
An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015) - neofrommatrix
https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3
======
samirillian
This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in
solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that
AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling
up, and I've heard similar from friends.

What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level
of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they want to
believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution
and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I can't help
but feel it's just this kind of false consciousness that prevents developers
from _getting organized_.

Sidenote, payroll tax on Amazon in Seattle trying to get revived. It's a long
and winding story. Check out taxamazon.net

~~~
AnHonestComment
It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first
iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by
construction unions due to its disastrous policy.

This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom
aren’t currently profitable.

“Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon,
both would be a disaster for Seattle, and proponents try to focus on Amazon to
keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is.

In 2010, the Seattle budget was 3.8B; in 2020, it’s 6.5B. An increase of 2.7B
and growth of 71% in a decade. (Per capita, the Seattle budget is 37% more now
than in 2010.)

[https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-
constructio...](https://www.geekwire.com/2018/seattle-socialists-construction-
workers-clash-amazon-hq-tax-big-business/)

[https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/politics/seattle-c...](https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-
news/politics/seattle-city-councilmember-sawant-says-her-tax-on-big-
businesses-would-raise-300-million-a-year/)

~~~
mlindner
As someone not from Seattle, the drama around that tax was quite ridiculous.
The idea of a "head tax" is utterly nonsensical in that it's an incentive to
NOT hire people, which is the entire point that companies are pulled into
cities. Jobs. Jobs are one of the things cities care most about more than
anything. A head tax actively disincentives hiring of new workers. A head tax
can maybe make sense if you have permanently low unemployment and companies
can't hire enough people, but that's not Seattle's problem.

~~~
vkou
Given how many people are moving to Seattle every year, far faster than new
housing can be built, I'd say that an effectively negative unemployment rate
has, in fact, been one of Seattle's problems, and that slowing hiring down
would, in fact, help things.

------
thoraway1010
The loaner thing is so true - having two bosses is THE PITS! That and not
sleeping.

My first job out of college I had two bosses. HORRIBLE.

This came up recently, a manager, trying to be helpful, not sure they could
manage someone said why don't we both manage them. NO!

The other things - trading sleep and shutting off friends - the first will
destroy your quality of life and the second you will regret for a LONG time no
matter how critical the day to day was.

I'm not perfect. Setting boundries. I focus on situations in my case - what
situation lead to bad results. Also - you can sometimes trade time for reduced
money - which in some of these situations is a NO BRAINER. I'm trying to do
that. Society really IS NOT setup to support that.

I go home even if I'm behind. I sleep next to my wife and play with my kid.
Covid has made catching back up with friends harder.

I think what folks from the outside don't realize is that folks making big
money+ - you put a lot of pressure ON YOURSELF. You are given lots of money,
often lots of responsibility, your work impacts lots of people (internally and
externally). This is even if Jeff Bezos is not your boss.

~~~
harrisonjackson
My favorite example of having two bosses was as an intern. I was getting
loaned out to a team that thought I was working full-time when I was really
working 20 hours per week. I wasn't aware of this until I started getting
super negative feedback from the manager. She basically thought I was the
worst developer alive haha - then when I clarified I was a part-time intern
and full-time student she totally lost it on my og manager. Of course he then
was furious at me for blowing his scheme... not sure exactly how the internal
budget/trading hours/money worked, but they were offloading 40 hours of full-
time budget for my part-time efforts.

------
redredrobot
I appreciate this being shared, but I have some qualms.

I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto'
is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other
companies I've seen. They don't include things they don't actually care about,
like most corporate mottos do (you'll notice the lack of 'we care about our
employees' or 'do no evil' LPs).

At least in my experience, you only need to pay back Amazon proportional to (2
years minus duration employed) so it really isn't that bad (maybe that wasn't
the case when this was written).

Maybe it's changed, but the signing bonuses I saw were essentially increased
salary until your stock starts vesting seriously. It gets paid out and vests
every paycheck so there isn't anything you need to pay back.

~~~
lowiqengineer
> 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs).

Customer Obsession is "do no evil".

