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I don't think this is completely true. I was with AWS for 3 years as SW engineer and was working around 12 hours until I decided to switch. AWS has pretty messed up softwar services with lot of technical debt. Rather than fixing these, AWS relies on oncall (pager duty) to mitigate production issues. My team use to get 200 pages a week.

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I've heard similar stories from several AWS engineers who were looking to leave or recently left. I can believe that pieces of AWS have good culture, because AWS is a large set of services and it's inevitable that it's not 100% consistent across the entire organization. But I also fully believe that parts of AWS are "duct taped together and on fire" because I've heard it from multiple sources.

I've never had anyone in person tell me that Amazon was a good place to work unless they were trying to recruit me.

I've worked here for a year and have never seen that. I'm sure there are a few bad managers, as there would be in any company with 350K+ employees, but Amazon really tries to take a data driven approach to employee retention. If you think they don't know this causes burnout and aren't trying to optimize for long-term employee sustainability, you're underestimating their management talent.

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