Current sde1 bluebadge. I also see exactly what the parent comment mentioned. I also saw a few nasty episodes such as L6 managers quitting in less than a year in because they hated the pressure they were subjected to, and a yellowbadge say during a all-hands to a bunch of newly arrivals that he was at the company when they joined and he will still be at the company when they all left. I know of a team where SDE2s and SDE3s felt the need to pull in all-nighters and even work the entire weekend to meet the deadlines that their L7 leadership pulled out of their ass. I myself felt compelled to work close to 12 hours a day and weekends during a period just because my senior manager wanted to shine. And yes, I've already see a fair share of colleagues disappear.
Of course YMMV but I'm baffled why I'm seeing accurate descriptions of what I'm personally experiencing on a daily basis being faced with such a sense of incredulity.
> because the engineering quality is so shoddy and the business plan prioritizes maintaining system uptime,
I've created this throwaway account just to comment on the issue of engineering quality being shoddy.
It's true that engineering quality is shoddy but the problem is caused by Amazon's structure and not by the engineers themselves. For example, each and every single engineer is expected to deliver major tasks alone as part of their evaluation process, and this means that by design we are placed on tasks where we are way over our head and we are still expected to deliver things out of thin air. This sort of trial by fire is sold under the premise of allowing us to deliver consistently at the next level before being considered for a promotion, but in practice if you screw up that's expected to also be held against you.