~~~
redredrobot
How so? Google is facing employee issues and protests because they sold the
'do no evil' ideal, but the employees don't think some of their projects
follow that. I think you would struggle to find an equivalent portion of
Amazon employees who think Amazon isn't customer obsessed.

~~~
lowiqengineer
I mean in the sense that being customer obsessed should mean you do not evil.
We absolutely are still customer obsessed.

~~~
redredrobot
> I mean in the sense that being customer obsessed should mean you do not evil

I think there is a real tension between customer obsession and 'do no evil'.
Serving the individual needs of consumers can come at the expense of the
public good. I think example of that are the amount of waste that Amazon
packages generate by shipping as fast as possible and the amount of
environmental damage AWS can quietly cause via their datacenters.

------
igorstellar
It's an old gist, you should flag it as [2015]

~~~
dang
Yes. Added now. That was really misleading.

------
holler
When my Uncle found out how much the average entry-level Amazon software
developer at Amazon makes, he was completely shocked, because it's higher than
his salary as a physician in practice for many years. So all things
considered, when it's mentioned how doctors are the only other profession
where the employees are on-call 24/7, most FANG devs are making more than the
average doctor.

~~~
aaomidi
Where does your uncle live?

Does he have to pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom rent?

~~~
deminature
$3000 for 1bd in NYC is pretty common, it can extend to >= $4000 for 5-10
minute walking distance to work. Tech salary can seem much less impressive
servicing that kind of recurring cost.

~~~
aaomidi
Yeah definitely.

I was specifically talking about the Seattle market for housing since I also
live here.

Comparing base compensation without taking into consideration the city the
person lives in is useless.

------
efdwefwfwerf
Burn out at work? Amazon? Oh c'mon.

The original OP's write-up misses the main questions and helpful perspective.
Doctors (we have several in the extended family), lawyers (worked with some),
entrepreneurs (have been one) all put in very long hours. So do grad students,
and undergrad's working on tough assignments.

It's not work per se; the issues are larger, and different:

\- do you enjoy what you do? If you're new, out of school you may not know
this without experience. This guy got experience. We are aware that plenty of
people make career changes inside and outside their industry right? Because of
they realized the enjoyment and fulfillment wasn't there, right?

\- do you have friends, hobbies, a social life, a wife (husband) and family?
Do you do anything with them? If not, why not? Why does one work all the time?

\- do you have self awareness of your red lines? If no, why not? If yes, why
were they repeatedly crossed? Individuals have choice, agency if they are
relatively self-aware.

\- Why would a team put up with so many bugs, and so many late calls? There
are a zillion developer teams ... we all have support issues/challenges, and
part of the job is reducing outages which feeds into software engineering,
quality, management, cross functional management with business people
providing requirements, corporate culture, and many other facets.

I didn't find this article helpful. I do not cherish or dismiss the trauma
reported herein, but something bad X happened at company Y is neither new,
insightful, or explanative in any ultimate way that counts.

------
majormajor
> Remember when I mentioned Amazon's moving and signing bonus? Little caveat
> on that, if you leave or are fired within 2 years, you have to pay it back.

Paying back a signing bonus if _they_ fire _you_ seems super rough. Is this
common elsewhere? 2 years also seems high - the time I got a signing bonus, it
was "pay back if you leave voluntarily in 1 year" which was much nicer than
the described.

Unfortunately, much of this seems pretty common, especially months-of-crunch-
time. Being able to figure out projects to _avoid_ (if you're at a big corp
like this where such things are possible), and being able to avoid them is a
very good career skill to cultivate.

On-call can work quite well if the team has sufficient ownership to improve
the underlying issues, not just keep the lights on. I've done this with good
success. I'm often disappointed by how many managers and companies I've seen
who don't get that aspect.

