I'm an individual contributor in product management, so not in people management. Amazon / AWS is a challenging work environment, just like most other tech companies. In my opinion, that is also why so many people want to work for FAANG & Co, as you generally get to work on really interesting but also challenging things. I'd say that bursts of intense working periods are par for the course in FAANG & Co, but it also depends on your own ability to handle our self-service culture (which I find empowering). The culture is certainly peculiar but each large tech company has their own culture that works really well for some and doesn't jive with others. Just speaking for myself here, but I have learned a ton professionally and personally, work(ed) with inspiring people and had the best work-life balance of my career so far. Don't want to sound like a shill here - I'm certainly aware that in a company the size of Amazon there will be good and bad pockets, I just happened to work with good teams so far.