Shadowing Practice: A Day in the Life of an Amazon Software Engineer - Learn English Speaking with Video

Everyone wants to work in big tech because of the beautiful offices and the high salaries, but what is it actually like?

Today, I'll be taking you through a realistic day in my life working as a software engineer at Amazon.

I want to talk a little bit about what it's like working in big tech.

I just hope that this doesn't break any of my already existing code.

I've definitely been lingering on leaving Amazon.

We need some sort of distraction for everybody.

Anything new on YouTube?

I just got to the office

and today is actually my last day being on call before I hand it over to the next engineer

So let's go over everything we're gonna do today

So first off I have my one hour on call handover

meeting where I go over all the tickets I did

and hand over the pending items to the next engineer

And then I have some project work that I need to chip away at and another one hour meeting today.

So let's go I have this idea, I'm sorry, I'm coming with you.

I'm just saying.

So, this is cool.

Lately, I've been feeling pretty conflicted about work.

Some days, the job feels interesting.

I get to see my friends, get out of the house.

And other days, it feels really procedural and hard to feel excited about.

I think like most software engineers, I got into this field because I love to create things.

I started programming in high school and things just clicked for me when I started.

I found so much joy in watching my code run and solving problems.

These days, it's been really hard for me to feel that same excitement at work, and I wonder if that's just how work is.

I guess I'm not that passionate about accounting software, but it kind of seems like the people around me are not that excited about it either, so I wonder how they're dealing with it.

Maybe work is just going to be work sometimes.

Alright, so for my Ops handover meeting, I go over all the tickets that I got this week, especially the SEV2s, which are the critical errors that need immediate attention.

I talk about how the issue occurred and what I did to mitigate it

and what we can do to prevent it in the future.

And then I also discuss all the other tickets

that I wasn't able to get to so the next on-call can focus on those.

I just turned 25 and I feel like there's probably more out there

and I probably should be doing something more stimulating and exciting with my life.

It's also weird because I spent four years in university trying to land a software engineering role

and I really wanted to work in big tech.

I've always admired it in other people and I just always wanted to do it for myself.

But now that I'm here, it doesn't really feel as fun as I had envisioned in my head.

I've always wanted to make some sort of impact on the world

and I've always wanted my work to actually help someone out there.

But I kind of feel like working on accounting software that only internal Amazon financial accountants use isn't really for me.

It is really boring and sometimes boring is really draining.

But then I also feel guilty for complaining about this job

that I know so many people want to have and I was once someone really excited to have this job.

So I'm still really torn.

I wonder if there's other software engineers feeling the same way about their work or maybe it's just me.

Anyways, enough of my existential crisis.

Let's get back to work.

I want to talk a little bit about like what it's like working in big tech and the pros and cons.

My very first internship that I got was a very small company of four people.

We basically did consulting for a different company.

The office that we were in was probably the same size as the room that I'm in right now.

I learned a lot in that internship.

My project was to make a full stack web page for the clients

and it was an admin page so that they could change user information like emails or their username, things like that.

When I was done my project, I actually got feedback from the clients.

They found my page very useful.

It was kind of addicting to know

that something I had built was actually being used by somebody else

But I did feel like something was missing I really wanted to make big impact

and work on something big and cool

And I really wanted to work in big tech after this small internship

So that year I grinded leek code and practiced behavioral questions and then I landed my amazon internship that year Looking back.

I had the most fun during that internship.

Everyone I met was so smart and ambitious I was like

so inspired by everyone who was here

and I also learned an insane amount of information in a short time I literally didn't know what aws was

when I started

and then I ended up creating full stack applications with aws

services like lambda glue S3 I also learned how to write design documents

and the behind the scenes side of shipping software like getting changes deployed safely and watching for issues Before they go live.

It was really awesome and I felt like I was building something useful I felt like really fulfilled during that internship.

So when I returned to Amazon as a new grad, part of me kind of felt like it was gonna be similar to my internship.

I knew it wasn't gonna be the same, but I felt like I was gonna have a similar experience and feeling.

But what you don't really realize when you join big tech is that it doesn't really correlate to having big impact.

