Day in the Life of a Software Engineer | Amazon On-Call

Amazon is back to a record high for the first time in three months and topping three trillion in market cap for the first time. It's also coming off its best week in over a decade. At 1 million square feet, the Post is the single largest office building in Metro Vancouver. For 50 years, it processed Canada's mail. Today, it is Amazon's largest office in Canada. It's another day at the Amazon rainforest and my on-call shift is almost over. But honestly, that just means I have to catch up on all the work that I've been neglecting and somehow stay on top of every new AI tool. So come spend a very real, slightly chaotic day as a software engineer. You never really know what you're gonna get when you're on call. It could be either very chaotic, you get paged like so many times during the night, or it can be really quiet, you can get paged like once or twice or not at all. Let's hope it's the latter. So let's get started. Okay, the first thing in the morning, I have my 10 a.m. stand up and it's gonna happen very soon and I just need to give some updates about my on-call tickets. The worst part of being on call is having the you-never-know-what-will-happen feeling. Even when nothing's breaking, part of your brain is still just waiting for something to break. Sometimes I'll hear a phone go off across the office and my heart will drop for a second before I realize it's not mine. And before I go to bed, I'll double check that my volume is all the way up, which is kind of a weird ritual, like setting up an alarm and hoping it doesn't ring. The middle-of-the-night pages are the ones that really suck because I wake up so groggy, I can't solve the problem, and sometimes I completely forget that I got paged in the middle of the night until I read the ticket queue the next morning. My first on-call shift was about a year ago, and I was so nervous, I barely slept the whole week. I kept my laptop next to my bed and I took it everywhere with me, even to restaurants. Honestly, in my next job, I really don't want to have to be on call anymore. Oh my gosh. Okay, I just got paged right now. When you get paged, you're usually getting paged for like a SEB 2 ticket, which means it's like high severity and you need to address it really quickly, and that's why they're making that really annoying sound on your phone. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna check into the ticket and see if there's any previously written comments because this might be like a well-known issue. The next thing I do is usually look through the SOP, which is the standard operating procedure. It's basically just a list of steps that you need to follow, and this happens more for reoccurring tickets because someone else has probably done a fix for it and then they've recorded their steps on what they did to solve it. You're also going to want to check any metrics or dashboards. You can measure how many errors you've been getting in your service or any backlog items, and metrics are basically numbers or statistics that tell you if your service is healthy and helps you spot problems fast. So I usually will add like a screenshot of the metrics to the ticket so I remember if the ticket is actually getting healthier or not. Luckily, this sub 2 is something I've also seen before so it's not too crazy and I can follow the steps so I can get the service back to a healthy state. I'm just going to update the ticket now with the findings. Back to work slackers. Brace care. There actually are a lot of software engineering positions where you're less likely to be on call. Like if you work on internal tools, developer productivity, prototypes, or products that aren't supporting critical services 24-7. But it really depends on the company and the team. Even two engineers at the same company can have completely different experiences. One person might get paged multiple times a night while the other person has never had to be on call at all. I will say though that I'm a lot less anxious about it now. Once you've handled enough tickets, you realize there's usually documentation, previous investigations, and other engineers you can ask for help. You're not just expected to wake up at 3am and magically know how to fix everything. Okay, that was a pretty easy fix. This on-call week has been relatively chill so I'm happy about that. Hopefully I don't get paged again today, but you never know. It might happen. Usually these pages come in series. Like if one thing in the system breaks, there's also a lot of other alarms connected to that same system. And then those are probably going to go off in like 30 minutes or so. But anyways, I have a meeting right now today. It's going to be a design review. We're just reviewing another engineer's design document and it's so boring. Usually what happens is we just read their paper for like 30 minutes all on our own time, like silently. And I usually have no idea what like their design doc is about. So I got out some paper and a pen. I'm actually going to take notes during this meeting because I feel like it really helps me stay awake. Otherwise, I will be taking a nap right now. Like I'm going to close my eyes. This is what I used to do in university when the lectures were so boring. I would just doodle or take notes about random