I've been at Amazon 7 years. I mostly work 9-5, plus offset (ie, if I get in at ten, I leave at six). My biggest barrier to working those hours is that I like what I'm working on.
Yep. Amazon is not subtle and demands its ROI on you to be HIGH.
But as regards to the comment about being 'expendable', I am certain to get a job out side of Amazon pretty easily depending on my own skill. In other words, this is a market that both companies and employees can play.
Amazon's strategy isn't focused on retention of long term employees, then it is its own choice, there is always a trade-off.
So now your product needs a bigger team to handle it and the ops load increases or feature work slows. So now your senior engineers get frustrated and leave/switch teams. So then you hire more college grads and throw them into the meat grinder... meanwhile your products suffer [0] and the competition is catching up.
BTW, checking that sub-reddit is a good idea before joining an established team.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/aws/search?q=sucks&restrict_sr=on
Overall, it’s made me better leaps and bound as an engineer prior to when I joined. Over the years when I’ve picked up a book on scalable systems or design, I easily identify the patterns of failure or whatever topics mentioned because I’ve had to deal with them on the job.
Amazon isn’t for everyone. My stress and anxiety level is generally pretty high.
I work with really really really bright people (compared to my previous companies) but being extremely intelligent doesn’t speak to your character. As a matter of fact, really intelligent people with bad character are 100x worse than Todd from my previous company who did very little work and was merely collecting salary.
If you have an opportunity to work for Amazon, at least as an SDE I say definitely go for it. But, if you want a relaxed 8-5 job, it may not be the place for you. The teams I’ve been on are full of overachievers but too many of those people in one room isn’t always a good thing.