I believe it. Every single day I get emails from various Amazon recruiters. Often it's for positions I'm barely qualified for. As much as I think AWS is a great service, I'd be terrified to learn what lies beneath given how low their recruitment standards are.

Their recruiting reach is high, but it doesn't have that much to do with desperation, and their actual interviewing standards aren't low.

The recruiting reach is high because every single sub-group of teams within amazon has their own recruiters, and none of them communicate with recruiters from outside of that. Sometimes i get multiple emails from different AWS sub-group recruiters per day, but it isn't because AWS is desperate for me. It is simply because for them, the existence of the other ones reaching out at the same time is completely immaterial, just like if they were recruiters from other companies.

And while yes, Amazon's interviewing bar might not be as high as Meta/Google/Dropbox/etc, it isn't far behind at all, and it is pretty much on par with Microsoft.

Disclosure: never worked at Amazon, but interviewed with them and the rest of the companies mentioned, and worked at (or got offers from) some of them.

Based on what I've seen from the outside about their corporate culture, I'm not in any way interested in working for Amazon/AWS.

That said, the interactions I've had with the people working on AWS have been uniformly positive. They're easy to work with and obviously very skilled engineers.

The level of churn at Amazon is incredibly high. They turnover a lot of their workforce and they're famous for "hire to fire."

I keep hearing that, but I know an absolute meathead who is a senior architect over there. Maybe he's just good at playing the "bro" game?

It definitely wasn't Meta's strategy when I was there in 2018. They hired a lot of junior software engineers but all other positions had relatively limited headcount (which I mostly think is a good thing).