The economy sucks, and they do pay decently for software engineers. Especially now that the rest of FAANG aren't massively over-paying for college hires, I doubt the supply of bright young minds will ever entirely dry up.
I have worked there for 8 years now and we ARE running out of bodies.
It has become extremely difficult to hire at any level, we have had an open position on my team for a senior data scientist for a year and a half now, with barely any candidate applying, and none of them being competent.
Similarly the average level of new employees has dropped dramatically. The famous "hiring bar" is now below ground.
Amazon has been on my Would Never Work For list for over a decade now. Even the “golden years” being referenced by OP and some commenters in this thread were plagued by Amazon overworking people and doing sketchy things like weighting RSU all till the last few years and then laying people off before their mountain of cash landed
Curious what you're looking for in that position as the aperture for what DS do at AWS is quite broad (my current role). DM me if you want to chat—contact info in profile.
I applied to work there on some kernel/hypervisor thing - rejected without comment. I've also worked at other companies that desperately needed to hire people but kept rejecting every candidate, even the alright ones. Interest rates are too low.
There are now more highly competent devs ready to work for cheap available now than ever before and all of them are boosted with state of the art coding agents…
It‘s the golden age for software engineer employers.
Correction: it's the golden age for code monkey employers. We as an industry have never deserved to use the term "engineering" to describe ourselves, and we are further from that ideal than ever.
I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the club" and had experience of working at a truly global scale that most software never needs. Those days seem to be over with the mass layoffs and hiring limits. And if you're not working at that scale - and outside that small world almost nobody actually is - those skills aren't always very transferrable and other types of experience often have more value.
When I worked in aerospace one of the surprising things to learn was we had an unwritten 'max allowed' percentage of people hired from Boeing overall and applied to each team because we did not want to incorporate Boeing's culture. If I was still in management at a software company I'd probably apply that as a consideration with regards to FAANG. Even for those hired ex-Boeing had a much stricter vetting not on skills but personality/approach/vibe(?).
I don't know exactly I never worked there and I was IT not design/qa/factory floor. My understanding was slow, non innovative, not efficient, and prone to complain. The ex-Boeing people we had were great though. I think it's probably just normal 150k employee companies end up toxic stuff. Just know we had a quota.