Believing too much in mantras like "adding manpower to a late software project
makes it later" can be dangerous, too, though. How well it works depends on
the manager and the person scoping and planning the work. Another critical
skill to develop to escape being the person doing the grunt work.

~~~
myalphabet
I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to
have caused him undue stress.

I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation.
I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing
bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave
voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing
bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you
get to keep the other $10k.

~~~
o10449366
I'm surprised at how many people in this thread are misunderstanding this.
Every tech company I've seen has had a stipulation saying you have to pay back
signing bonus or relocation if you leave within 1 year.

~~~
myalphabet
Yea, that's something else I forgot to mention. I chalk it up to OP possibly
being inexperienced/naive (I think this was his first job out of college), but
I have worked with a lot of companies and _all_ of them require you to pay
back at least part of your signing bonus if you quit within a year.

When I graduated college, all of my friend group discussed it and we all took
out a small chunk of the bonus to go on a small group vacation, but the rest
of the bonus got put into an investment account and not touched for at least a
year. That way if we did decide to leave, the money was easily accessible to
be paid back. I know not everyone has that flexibility, but it's probably the
best way to approach signing bonuses if you're not 100% sure you will be at
the company long term.

------
DethNinja
Kinda unrelated to topic at hand but I always wanted to ask this to other
programmers:

Author mentions that he traded sleep for code, and I hear this from so many
people but I really cannot understand how well they manage to pull this off. I
simply cannot code productively if I get less than 7 hours of sleep or code
for more than 8 hours straight, and caffeine doesn’t help me. So how do you
people manage to pull this off? I’m really envious that people can code all
day long but does it really provide good code? Doesn’t that increase the bug
count of the code?

~~~
latencyloser
Easy, most of the code we write is pretty mindless. Boilerplate tying together
of various internal libraries to make it play nice that you've done too many
times to count. Following someone else's wiki page instructions on how to
implement some "best practice" that needs to be done for a production system.
Writing CRUD operations and such. Writing unit tests for all these things.
Sure mistakes happen when you're exhausted but the stuff is hard from mentally
demanding given the bar that they're supposedly hiring for.

I don't say that disparagingly, this is 90% of my day to day life as a mid-
level engineer at a FAANG. The other 10% I might get to do something "neat"
that I can justify somehow. It depends on the team of course, but I find the
Author's experience believable.

------
TrackerFF
Lots of IT jobs that deal with critical infrastructure have on-call duties.

Try working for some IT firm that supports healthcare, utility, defense, or
what not, and I can assure you that there's rotation duty where you need to be
on-call within xx minutes, 24/7.

During college I was interning for IT firm that provided networking for local
hospitals, and they had the same rotation. My friend who got me the gig,
worked there FT, and he basically had to forego social activities every 3 or 4
week, because he'd be on call 24/7.

~~~
julianlam
Yeah, I also thought the on-call/pager thing was a little overblown. It
immediately raised a red flag about how wet behind the ears OP is.

Not to say that there aren't toxic on-call rotations and such, only that it's
a lot more common than you'd think, and is not limited to just doctors
_eyeroll_

Any time a business unit needs to be accountable to another party after-hours,
some sort of call schedule is created.

~~~
sixstringtheory
> During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way other than
> the usual salaried catch-all "are you willing to work nights and/or
> weekends."

It should be very clear what the actual expectation is, though, instead of a
nebulous "we may need you to work extra sometimes." It's a guarantee that you
will work extra at a fixed interval, and that extra work happens to be
psychologically draining.

I ask for quite the premium in salary if I know I'm going to be on call.

~~~
redredrobot
I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon
that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing
that you'd be on-call.

------
throwaway24857
> After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call
> rotation

I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call
can be brutal, even if there are no incidents during your week (which is
rare.)

Just the fact that you have to be 24/7 _ready_ during a whole week sucks,
especially when you have a family. During my on-call week, I can't go get
groceries, I can't take my kid to her hockey practice, we can't go out for
lunch over the weekend, etc.

It takes a toll, for sure.

