There's a lot of factors why it might have been that person's fallback even though it might have been your first choice. The product, the culture, the location, salary, WFH, options, benefits, etc.

I knew a guy who would passed up working for Apple for a relatively unknown non-FAAANG company.

People have their reasons. It's not that everyone working for Apple is lesser than. It's more that this guy had his own reasons.

To each his or her own.

I would take it more as a comment on the sheer volume of hiring, meaning there was a place for any level of engineer there.

For entry-level ... yes?

Amazon isn't selective in hiring L4s, it hires some people who simply can't code and PIP them in next 6 months.

It is just how Amazon chooses to operate.

Good ones are still there though, just varies very big from team to team, org to org.

Essentially, Amazon engineer means nothing significant, the bar isn't consistent across its body

so, I say fallback in the sense that I felt confident I could interview there and apply without much friction. I got alot of LinkedIn invites from recruiters - typically once a week - for over a year.

I think Amazon engineers are - by and large - pretty great actually, worked with more than a few ex-Amazon engineers to know.

This was, and I admit, an offhand comment of which I should have explained this context better.

I also don't believe the interview is "easy", but it felt available and I'm someone who - even for companies that don't crazy rigorous hiring practices - goes really deep before any interview, reading many weeks in advance worth of stuff about the company and their hiring process, learning etc. I practice alot, so I felt like I could do well with the Amazon interview. In fact, I did one once before and it wasn't nearly as bad as I thought it would be, it just didn't work out at the time for me to join.