The real issue is the manager churn. You may have a great manager for a year, then 3 more then next year who aren't great. You can work hard to burrow your way into a perfect spot, but because of churn the chances are high that your spot won't be there long and you'll start the process over. It's absolutely exhausting and ultimately one of the reasons I left AWS after 6 years.

> can you dig your heels in if you end up on one of the bad teams and just refuse to stay late

I mean, literally anybody anywhere can do this. Whether you get fired depends on your performance evaluations. Like any organization, the biggest reasons to stay late is (a) too high expectations were set, (b) failures to re-adjust to new information (e.g. we had to pull you off your project for 2 weeks but still expect you to make your deadline), (c) paging / oncall. At AWS, I'd say (c) is the biggest risk, but (a) and (b) can also be present at any team of course.

> Is it just the luck of the draw who ends up on the teams with good managers

Yeah, that's my impression. When you're already in Amazon though, you're empowered because you have a much greater ability to gather information about a team before deciding if you want to transfer. For example, message/meet with devs on the team, look at their ticket queue to see how often the oncall gets paged, and so on.

> Or can you easily switch teams until you find a good one?

I don't know about "until you find a good one", but transferring is pretty normalized. If you've been here a year or two, it's normal to want to transfer, and even before that it's not impossible. You can't transfer if you're on a performance improvement plan, but otherwise it's pretty straightforward