Disclaimer: The opinions in this article are solely my own and based on personal experience. This is not official AWS guidance.
Intro
Amazon is not for everyone.
I have been at Amazon for close to 4 years, and it is one of the best places I have worked. But it has a very specific character, and I have seen good engineers struggle here not because they lacked skill, but because the intense environment wasn’t the right fit for them.
Let me tell you what that looks like.
Figure 1: Amazon Peccy
You will own everything
You don’t only own code here. You own a product. Writing code is literally 1 of the 10+ other things you are responsible for: your service’s infrastructure, monitoring, oncall, design docs, customer communications, etc. There is no “that’s not my job” here. If your system breaks at 2am on a Saturday, that’s your problem to fix. If you want to write code and hand it off to someone else: ops, QA, DevOps, Amazon will frustrate you quickly.
Startup mindset
Despite being one of the largest companies in the world, Amazon operate like ‘the world’s largest startup’. Resources are not handed to you: you fight for compute, you justify your infrastructure costs, you build with what you have. If you are expecting the comfort of a big corporate environment, you will be surprised (also no free lunches like you see on Software Engineering day YouTube videos).
You will be held to a high bar; continuously
The interview is just the beginning, and probably the easiest step. The same rigor that got you in is expected every day after. Code reviews, design docs, COEs, operational reviews: everything gets scrutinized. A senior engineer once told me:
“success has many fathers, but failure has none.”
That is more true at Amazon than anywhere I have worked.
Ambiguity is the default
Your manager will not tell you what to do. You are expected to figure out the problem, the solution, and convince everyone it’s right. It is your job to create clarity and disambiguate a business problem. You are expected to drive every open question to a conclusion, even the uncomfortable ones.
Oncall follows you home
If I am the oncall for my team this week and if something breaks, I am the first to know and the first to respond, day, night or weekend. This is not optional, it rotates across the team. Some people find this energizing, others find it exhausting. Know which one you are before you join.
Conclusion
If you read this and felt excited: you will love working at Amazon. If you felt anxious: it is worth reflecting on that before you apply.