Most of the times, big tech companies are so big, they have

so many organizations within the company they each run like their

own mini companies my organization has about like 300 people

which is bigger than a lot of startups i work on

a very small part of amazon their financial accounting team the

work i do is very specific in terms of the experience

that i gain but i don't gain a lot of breadth

and because you're working on something so specific the customer is also very specific

and it's kind of hard to feel the impact of your work.

I kind of feel this way about my project.

I really don't know like how many people are going to be using it

and if I'm going to even get much feedback from it.

So while working in big tech is amazing, it exposes you to the most amazing engineers, technologies, and opportunities.

It can be also limiting in your impact and your scope

and hopefully this is helpful to anybody who's wondering what it's like to work in big tech

and maybe they were thinking about like choosing between like a small startup

or a big tech company there's definitely pros

and cons to each of them

but one thing i do like about working in big tech is there is a lot of amazing people

and i'm really happy this year

because i was able to make some new friends i'm going

to be getting lunch with one of my friends right now

so let's go i'm coming out out of what out to society what are you talking about Thank you.

Wow.

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That actually looks really good.

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I'll send that to your present.

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What?

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This is a little present.

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Don't go with it.

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Wait, I'm gonna go.

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Oh my gosh.

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Thank you.

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Thank you i love i love this video yeah you can

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just save it for later yeah i appreciate it bro on tiktok i've been seeing

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so many stories of the people like my husband like had an affair

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they're so awful and i'm like everyone i watch them i'm always like

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hmm like men really age it i can't always do this

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okay no no no okay i have to tell you the most insane one this girl

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so basically i tried for batch sake initially the day i

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did need a full loop say this might be constant ever

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since all the layoffs started happening work has felt a bit unstable

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and it's really hard not to think about it in the back of your mind even

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if your team feels fine today there's always that lingering question of what

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if i'm still pretty early in my software engineering career i've been working for one year

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and there's so many fears around ai taking over my job, losing my job, to the layoffs, and it honestly makes things feel a lot more uncertain.

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I've been trying really hard to not let that anxiety take over my life.

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After work, I just want to disconnect, relax, and not think about coding, performance reviews, or the job market.

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But at the same time, it's really scary to ignore it completely, especially knowing that I don't have much experience yet, and if I suddenly go out, I'll have to interview again.

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So I've been trying to stay positive and just focus on what I can control, keeping my skills sharp and staying open to opportunities and remind myself that I'm still growing.

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I want to help with my burnout by just keeping my options open so I don't feel stuck in one place.

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Recently, I've been trying to keep my interview skills sharp on the side, but the hardest part for me isn't just solving the problems, it's remembering to practice consistently.

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So I built this system that reminds me to practice every day using Notion.

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Notion recently introduced custom agents, which are basically automations that run in the background of your workspace.

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Instead of manually prompting the AI every time, you can set agents to run on schedules or triggers.

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This video is sponsored by Notion and it's the perfect time to show you how I set up my custom agents.

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All I did was connect my custom agent to a LeetCode database.

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Every morning it sends me a problem from the database

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and then it updates it so I don't get sent the same problem twice in a row.

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I'll make a full video showing you how I use Notion for my job searching process, so stay tuned for that.

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But in the meantime, if you want to try making your own automations with Notion's custom agents, use the link in my description.

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And now we return to our regularly scheduled suffering.

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I used to do.

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It's that time of the year for my annual review, and it's a time to reflect on my year and what I learned and what I got out of it.

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When I first joined, I asked the senior engineer how long it would take before I became a pro on the team, and they said a year.

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So am I pro now?

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No, I do not think I'm a pro.

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Our team owns a lot of services, and I feel like I'm just scraping the surface of what they all do, and I'm still really confused by all this accounting jargon.

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I think I know my own project pretty well and that's about it.

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I'm more confident overall, but after all the layoffs and the recent talks about getting on the promotion path with my manager, everything is a bit shaky for me.

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My friend Marlene joined Amazon a year before me

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and she's already gone through the entire promotion process already

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and she knows ins and outs way better than me

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so I love talking to her

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and seeing her progress gives me a lot of hope

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because maybe in a year from now I'll be where she's at and if I am, I'm really happy.

