Everyone sees the pretty offices and the big salary and thinks big tech is the dream, so in this video I take you through a realistic day in my life as an Amazon software engineer—no highlight reel. It’s my last day on-call before handover, so I walk through how I review tickets (especially the critical ones), what those ops meetings look like, and how I try to chip away at project work in between standup, design review-style meetings, and getting randomly paged. But honestly, the bigger theme is how I’ve been feeling about work lately. Some days it’s fun to get out of the house, see friends, and be around smart people—other days it feels procedural, repetitive, and hard to feel connected to what I’m building (especially when the software is internal accounting tooling). I talk about the pros/cons of big tech vs smaller companies, why “big tech” doesn’t always mean “big impact,” and how layoffs, AI anxiety, and performance reviews can sit in the back of your mind when you’re still early in your career. I also share what’s helped me cope: leaning on the “girlies” I’ve met at work, trying to keep my interview skills sharp, and using a simple Notion system to stay consistent. By the end of the day, it’s quiet, it’s late, and I’m still figuring out in real time whether I want to stay on this path—or if I’ve been lingering on leaving Amazon.