I am currently a software engineer at Amazon. I obviously can't speak to other people's experiences at Amazon. And having never worked at any other big tech co

I am currently a software engineer at Amazon. I obviously can't speak to other people's experiences at Amazon. And having never worked at any other big tech company, I'm not in a place to compare to them. But my own experiences at Amazon have been pretty good. I've been quite happy with my compensation and work life balance, which all have improved since my previous roles mostly at start-ups. There have been some stressful crunch times (Q4 tends to be stressful, between Thanksgiving-Christmas peak on the Retail side and Re:invent on the AWS side), but not more stressful from other big milestones at previous companies. I have been lucky, in that I had worked with my first team's director at a previous company and so I knew he was a good boss, and I had known the manager for my second team prior to joining. It's important as part of the interview process (at Amazon, or anywhere else) to treat the interview as a two-way process, as you're vetting the company, the team, and your boss as much as they're vetting you, and if you don't get all your questions answered as part of the interview (interviewers are supposed to save time for you to ask questions!), feel free to relay them to your recruiter.