It's not so much the missed sleep, as it is the 48 hours of intense heart-rending stress.

I’m blown away by the sudden and swift down votes to my original comment.

These engineers work at a world class company and are paid vast sums of money to not fuck things up. They live way better off than the majority of the country and their mere presence makes life more expensive and stressful for communities around them.

To suggest they cannot go a mere 48 hours or less without sleep on one of their company’s most hyped days is out of touch.

That someone can earnestly suggest that going 48 hours without sleep is somehow an effective way to address an outage is an indictment of a messed up work culture.

People need sleep to think straight, and no amount of money or responsibility is going to change that.

Amazon is not world class. The pay is not comparatively great. There is no retail job (including Amazon) where undue stress and sleepless nights are warranted.

You're not saving lives, you're selling books and cat litter on the internet.

Is their pay not comparatively great? Usually when I see this statement, folks are comparing seattle to silicon valley 1:1 which isn't a fair comparison. Seattle is expensive but not that expensive. My friends who work at amzn seem to be compensated in line with everyone else I know, but maybe I'm wrong?

The vesting schedule and the sweatshop-esq environment arguably don't make the pay worth it (compared to what you can make elsewhere).

Disclaimer: My knowledge is based solely off of public reporting and first hand experiences of SWEs and TAMs no longer at Amazon/AWS.

That...just isn't true. Missed sleep costs millions of dollars a day and worse, numerous human lives in sleep related accidents (car, medical and more).