You should have just switched teams. Amazon has amazing teams working on deep technology, they also have huge systems with technical debt and stress. People dont realize how different it can be inside the company.
Btw this happens in most companies, tons of tech debt. And those who created that st are off onto new projects recreating the exact same mess all over again.
It is a cycle that never ends.
Only chance is to join early and be in for the long run.
It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.
And hopefully no one else regrets it...
Thus is the circle of (engineering) life.
Just kidding. Please write maintainable code.
Not in the requirements, sorry.
Most people don't know how to do this, because it's actually hard, and I don't think it's being taught much in programmer education.
I certainly had to learn "on the job", and probably spent 10 years before I got good at it.
I learned the most by fixing bugs. After a while, I started seeing the patterns of why this bug had occurred, and started writing code do avoid the traps.
I prefer the term troubleshooter specialising in legacy code, but "code janitor" definitely has felt more appropriate at times.
I was an L5 with about 5-6 years of experience, 1.5 at that point at Amazon.
IME, the best managers are the ones who trust and enable their teams to make the right decisions. It would be a red flag if the manager was just giving out offers without allowing the team to provide their input.
Whiskey team? Ok, probably somewhat stressful but doable. Wine team? Plush and cushy, with a line of people who want to be on that team out the door. Vodka team? Oh hell no. Etc.
... I'm kidding. Sort of. But not entirely.
There are so many data sources that are all queryable via API. There are a couple basic greasemonkey scripts already floating around but as an SDE it really isn't that hard to write something yourself... It does take a bit of experience to get a good heuristic on weighting the different data points but you can do way better than blindly guessing.
I will say as someone who HAS intelligently looked through this data for most teams at Amazon, there is an absolutely MASSIVE difference between the top 10% of teams and the median, and an even larger difference between than and the bottom 10%, which by all metrics appear to truly be hell on earth.
Tech survey results??
OP was making it sound like you could get the results for a specific team you'd want to transfer to.
Most of the time its somewhere in between. You'll speak with the manager, speak with the team, you each review each other's artifacts, and if everyone's happy, you swap over. The balance of power is pretty nice. I've dropped out of the process many, many times after starting talking with management. Or even just learning more about what the team itself does (I couldn't live with myself if I worked on pre-roll ads, for example. So I noped out of that one).
Not familiar with Amazon culture so I don't know if that'd be considered acceptable behavior. I hope not!
The manager should put those bad things _in writing_ during performance reviews instead of trying to prevent their employees from leaving by dunking on them after they are informed about the fact.
And from what I understand at Amazon, it's kind of the same thing, but PIPs have been aggressively weaponized.