~~~
dudul
The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while
trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be
on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved
it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after
10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page
happens during the 45 minutes where you're out, your buddy will get it.

~~~
dfinninger
Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for
primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents.
This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare,
but has happened), etc.

I’ve found that just having _someone else_ to commiserate with at midnight, if
needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.

~~~
dudul
Absolutely. We had the same policy. If primary wasn't sure what to do, they
could ping secondary to regroup. We even had a third "last line of defense"
which was basically always the same 3 people, pinged if nothing was acked in
the first 30mn.

------
lowiqengineer
A 5 year old gist from 1 employee (out of the current ~70k SWE's employed at
the company + all that have come and gone in the last 5 years) just to shit on
the quality of Amazon engineering? And folks wonder why I have depression
-it's not because i'm burnt out, it's because the HN crowd thinks I'm some
sort of cognitive defective for working at Amazon.

~~~
ikRwS3Nb6Y
Fellow happy Amazon SDE - hopefully you're not being literal saying you have
depression from HN type crowds displaying their typical amount of empathy.
just in case you are, take this as a friendly reminder that you're not the
only person with that experience and it's easy to just stop reading the
nonsense

~~~
lowiqengineer
Yeah, I know. But even when talking to friends at top companies it's like a
stream of microaggressions when I've worked just as hard as they have to be
where I am.

------
Thaxll
I used to be like that and then one day I realized it's just a CS job, I'm not
doing open heart surgery so I shouldn't stress about it. Since then my life
has been much better.

------
nanoscopic
I can chime in that a lot of this rings true for me. I was also an SDE-II (
started as one ). I also was loaned out to other teams. I also suffered the
idiocy of being locked into 2 years of work or get saddled with a huge amount
of money to pay back.

Also, I consider that my child is dead because of what happened.

See [https://amazonandmykid.com](https://amazonandmykid.com) for the full
story.

~~~
ikRwS3Nb6Y
I'm not sure if you're legally bound not to say certain things by the terms of
the NDA you signed, or if you've simply chosen not to share some details. But
I read that entire page, and who is in the wrong in that story hinges entirely
on the exact events of the day you requested to go home, and exactly what you
said that was considered a death threat. The extreme vagueness around those
details leaves me with no ability to form an opinion on whether your manager
is a whip-cracking sociopath, if you have serious anger management issues and
are blaming the consequences of them on anyone but yourself, or somewhere in
the middle.

Are you willing to give more details?

~~~
nanoscopic
I wrote a long response to this. Hacker news then presented me with a message
"Your comment was too long".

Short version: Think what you will. My story serves as a warning to anyone who
thinks you can survive the Amazon hell. I may have issues of various sorts,
but no one should have to tolerate the "Amazon way" or be subjected to their
insanity.

------
w0mbat
Amazon's 401k plan is terrible when compared to competing companies. I
cancelled my Amazon interview the second I saw the terms of it. I had to find
the details for myself because the info packet the recruiter sent me,
conveniently left out any details except that there was a 401k plan and some
matching.

Only 50% match, and the maximum match they will pay is 2% of salary.
(Competitors match 1:1, high or no limit).

Three years vesting on the match. (Immediate vesting elsewhere, e.g. Google).

No match on catch-up contributions. (WTF? Naked age discrimination as policy?)

Source: [https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-
us](https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us)

~~~
sikim
This might be helpful to you [http://perks.guide/](http://perks.guide/)

~~~
supersimp
Is this accurate? I definitely do a mega backdoor roth and I'm at Amazon.

~~~
ikRwS3Nb6Y
It was accurate until this year - Amazon switched 401k providers from Vanguard
to Fidelity. I don't remember all the details but after tax contributions
(which are required for doing a mega backdoor) are possible now, but weren't
before.

------
MattGaiser
A former colleague of mine suspects that Amazon is going to eventually run out
of developers to hire because of how rapidly they burn through them.

Yet to know anyone who lasted more than a year or two there. Obviously some
do, but they go through an enormous number of people.

