Reflecting on my internships: life in corporate hell

I've spent my past 3 summers interning as a software engineer at Amazon, where I've gotten very lucky with my teams every time, and was also able to productionalize my project and do user testing each time.

In the summer of 2024, I was on a control systems engineering team in Bellevue that worked on creating robotic machines that Amazon uses to automatically package products. I got to design and build a hierarchical alarm visualization system end-to-end. I know people always talk about how you don't need to use data structures and algorithms, and that is even more true since AI can write your code now, but I genuinely had to implement breadth-first search here in a non-trivial way. I was glad that I had taken 6.1210 and 6.102 by this point (yes, I took 6.102 Software Construction as a freshman and it was the best decision I ever made because my capacity to do grindy work has fallen off exponentially since then, and also doing it completely without AI was good for my learning). My coworkers were super friendly and funny, and we went out to eat at restaurants A LOT, and one of them took me on a field trip to a fulfillment center, since that's where the machines were. I didn't use the traditional Amazon tech stack for this internship, and I was doing PLC programming (the language name was just some seemingly random string of letters and numbers) and code reviews on a Quip doc. As a result, I didn't come out with much transferrable knowledge from this internship, but getting used to corporate was an invaluable experience for me, not to mention getting to work from the tallest, newly built, state-of-the-art skyscraper in Bellevue every single day. I did practice the art of dealing with ambiguity, though. I was only given a problem statement and I designed and implemented the solution from scratch— a skill that would come in handy for my later internships.

In 2025, I was placed in Seattle on a team that handles internal tools for Amazon Business-specific marketers (Amazon Business is the B2B version of Amazon). I created an end-to-end heatmap for displaying customer click locations and metrics on an email template that is sent out marketing emails. You may have seen these; they're the ones with a grid of personalized product recommendations for you. This was also the last time I had to really write code by hand at Amazon. A fun fact is that almost all of the clicks (like > 95%) were all on the opt out/unsubscribe button at the bottom of the email template — which isn't really surprising, actually. My coworkers were really fun to hang out and yap with, and we did a team trip where my manager piled all the interns into his car and drove us to the beach, and they catered food including an Indian dessert called rasmalai (and I loved it so much I convinced one of my Indian friends back home to get me some when I came back to visit).

This summer, I'm on a team that works with the Amazon shopping catalog. That's right — the catalog where we do a lot of shopping. As a shopping fiend, I was elated to find out I would be working with the Amazon shopping site pages I hold so dear. My project was a defect detection agent for catalog items, which involved a complicated asynchronous pipeline involving authentication, scraping, and evaluation. I created an absolutely amazing design document, and got the project pretty much finished by the halfway point of my internship. This summer was full of sidequests with the other intern on my team and a coworker named Sai. We went to Bellevue instead of working on some random Friday for Uniqlo shopping and the Cheesecake Factory, where we bought anime shirts and also happened to run into another coworker around 3pm. We went shopping at Pike Place, worked out of other offices, went to another mall to shop and watch the Odyssey at midnight (Sai was laughing every time someone died during that movie???), and hung out after work. We also managed to see like half of Toy Story 5 before seeing the Odyssey, and we were hooked on the plot (after we managed to stop laughing, since we snuck into this theater during a scene where Jessie was making out with her horse???). A coworker also put me on an Indian sweet called kaju katli which was f*cking delicious (and I've asked the same friend from before, who is also a kaju katli fiend, to hook me up with some more) (thank you Rahul). Side note: I learned from my manager that in the past few years, the return offer rate has dropped to something like 40-50%.

What corporate hell actually felt like

It wasn't the work itself that got to me— I like hard problems. It was the atmosphere around the work. The way urgency becomes ambient. The way your worth gets summarized in a doc. The way everyone is very smart and still somehow trapped in the same meetings... about meetings.

I didn't really feel like a real engineer until this most recent internship. That was when there was really a shift in how I felt about working here. I'm able to take my ownership of my work to the next level since I've been given so much scope and leeway to get my deliverables out on my own, and as a result, I feel much more competent— like a real full-timer. My schedule is also very flexible since I can come and go from the office whenever I want; there are some days where I just stayed home and some where I stayed for just an hour to hang out with my coworkers or get free matchas. And I have to admit, I haven't been pulling the full 8 hour workday because I'm able to get the work done faster. A lot of the time, I only stayed at work for 3-4 hours before leaving. It's the ideal work-life imbalance (of course, I'm pursuing my own projects with my extra free time). As a result, it's been pretty bearable— really really good, even.

Something that made things better was that I had another intern on my team (or on an adjacent team) every single year (shout out to Isaac, Elijah, Feyza, Yijia, and Anshul). They were great sidequest buddies for when I was bored during the workday, and were always down for my shenanigans. My mentors were great too. What I loved most about working here was the people, first and foremost. The nature of the work came second— getting to work on complex projects and see them being used is an unmatched feeling. I definitely feel like I could get used to this, as long as the people around me are great, and I get to keep learning, which is easy when you're working with scale as large as Amazon's.

My advice in general

1. Don't let CS, whether in school or industry, take your whimsy. Stay connected with what made you passionate about the field in the first place.
2. The quiet dread of having tasks that have been "almost done" for weeks and of having more work to do will never go away. There is always more work to be done. So learn to live your life outside of work, and do work ONLY at work.
3. Go down those rabbit holes (as Amazon calls it, dive deep). You'll learn so much from learning a specific topic in detail. Don't worry about the sheer number of topics that exist, because you'll learn them all eventually. The loop of continuously learning then questioning it or asking follow up questions (especially to an LLM) will help you grow.
4. Have strong fundamentals; know what good code quality looks like.
5. Get to know your team well. What makes or breaks your experience is your coworkers. Your social relationships in life are more valuable than anything you'll ever own or money you'll ever earn.

My Amazon specific advice

1. Make your design doc as detailed as possible
2. Document what you do at work every single day— it'll be promotion material in the future, and also allows you to keep tabs on your productivity.

Time: 1.5 hours