Realistic Day in the Life of an Amazon Software Engineer

Two years ago, I was an intern at Amazon, and now I work here full-time, so come with me for a day in the life as a software engineer. The mentor does, like, the actual important stuff. It's actually terrible. This morning, I got a dreaded Slack message. Hello, Vancouver, this is Michael Scott calling from the United States of America. Well, we're looking forward to having you, so let me just pull up your information here. If you're new here, my name is Sarah, and I'm a software engineer from Vancouver, and I know a lot of people think I'm from the States, but I'm not, I'm from Canada. I wanna show you what a day looks like working in tech and how I went from intern to full-time engineer at Amazon. Today is going to be a fun day because I'll be getting lunch with a new intern on my team who I'm the onboarding buddy for and taking you through how I've been trying to find work-life balance. This morning, I got a dreaded Slack message. One of the engineers told me that a couple of the data transformation jobs had started to fail, and it was probably because of a change I made. These jobs are pretty critical because they generate data that the other services rely on and other teams use. I suspect it has something to do with the dependency changes that I've been making. I am jetting off on an international business trip. Where are you going? To Canada. Where is it? Canada. Okay. Okay, so I just got to the office. As usual, we have meetings. I have a standup, and then later in the day, I have tech discussion, which is like a meeting where anybody brings up a new topic or something that they'd like to share with the rest of the team and learn. Fun things that will be happening today are I'll be meeting my intern. I'll be taking her to lunch. Every intern gets a mentor, an onboarding buddy. The mentor does the actual important stuff, like project work, technical things, checking in all the time. But I'm the onboarding buddy, which means I am basically a friend. I'm just having fun. You can ask me any questions. I can tell you how to maximize your internship. I kind of just give you the fun parts. It's supposed to be like onboarding buddy, but I'll help you through the whole process if you really want. And then for the work part of today, I have some dependency conflicts to figure out, and that stuff is absolutely not fun at all, but someone has to do it, and this time it's me. But let's get to it. It's gonna be a fun day. I am downloading some N3P music. That's not it. ♪ Wake up, brush my teeth ♪ ♪ I'm ready for another day of feeling bleak ♪ ♪ God, I really just wanna go back to sleep, oh ♪ ♪ And I'm sick all the time, coughing like I'm Ethan Klein ♪ ♪ I'm committing, I've gotta do this every night ♪ ♪ I just wanna sleep forever ♪ You didn't have to bring any coffee, did you, Michael? Milk and sugar. Wait, is this just milk and sugar? That's what I said. Well, it's like I know their parents. Yeah, my mama says it's the craziest story. When I started my internship, I was so excited because I had never worked in big tech before, and I was extremely intimidated to start out. I didn't know that Amazon had AWS and had their own cloud services. I didn't know what a CDK was. I didn't even know that software went through different stages before it's released, like it goes through beta, gamma, prod. It was a lot to take in at the moment, but because I was surrounded by so many incredibly smart and talented people, with their help, I managed to figure it out. Prior to this internship, even though I was in university doing computer science, I did not feel prepared to work a full-time job, but this internship really taught me that I could figure it out and I'm capable of working anywhere. Now, a good internship will be one that will provide you with a complete project that you'll be able to design and develop over the course of your internship. I actually got a pretty good project where I could create a full-stack application that displayed the data that I had fetched from an upstream service and transformed. Even though I had a good project, it wasn't perfect. For one, most of my team hadn't even learned the AWS service that I was using to handle the data transformations, so there wasn't many people I could go to for help. On top of that, the dataset that I was supposed to be working with was not ready yet, so for most of my internship, I was just testing with mock data and guessing what schema would be in the final dataset. And at one point during my internship, I was convinced that I was not gonna get that return offer because I was really new to AWS. I was writing majority of my script in the AWS console, and then one night, I was working until 12 a.m., and I click Save and refresh the page, and I see that all my code has disappeared. The code that I was working on for weeks just vanished. I was freaking out. I basically had to stay up till 2 a.m. to rewrite the code based off memory. Luckily, everything worked out. I learned that I need to version control my code so that doesn't happen again. And now that I'm back at Amazon as a full-time engineer, I do have a few regrets. I really wish that while I was in school, I did a few more internships because once you sign the new grad offer, the opportunities to try and work at different places and experience different dynamics will be a lot less frequent. You can't just hop up and change jobs every four months like you do during your internship. Yay! Another thing I'm working on is getting more visibility for my work. I usually don't talk much about what I'm doing unless I'm blocked, but my manager told me it's important to share with other people so they understand your contributions, especially if you're working solo on a project. This afternoon, I've got some more coding to do and I need to untangle these dependency conflicts. Honestly, I'm not sure if I'll finish today because the number of packages involved makes it feel so huge, but I'll push as far as I can. So I made a video at the beginning of the year about the return to office mandate and saying that I was optimistic about making friends because I'd be in the office more. Well, that plan of making friends was kind of stagnant for the first half of the year and I'm just gonna blame it on the gloomy weather. Making friends in your 20s has been so hard and I find that you actually have to put in a lot more effort to meet them and hang out. In fact, I even downloaded Bubble BFF so I could make friends in Vancouver. I ended up actually hanging out with a girl I met on there and we went out for dinner. It was a really fun experience and nice to know that there are other people in the city that are looking to make friends. I also really wanna make friends at Amazon. So this month, I actually got really lucky and I was able to meet