stuff. Okay, yeah, let's just join the meeting. Okay, so that was one of my meetings. It was short, but I have a few things that I need to follow up on. This is where my day kind of gets messy because every meeting creates more tiny little tasks that I need to remember. I've recently started using a tool called Granola, which is an AI notepad for meetings. It runs in the background of all my calls so I can actually pay attention and take some rough notes when it matters. Hello! After the meeting, it turns my conversation and notes into a clean summary with main decisions and action items. One feature that I found especially useful is Granola chat. After a meeting like this, I can literally ask what did I say I was going to go and follow up on and it'll read back through the summary and pull up on the specific action items. It's really really helpful on busy days when I'm jumping between meetings and project work and it's hard for my brain to switch. Sometimes it's nice to just have a second note taker. Thank you to Granola for sponsoring today's video. You can try it out using the link in my description. Okay, I want to give a little desk tour because we got assigned seating last year actually and I wanted to decorate it, so let me show you what I have. So here I've got my 16-inch laptop. Don't worry, that's not real code. It's just like my personal project. I also have here two Molentas, my favorites. This one is a little witch that Marlene gave me and then this one is a little pink cherry blossom one. She's so cute. And then here, this is my monitor. This is actually a drawing that I made. It's a bee and a fizzy drink. Fizz buzz, do you get that? This is my notebook. I write like a lot of my agenda. Like literally everything goes in there, so it's secret. Then this is my nothing headphones. These are really cute. I just like how they look, but they're a little uncomfortable, so I have another pair of headphones that I keep. I also have my Keepcon keyboard. When it's busy at the office, I don't want to use this because it's kind of annoying and loud, but I just like it. It's fun. Then I have my drawer here. My drawer, I have another pair of headphones just in case the other ones get uncomfortable. Then I have some pens. I've got this one. It's got a panda on it. I've got my Burt's Bees, some Muji pens. Then I've got my secret stash of snacks, ketchup chips, and Welch's. My two favorites. And then this bottom drawer here is my classified information. It is my design documents, but I just keep them here so I don't have to take them home. And then this is the view that I get. So pretty. It's back to work. So I'll never leave here. You'll leave at 5. Well, actually, they stagger exit, so 5.15. I have no choice. Well, every time you find yourself here, it's because you chose to come back. Something that gets brought up a lot is, is software engineering still worth doing? I don't think software engineering is going away. I just think the job is going to look really different. And since I started, it's already changed so much. Something that I did read up online was that UF software development jobs grew about 15% since Cloud Code launched in February 2025, while overall postings fell about 7%. So that kind of goes against the claims that AI coding tools are killing developer jobs. What I actually think is going to happen is that we'll see a lot more roles focused on bringing software into a company, adapting it to how people already work, and making sure it actually delivers value. And a lot fewer jobs where you just sit there and write code all day. I'll talk about these roles later, as I'm actually looking to pivot from software engineering in my next role. All right, work update. I finished a lot of my work. I've done all the code changes I need to make. I'm just waiting for approvals from the other engineers. I've also done the deployment work. I just need to get testing evidence. And then I also need to write the AI report that my managers ask me. It's pretty chill. I can just put my music in and then type away, and I'll be really good. And other news, it is actually my one-year anniversary at Amazon. I have been working here for a year now. When I look back, it's like, I feel like a different person. Like, I feel like I've changed a lot this year. I definitely feel more chill, more confident in my position. So that's good. I remember like sitting in this exact phone booth a year ago talking to you and saying that I am so nervous about everything. Nervous about on-call, nervous about my team changing. There's still a lot about like the accounting software that I don't know too much about, but I feel like I can figure it out. What happens after you work for a year? For me, nothing really happened actually. I didn't get an email. I don't think anyone really like talked about it. I think I just got an email that like my stocks have vested. I might even get a badge under my username or something. But yeah, that's cool. I'm very happy. It's been like one year on my first like big girl job. On to many more. Hopefully for many more years. And let's get back to work. It's also been a year of me posting daily life on YouTube. So make sure you subscribe and like the videos because I spent a lot of effort on them. And if you like them, I'll be making more. Lately, I've been trying to figure out