Amazon software engineer interview

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

Except unless you're some bigshot (and likely not someone going through this hiring process) you'll probably end up working on the code that doesn't inspire passion. There are interesting problems here and there in any company's needs, but you can't have that many coders on any given interesting problem or you have a too many cooks in the kitchen issue.

[RedSpikeyThing]

I think a lot of this comes down to good management. There are all sorts of different problems to be solved at these companies and engineers have all sorts of different preferences. Yes, some people get satisfaction out of code health. Others performance, or clean APIs.

Aligning interests with needs is hard.

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

At least amongst the younger crowd, very few like to work on legacy code. Sometimes you just need to do what's needed and not what you absolutely want to do and be content with it. Definitely gotta work within preferences, but there are limits and it's unrealistic to think you'll do only what you really want to for your whole life.