some new girls because they knew me from my YouTube. They're so cute and I hope we can all hang out more. But if you do wanna see more of my day-to-day life, be sure to follow me on Instagram. All right, so this week, I've been working on what every engineer dreads to do and that's when they're trapped in dependency conflict hell. And in simple terms, this is when you have a project and different parts of your project are using different versions of a tool. I kinda got put into this because on my last day of my on-call shift, someone was like, oh my gosh, your pipelines seem to not be working because of this dependency conflict. So it's actually terrible. I've been working on this for, honestly, too long. I've been working on this for way too long. Anyway, so I'm also putting together a little document just so that I can capture this work that I've done and then probably come up with a solution so we can better manage our team's packages and everyone's up to speed on what's been going on. If they see something like this, they will know what to do. ♪ Love, I never knew until the day that I met you ♪ ♪ Colors were gray, melody sung, sounded the same ♪ ♪ Baby, it's our time together ♪ These day in the life videos are really fun to watch and I love seeing how other people's day to day looks like in different cities. The truth is, most days I am glued to one spot, barely moving, barely standing, not talking to many people and just working at my desk. So while these videos show the highlights, just know there are a lot of very unglamorous work behind the scenes. It usually just looks like me with my headphones on staring into the screen until I get a headache. The past few months, my channel has been mostly work related content because that's my whole life. And I honestly can't even tell you what I did last weekend, let alone last month. I feel like time is kind of just slipping away and suddenly summer is now over and I realized that I haven't done much outside of work. So I want to change that because later in the video, I'm going to be printing my very first 3D model and I want to get back to making things for myself, projects that excite me and share that journey with you. Work is bullshit. The work is mysterious and important. After work, I'm going to go see the basketball courts and I've been there only once because our team members actually organized a 3v3 between the interns and the mentors. And it was really funny because we were all so bad. Why are there so many bees? It's now 7.20 PM. None of my bills are passing and my eyes are really tired. So I'm just going to call it a day and go home. We need some sort of distraction for everybody. Anything new on YouTube? Here I am at my favorite cafe. The food and drinks are honestly okay, but the vibes are amazing. They've got these tall indoor trees and I'm not sure if they're real, but if they are, that's pretty impressive. Also, I just like coming here because it forces me to leave the house. Otherwise, I just work at my desk the whole day and never go anywhere. Hello, I am at a cafe. It is so loud in here, but I am doing some 3D art. I found this really cool software. It's called Nomad Sculpt and basically you can do like sculpting and I'm not really good at sculpting. I've never really sculpted before, but you can do it on your iPad and so I get to practice without like actually having to get clay or anything. Anyways, so I followed this tutorial and I made this little cute guy. Let me show you him. He's so cute. Look how cute he is. He's got little arms. He kind of reminds me of my dog because he has like big ears. I also am starting to make a mudang, but it looks really terrifying right now. Yeah, the mudang looks horrifying right now, but hopefully once I add its face, it's going to look cute. Right now it looks like a very, very, it looks scary. I've tried to learn other 3D modeling softwares like Blender and I had a really hard time and I honestly don't have that much time after work to be learning a brand new skill. I'm pretty sure in Blender, all I could make was like a box. All right, let's keep going. I'm excited to print this out. I've always had a creative side. Over the years, I've picked up all kinds of hobbies. Sewing, knitting, crocheting, drawing, painting, making little random crafts. My newest hobby right now is 3D modeling so I can make these little figurines. This all started because I began collecting these blind box figurines called molintas. And for anyone who doesn't know, a blind box is basically a mystery toy. You buy the box without knowing which character you'll get until you open it. I'm sure you've heard of a labubu, but molintas are actually cute. So I'm using Nomad Sculpt. Even though it's one of the easier modeling apps, it's still kind of hard to learn. There's just too many buttons and tools and half the time, I don't really know what each of them do. But the nice part is it's not like real clay where you're wasting materials. You can make infinite models, delete them, and keep trying until something works. Right now, I've started three separate projects. One was an attempt at a mudang, the very famous pygmy hippo in Thailand, but it looked way too bad so I'm gonna abandon that. The next one is this little alien that I actually like and I also tried importing a 3D model that I generated with Meshi AI. There's definitely a lot of discourse about whether AI art is good or bad, but I think for personal use, it's fine. It's a cool way to learn, get inspiration, or tweak something that already exists. So since I've always loved collecting toys, I feel like 3D modeling is the perfect outlet. I'm really nervous about setting up my 3D printer because I've heard horror stories and I found out that resin is super toxic if you don't ventilate properly, so I don't want this to be a total disaster. I'm back from the cafe, I finished my 3D models, and now it's time to print it. So I've had these two boxes sitting in my living room for the last six months. This is the 3D printer, that's the washing and curing machine. I don't even know if I have all the supplies and I decided to go with a resin printer so that I can make more smaller figurines and stuff, which is what I wanna make. I've never used a 3D printer. I don't even really know how to 3D model, but if I can do this as a beginner, that means you can too. Oh my God, look at it. I don't know if I should take it out like this, but it's like the whole printer. It's just like, I don't even think I have to put anything together. Oh, I hate that sound. Okay, whoa. This orange box here is the curing and washing station. Takes off all the like extra debris on it and like smooths it out a bit. Then after that, it will still be a bit soft because it's resin. You'll cure it under this UV system here. I think the next stage for me is to actually print something.