realise though that its just part of an extremely long interview process, with the goal of weeding out those who just aren't thriving in Amazon's environment of "organised chaos". New grads who don't make SDE2 within a certain amount of time will eventually be PIP'ed, which is basically a signal that its time to find greener pastures.