Amazon Operations Engineer III reviews

- Difficult to get rid of technical debt - A lot of house-made solutions to replace industry standard

I will speak for AWS because that's what I know. One word can sum up the work here - pager. Responding to the pager is what engineers are hired for. You do get to code snippets now and then, but in all likelihood, you will write more code during the interview than in your actual work at AWS. There is an elaborate system to track who's supposed to respond to the pager when, who all that person can then page when he's unfamiliar with the problem (happens a lot), how many pages were encountered during the day, how many pages were encountered during the night, what to do if you see the same issue when you get paged next. Everything, expect how to fix the problem that caused the page. Yes, that's discussed superficially at meetings, but then there is no one to actually go and do the fix, because all the engineers are attending to the pager, or waiting their turn to do so. People keep joining and leaving the team every month ( it's a "revolving door"). At the end of my eighth month, I was the second seniormost person on the team. Most people who hang on beyond a year have under water mortgages or kids in college to pay for. If you do join AWS, don't at least buy that million dollar condo.