~~~
mmcconnell1618
No, they won't run out of people to hire but the cost to hire them will go up.
At a certain point, they may have to pay more and offer more perks to attract
the level of talent they want. The culture will mellow once the payroll
expense starts climbing.

~~~
mrep
Yeah, I'd probably go back if they started paying more than G/FB/N.

------
qeternity
> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other
> profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors

Uh, not even close. I used to get up at 4am EST to trade European markets for
a hedge fund. I was on call 24/7/365\. I had my laptop and Bloomberg
fingerprint scanner with me on any trip I took.

And this is just my experience. I have had many friends in engineering,
management consulting, fin tech, etc who have similar demands made of them.

I’m not saying it’s right, but it is part of the rules of the game that we all
sign up to. There’s a reason all of the aforementioned jobs pay so well.

~~~
sa46
In the military, we had a 2 hour recall for a large chunk of our battalion,
about 200 people for a few months at a time. If you got a call, you were
expected to be ready to go in less than 2 hours. Social norms meant the
expectation was closer to 45 minutes than 2 hours.

I think oncall is a common requirement for anything involving large sums of
money, treatment of high risk injuries, or geopolitical power struggles.

~~~
qeternity
One I hadn’t even considered (typical stereotype here: no friends who are in
the armed forces). But yeah I imagine loads of others (military, EMT, police)
are in a similar situation.

------
pkamb
I've never understood how their Apple TV apps (Amazon Prime Video, Twitch,
etc.) are _so_ bad.

If the Prime TV app was better I'd honestly probably cancel Netflix. But as-is
I avoid using it completely.

Then I interviewed for a mobile position at Amazon. Now I understand. A
Facebook iOS recruiter _laughed_ at my experience.

~~~
Austin_Conlon
Is Facebook iOS engineering supposed to be impressive for laughing you off? I
don't understand how they let slip crashing any app that used their iOS SDK:
[https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-
sdk/issues/1374](https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1374).

~~~
dfinninger
I think the parent means that in a Facebook interview they shared a laugh at
how terrible the Amazon interview was.

~~~
hckr_news
Makes sense. They probably meant to say “...laughed at my story”.

------
maerF0x0
> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other
> profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal
> lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and
> tells you “holy crap, this is serious.”

A key difference is that the oncall engineer is usually able to directly
influence the quality and robustness of the systems being watched. Sort of
like preventative medicine, but much more direct.

Crappy teams make crappy software that pages often (or not at all if their ops
fails to write any meaningful alerts)

~~~
btmiller
I don't trust an engineer that can't troubleshoot their own software running
in production. I think the "you write it, you own it" adage is really smart
and raises all tides when engineers are empowered to root cause each issue.

~~~
disgruntledphd2
I think the second part is super important though, but it's often forgotten.

If you work on a buggy-enough system, and don't do the root causing, then you
will have incredibly bad on-call experiences.

------
Barrin92
The on call stuff sounds outright dystopian to me, it's not even legal in my
country. More places should think about adopting something akin to France's El
Khomri law's
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect))
and ensure that every citizen has enough time to recuperate from work and
isn't pestered by their employer 24/7.

~~~
jakebellacera
What was stated seems pretty typical on small teams who manage critical
systems. How are critical systems managed otherwise without having to 3x your
team (assuming you want 24hr coverage with a 8hr workday)?

~~~
Barrin92
>How are critical systems managed otherwise without having to 3x your team
(assuming you want 24hr coverage with a 8hr workday)?

They typically aren't, you need to hire more people then. In anything defined
as critical I would suggest that being well rested is also a requirement
rather than having a team of people who are so overworked they develop mental
illness.

~~~
dudul
Doesn't make sense financially. You're gonna triple the size of your team,
just to make sure that this one time of the week someone will restart the DB?

I would much rather bite the bullet, be on call a week a month or so and use
the budget for something else.