whether I actually want to leave Amazon or I just need a different team, a different city, or a new project. Amazon is such a large company, so I don't actually have to leave to get new experiences. The nice thing about working in big tech is because it's so big, there are Amazon offices around the world and you could move and keep relatively the same job. Internal transfers are a very common thing that happens at Amazon. Honestly, a lot of the attrition that happens in my org is an internal transfer. They'll just transfer to a different team in a different location. This is a funny story, but when I was doing my internship, I was on a different team. And my manager at the time during one of our stand-ups, he was just trying to make conversation. He was asking everybody, how much time do you have left here? And asking them when they would jump ship and go to the States because a lot of people have the desire to go to America because you get paid a lot more. Maybe the living standards are a little bit higher there. Everybody was like, okay, I'm just waiting for my permanent residence or my citizenship and then I'm going to start applying to the States. And everyone had a timeline, like a ticking bomb that they wanted to leave Canada and go to America. And also the funny thing is, when I joined Amazon later as a new grad, we experienced a ton of attrition and one of those people was my old manager. He ended up going to America and still working at Amazon. I also briefly thought about internally transferring to Tokyo because when I went to visit the office there, it was so cute. It was so amazing. The cafeteria was very Japanese themed. There's cherry blossoms. And the cafeteria had like a lot of Japanese food. It just looked really nice. And I feel like your after work life would be so much more fun living in a city like Tokyo. Also, when I was talking to the other engineer who was showing me around the Tokyo office, she was telling me that they speak English. Everything's done in English. A lot of people are basically foreigners. So it's not like there would be a huge change living in a completely different country. Honestly, I think it's something that you can definitely explore if you're kind of getting stuck I think that's what makes leaving so confusing for me because there's just so many ways to change your life without actually having to leave the company. But I still don't know if a new team or city would fix how I'm feeling. Maybe I'm just burnt out and this feeling will pass with a little break. I wish that leaving at 5pm meant that I was actually done. But when you're on call, you take that work home with you and it usually just lives in your brain the whole time. And lately, even when I'm not on call, I find myself still working. Which brings me to the question I get all the time. How do I balance everything? Okay, so it's about 5.30 and I'm getting pretty tired. So I think I'm going to start wrapping up for today. Thankfully, I didn't get paged again today. I just had that one and hopefully I don't get paged again later tonight. I really need to get like a full night of sleep. But I wanted to come in here and talk a little bit about how I manage like my personal life and my work life because it kind of does seem like I have it all together. You know, I'm like working and then at home I'm like going and coding some more and then I like post all these videos. So I get a lot of questions on my Instagram and YouTube asking me like how I balance it all. And the truth is, I really don't. There's a lot of stuff that like I really want to do and really want to learn. Especially when you're a software engineer, you always want to be like upping your skills and staying on top of like all the AI trends. I also really just have this desire to learn and build things. But I truly don't feel like I have enough time or energy to like do all of that. I definitely find myself working a lot on the weekends. I haven't seen a lot of my friends in a while. Like I have friends who live very close to me, like 20 minutes away, but I have not seen them in months and months and months because I feel like guilty when I'm doing something that's like not productive. I know it is productive like to see your friends, but to me it doesn't feel like I'm actually doing something, you know, towards like my goals or my side projects. I've been feeling quite burnt out lately. What's contributing a lot to the burnout is not really feeling very passionate or inspired by my work. You know, it's really funny because one of the friends that I made recently, the first time we hung out, we like sat on her balcony and we just talked about like how meaningless we found our job today. It sounds really bad and I definitely need to take a break. Anyways, I don't know. Just my little stream of consciousness. Hopefully it related to one of you guys. Thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you enjoyed it. I have a lot of fun making these day in the lifes and I love watching other people's day in the life videos, so make sure you like and subscribe and also follow me on Instagram and if you want to check out my other day in the lifes, I'll have a huge playlist right here. I post a lot of them and I'll see you in the next one. Bye! Sleep all day, up all night Staring at the walls, in the light Dozing off