The best part of the internal Amazon stack is the relative consistency across the company. Not that every team is using the same thing, but it's a reasonable assumption that whatever particular combination of things you're using, someone else probably is too. It makes it really easy to work around the sharp corners present in any stack. Additionally, basically everything is internal-only or AWS, so the people who developed the tech stack are all just an internal search away.

That said, I've done just fine without that benefit since moving on.

If anything it’s scary. From what I’ve heard software engineering practices at AWS leave much to be desired.

Yep, it's almost as much've a shit-storm as Amazon's internal tools - which are rife with errors and pushed by Amazonians because "open source is shit" (verbatim from a lead engineer).

That seems a bit inflammatory. Anecdotally most of the people I've interacted with especially like open source. My team is increasing our involvement in the open source projects we use.

A lot of the internal tooling is due to legacy and inertia. There's 20+ years of history, and so much has been built and continues to be built that it's enormous investment to steer a different direction. Incremental improvements have higher reward ratio. But people do want better a better development experience, especially w.r.t. idiomatic language tooling.

That being said, initiatives are brewing for that "enormous investment".

Certain things must be pretty cool/groundbreaking though. Just watching things like Youtube videos about how VPC works is pretty amazing. I won't let that blind me to the fact that the company seems pretty toxic.

That can be a good thing.