Amazon WLB/culture

I work in the financial org under AWS and the balance is awesome. If anything I work extra just because I enjoy what I'm creating. I'm an SDE. At first I really wanted to be on an AWS service team but I'm really glad I'm not. Would likely be much more support focused. In my current team it's all new projects with direct impact on the organization.

Most of the complaints I hear come from Retail and since it’s big, there is a vocal community here. For me, it’s actually the most WLB company I’ve been in.

Purely depends on sub-teams and their managers. You cannot generalize that org A is good and B sucks. Depends on individual managers.

Amazon in general is a great place to work if you are career-oriented. You will be exposed to a lot of interesting projects and ideas. It’s just that they expect you to act like a business owner rather than simply a software engineer and this can get pretty stressful if you can’t manage it. If you are disciplined and devoted to your job, you can make it. But if you are thinking of it as simply an income source to fund your life you will become miserable eventually. As far as culture is concerned, you need to be thick-skinned and learn to use competitive/assertive people to become a better version of yourself.

There’s absolutely no way to predict. It depends upon your division (Retail/AWS) and individual manager. I happen to like my team and manager, but two aisles over in the same org it’s a shit show. I generally tell people: We work. We don’t fuck around much. We’re given sharp tools and expected to use them properly. In that, I love it.

Sorry: to Your actual question: I typically work 50 hours/ week, base. About one month a year it’s 60-70. I’ve always worked like that, so it’s nbd for me, but if you don’t like to actually work or rise in your career don’t come here.

There are so many inefficiencies that I've learned to work around. Things took me 3X when I first started (and there were a few long days back then), but now that I understand the system, I only spend about 20-30 hrs a week on actual work. I've been able to work smart, not hard. My leadership team cares about deliverables, so it could be a different story with a different manager, team, or org.

I left because of WLB. Way over worked like 18 hour days shitty pay extremely low bar entry workers shitty culture

The problem that I face is my dumb Manager and my smart but unmotivated teammates. After the stock price soar every1 attitude is to slog years for the stock to vest. I am trying to change team. An unhealthy team may reflect back at home. Happy at work happy at home.