AWS has mostly built its reputation on a few world class services (EC2, S3), but the vast majority are of mediocre quality and wouldn't stand on their own as products. Most were designed poorly by amateurs and then scaled aggressively to keep up with the cloud computing hype. As a result, there's some catastrophic operational nightmare occurring at any given time of day within AWS, and some poor souls are scrambling to apply more bubble gum and baling wire.
The company, AWS specifically, operates on the lone, hollow vision of "make the customer happy". With no vision comes constant re-prioritizing of work, bike shedding, and conflict, which only makes getting anything significant done in an under-resourced, massive, and operationally-intensive environment that much more impossible. Vision and long term strategy aren't valued, which makes sense given that a lot of the leadership seems to be context switching between outages, people management, and 3-6 month out feature launches. Odds are that your work will be largely limited to putting out interesting fires or making something terrible last a bit longer. That and perpetuating the thin public veneer of elegant automation at scale, which in actuality are crude scripts (see any number of high visibility outages) at best and clumsy human driven deployments, changes, and operational responses at worst.
Talent, overall, is not great because of the self-perpetuating cycle of under-investment in hiring and its second order consequences: poorly designed and maintained systems that drove high operational burden and ultimately attrition. Intelligent and capable folks have mostly gotten the read that Amazon is a miserable place to be, which only makes this feedback loop worse. To keep the lights on through the last few years of cloud computing hype, AWS has hired a horde of low-bar, Enterprise-type characters that seem endemic to corporations well past their high point. A lot of AWS is well past day 2. Turf wars, kingdom building, and subcultures imported from other companies were increasingly visible.
There are bright spots within the company, but not many and they are certain not to last. If you do end up joining, do your best to determine the trajectory of both your service and manager and adjust accordingly. Moving between teams seems to be the only way to outmaneuver some of the miserable circumstances within the company and is available to those not under-performing. Research as much as possible before signing your offer. Ask your hiring manager about vision/priorities, attrition, and expectations out of different roles within the team. Ask about what their biggest fears and goals are, and determine if they’re serious and/or capable of addressing either. Take care to get a good read on the manager’s relationship with the team and their style of leadership as sociopathic managers seemed to thrive and escape accountability in the chaos of AWS.
