BREAKING DOWN

I did a short stint at Amazon last year. My team was that bad so I left after only 6 months. I wasn't afraid of the hard work. I hated the fact that the hard work was done to keep really broken systems alive with sloppy bandages and hacks. What I saw there is that a ton of Amazon's most important systems are held together with garbage code (mostly scripts rather than proper languages). 

People never have a chance to fix this, so there's just never-ending frustration with getting operational tickets that you can't ever really solve. Before joining Amazon, I had never seen a grown man break down and actually cry out loud when his pager beeped. Amazon is just a mountain of technical debt. The managers are always breathing down your neck to hack the latest fix and move on.

That kind of crap isn't worth it for any decent engineer. If you are any good, there are a ton of other jobs that pay as well and are much more fun, so that's why I left.