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It's nice to be able to talk to her about her process

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and her time at Amazon because it definitely makes me feel a lot less alone

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and that's one thing

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that I'm very happy for in the last year at Amazon is the girlies that I got to meet.

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Everyone has been so nice and it's actually made coming to work and getting through the boring days so much easier.

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I think a lot of your experience at work is also what you choose to make of it.

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It's the people that you push yourself to talk to, the mindset that you want to have, and I definitely need to remind myself that when I'm in my slumps.

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I'm not sure how to make a joke I'm so cool

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I'm just gonna get all the touch I'm gonna go on the flash I'm gonna be honest

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You gotta call

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me baby

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I was

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getting lunch with my friend today and

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while I was waiting in the lobby I actually got recognized at work I think it's

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so cool that people actually watch my videos a lot of the times I think I'm just like filming

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and talking to like myself but something funny that I noticed is

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that I only ever get approached when I'm with a friend never

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when I'm just like by myself and I think it's

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because I have an RBF when I'm by myself and then

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when I'm with people I'm like smiling and laughing

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so I think I come off a little bit unapproachable so

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if you came up to me this year thanks it was really nice to meet you

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and I hope to see more of you soon anyways let's get back to work

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all right it's getting a bit late now

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but i still have to head to one of my second one hour meetings of the day

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so we have these meetings twice a week

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and basically we share our individual learnings

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or any design reviews with the team for example this year

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i needed to do a migration from one build tool to another

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so i wrote like a two-page document summarizing the problem how i was going to solve it

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and all the different options with their pros and cons and then I booked this meeting with my team.

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In this meeting they basically read over your document, they spend like 20 minutes reading over it, they annotate it, ask questions.

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This method actually kind of makes sense because sometimes

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when people are talking I can zone out and then when I zone back in I'm like completely lost.

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So if I can just read a document at my own pace

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and like annotate it I feel like I'm gonna absorb the information a little bit better

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but then sometimes the document is like 15 pages long

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and i already have no context about it

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so these meetings like get me really really sleepy

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and they also happen after lunch i talked to like one of my co-workers

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and they've also said this feels like a nap to them it's

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so hard to stay awake especially

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when you don't really know what the context of the meeting is

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because everyone's working on like their own thing anyways let's head to the meeting Alright,

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I just got done chatting with the senior engineer.

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They explained what I need to do for this project, so I started making some of the code changes they recommended and hopefully this will start adding more traffic to my project.

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I just hope that this doesn't break any of my already existing code, but I really do think it probably will, so I'm just going to tweak this and hopefully it works.

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I'm sorry.

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What do you say?

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We call it a night and get some beauty sleep.

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You go.

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I want to review my notes one more time.

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In my last video, I was working on the annual reviews and writing some reviews for my peers.

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So I finished up writing those and today I'll be working on my individual review.

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You basically need to say which leadership principles you did well on

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and maybe some you need to improve on and you want to share examples from the work that you did this year.

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So this year I did something which was keep a work summary.

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Basically I recorded all the work that I did throughout the year.

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I noted down the operational work, any notable tickets that I saw, any project work that I did and the progress I made on it and the impact of all of that.

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I also compiled all the design documents that I wrote throughout the year and what decisions that I had made.

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A work summary is also very helpful for you later on

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when you're going to promotions or when you want to update your resume for future jobs.

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If you watched my video from last year, I also did an annual review, but I had only been working for a few months.

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My team was really new to me.

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I was really new to my team, so they didn't have much to say about me, and even though I've been working for almost a year and a half now, I still feel very new to all the systems.

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I really only know about my project which is a very small part of what my team does as a whole.

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I think my project definitely has similarities to other services but there's a lot of low-level detail that I don't know about.

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So my goal from next year is

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that I become a pro in all of the services so

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that people will start coming to me about not just my project but all the other services as well.

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So with that I'm going to start writing my individual review

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and we'll get back to I'm still working today even though it's getting pretty late.

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I tried to clock out around 5 because I want to have a life outside of work, but today was a special case because I'm still wrapping up my on-call shift, I also have project deadlines,

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and the annual reviews so I want to finish it all before I head home.

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I don't mind working later after most people have left

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because it's actually quite peaceful

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and I end up getting more stuff done office can get really loud during the day and it's super distracting for me.

