Amazon makes no absolutely effort to attract high-quality people (in fact, they do quite the opposite with their self-claimed 'frugal' -- absolutely-under-no-circumstances-any-benefits policies).
When Amazon tells you about 'Work Hard', what they mean is that they make work hard. Like all the stuff you're expecting: a powerful developer machine, or a second monitor, are things Amazon has a policy against (Although, as they will tell you -- you're allowed to buy and bring in your own stuff like RAM, SSDs and Extra-Monitors ... lucky you!).
And what about Admin access on your developer laptop? LOL no, that would make life easy. To be approved for that, you need to be literally 4 levels up from the bottom! Root access on your Desktop? Nah, but they'll give you sudo, but you can't actually use your desktop for development -- you'll have to work through a VM. And to make sure you don't enjoy it, your development VM will be some ancient Red Hat image, with absolutely nothing newer than 5 years old (literally!). Just in case you ever want to google something, all the libraries/function/features made in the last half-decade won't work.
The internal systems at Amazon are so painful, that I suspect that a large percentage of employees after a hard-days work, come home and put needles in their arms for fun. When stuff works, its slow and largely unusable, and a dozen times worse than any freeware you'll find on the internet. The source control, build systems and all other developer tools seem like it was developed by a retarded monkey after he drank too much that night. Apparently they're now working on an "internal github, that works on more SCS than just git -- and has an awesome advanced security model". I wonder why they don't try get their page-load times under 10 seconds first.
Even things that you thought were solved 20 years ago, Amazon manages to break with their own special flavor of retardedness. Like the mailing lists. It's an accepted fact, that it's impossible to *reliably* filter a message to a folder, because the send is not from the mailing list -- there is no mailing list header, and no required subject prefix! Another great joy is, after sending a message to a mailing list, your inbox will lag for *literally* the next 5 minutes, as you get spammed by "Out of Office" replies. But no one excepts the Amazon workplace to be functional or enjoyable, so this is just the normal.
And of course, then there's the bureaucracy. At first, you'll try fight it, and try do what's best for the company. But soon you'll realize, like half the company is nothing but paper-pushers -- and you can easily waste a month just trying to get approval for some trivial thing. In the end, you'll be a lot happier here if you treat it as a job, don't try fight it, don't try enjoy it, put in your hours and leave at the end of the day (hoping your pager doesn't wake you up in the middle of the night, over some stupid issue)
