How far can a pure mercenary culture get?

Amazon has been on my Would Never Work For list for over a decade now. Even the “golden years” being referenced by OP and some commenters in this thread were plagued by Amazon overworking people and doing sketchy things like weighting RSU all till the last few years and then laying people off before their mountain of cash landed

Curious what you're looking for in that position as the aperture for what DS do at AWS is quite broad (my current role). DM me if you want to chat—contact info in profile.

I applied to work there on some kernel/hypervisor thing - rejected without comment. I've also worked at other companies that desperately needed to hire people but kept rejecting every candidate, even the alright ones. Interest rates are too low.

Correction: it's the golden age for code monkey employers. We as an industry have never deserved to use the term "engineering" to describe ourselves, and we are further from that ideal than ever.

I'm not sure FAANG does look good on a CV any more. The skill set to be effective in those environments is quite specialised and crucially it's very different to what you need in a lot of other software development organisations. There appeared to be a happy cycle for a while where very well paid devs working in one of the few FAANG or FAANG-adjacent companies could jump to one of the others because they were "in the club" and had experience of working at a truly global scale that most software never needs. Those days seem to be over with the mass layoffs and hiring limits. And if you're not working at that scale - and outside that small world almost nobody actually is - those skills aren't always very transferrable and other types of experience often have more value.

Be careful what you wish for. Amazonians are in a no-hire list in quite a few companies.

The reason is simple: nobody wants to bring in toxic culture.