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I can't help but overhear other people's conversations

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and then suddenly I'm really distracted not doing any work

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and then if I put my headphones I'm listening to good music

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and I'm also getting distracted so it's just nice when it's really quiet in the office.

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If I could choose when to come into work I would come in way later

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and stay way later because I'm pretty much a night owl and I get more work done at night.

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I can't do anything tonight.

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Why not?

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Because I have a lot of planning to do.

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I think within the first couple of months, I started to feel like this job at Amazon isn't really what I imagined for myself.

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It's not that it's a bad job or anything.

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It's more that I don't feel connected to the work.

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What stands out to me the most is how small I feel inside a system that is this big.

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At a company like Amazon, especially as a more junior engineer, I'm really not shaping the bigger picture.

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I feel like I'm just floating around.

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I understand that I'm junior, but I'm doing very mundane work.

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I'm updating packages, running pipelines, fixing tests, all for just some financial accounting software.

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A lot of the work starts to feel repetitive and honestly pretty empty and not because software engineering is boring, it's because this version of it doesn't feel right for me.

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I've also been having this weird realization where I worked so hard to get here, now I'm here and I'm not sure I even want it.

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I've definitely been lingering on this feeling of leaving Amazon and that's probably just the most honest part of all of this.

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I'm still figuring it out in real time

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but I'm seriously starting to ask myself whether staying on this path just

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because I don't want a job search and the market is bad is actually a good enough reason.

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And I've been watching a lot of videos of my favorite software engineers quitting their jobs

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and it's just making me feel some type of way.

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I think a lot of people assume that once you land a job at a company like Amazon you should be grateful, stay, and try to make it work.

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And there is a part of me that thinks that too.

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Maybe I should just try to tough it out and maybe I just need more time.

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Maybe I need to work on a cooler project.

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Maybe it's just, you know, seasonal depression.

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But I also think there is a bit of a difference between something being challenging

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and something just not being right for me.

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And that's the part I'm trying to figure out.

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My friend Marlene gets the best snacks for a snack wall.

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These are so delicious.

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I sleep all day, up all night, staring at the wall, feeling light,

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dozing off to rest my eyelids.

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So I've wrapped up most of my work today, the office has cleared out, and I'm going to be catching the train and heading home.

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What You'll Learn from This Video

This clip is a goldmine for IELTS speaking practice and everyday conversation skills. You’ll master how to talk about work experiences—sharing both positives and struggles—using natural phrases like “chip away at,” “hand over,” and “mitigate an issue.” You’ll also learn to express conflicted feelings, such as “I’m torn” or “I feel guilty for complaining,” which are key for real-life discussions. Plus, it’s perfect for practicing narrative flow—how to move from daily tasks to personal reflections smoothly, a skill vital for fluency.

Listen For These Sounds

Pay attention to connected speech! The speaker often links words, like “got into this field” (sounds like “gotintothis field”) and “lingering on leaving” (blends into “lingeringonleaving”). You’ll also hear reductions: “I’ve definitely” becomes “I’ve def’nitely,” and “it kind of seems” shortens to “it kinda seems.” Notice how “SEV2s” is pronounced “sev-twoz,” a common way to say technical terms. These nuances make your speech sound more native, so listen closely and mimic them.

Say It Like a Native: Master Rhythm and Stress

To mirror the speaker’s natural tone, focus on stress. In phrases like “big tech,” “big” is emphasized, while “tech” is quick. When talking about emotions, stress words like “conflicted,” “excited,” and “torn” to convey feeling. The speaker also uses pauses—like after “Anyways, enough of my existential crisis”—to create rhythm. Practice shadowing technique with this video: pause, repeat, and match the speed and stress. Use a shadowing site or app to record yourself and compare. This is how you’ll sound more confident, whether for learn English with YouTube practice or real conversations. Remember, even native speakers have moments of doubt—so embrace the flow, and keep practicing!

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Present perfect continuous have/has been + -ing — an action that started earlier and is still going on	I've definitely been lingering · I've been feeling · i've been seeing
Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now	I've always admired · I've always wanted · has felt
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	everyone who was · agents, which are · something which was
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was done · is sponsored

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

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Grammar in this video

What is the Shadowing Technique?