~~~
jobhunt94110
You don't need to keep the primary development team as primary oncall 24/7\.
"Hire people to keep an eye on things off-hours, follow playbooks when
necessary, and escalate to the right people if they can't resolve" is a
reasonable pattern that folks have done for decades the world over. You get
less incentive alignment perhaps, but it really isn't hard to come up with
ways to make creating work for another team unappealing.

~~~
devdas
That is an anti-pattern and leads to burnout for ops teams.

------
trynewideas
> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other
> profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors

My only advice to this person is:

\- talk to someone who does customer-facing tech support in your own company

\- never take a job in customer-facing tech support

~~~
chiyc
I'm not sure where they got the notion that emergency services are the only
other field where people go on-call. Plenty of industries operate 24/7.

I worked in high volume manufacturing where process engineers could be on-call
24/7-365 unless you explicitly asked a backup to cover you during a vacation
or weekend. Depending on the part of the process you owned, that might mean a
middle-of-the-night call a couple times a month or several times a week. No
human lives on the line, just lots of money.

------
preordained
A part of me feels bad sometimes cause I doubt I'm good enough for some FAANG
company...then I read stuff like this and I think, yah, ability or no, I don't
think I'm type of person who would want to partake in this culture.

------
dang
We changed the url from
[https://gist.github.com/bricker/cb811b3b86d767124801](https://gist.github.com/bricker/cb811b3b86d767124801)
to the original source it points to, which also lists its date instead of
obscuring it.

------
bougiefever
I was a contractor at a company that announced that developers would have to
work through the nights and on weekends at times, and they couldn't take any
extra work days off. So, if you had to do an upgrade to production and it took
all night, you were still expected to work all day too. Oh, and you didn't get
paid any extra for the overtime either. One person asked about work-life
balance, and the response from that manager was that when you chose a career
as a developer, you signed up for this. This is what happens when this kind of
abuse becomes rampant. The managers then declare it comes with the job. Such
BS! BTW, that guy quit along with anyone else reasonably competent.

~~~
hckr_news
That blows. Seems like the company was wholly incompetent and rotten with
comments like that. And as a contractor, you should always bill overtime so
your unavailable time isn’t abused.

------
itsspring
> On-call wasn’t (and isn’t) too terrible for my team. At first we averaged 1
> page every 2 weeks; now we’re up to about 1 a week.

Wow, I wish I had once a week. This is way better than my previous
employer/role. I was on-call for months straight, and would get paged multiple
times a night, every day, even at 2am, 4am. I had to carry my laptop to
dinners, date nights, game nights, etc.

I got burned out and moved careers into a role that never has on-call. I don't
get to code much anymore, but I've found other things to enjoy

~~~
csharptwdec19
Yeah On-call can vary greatly by company, although how On-call issues are
handled can have a huge impact on your perception of a job.

At one previous employer, you were on a 2-week rotation for on-call.

But Every time you were on call, it was the same set of problems, always at
the same inconvenient times (Mid sunday afternoon, random weekdays but always
between 3-5AM, etc.) Admittedly often they were NOPs (Oh, alert came in, but
when you check the system it's fine.)

But we didn't fix the false alarms. And we didn't fix the recurring real
problems either; the Org's view was that was the entire purpose of the On-call
person; that middle child you send to pay the loan shark not-quite enough
because you don't care what happens to them.

At later employer, I actually had to deal with -more- on call issues, both in
severity and frequency. And yet, I hate being on-call less, because at the
very least when we find problems on-call the org puts a focus on fixing them.

------
foo321
Dunno, I read through half of the post and have not figured what actually the
problem there? If 15 minutes you have not responded while on "pager duty" your
manager get notified? Phew. I mean if you are infrastructure worker, you kinda
need to go and fix the infrastructure that is expected by everyone to be
efficient and up 24/7\. Imagine, your internet goes down once a month, you
will be among first to complain how sh... I mean bad, your internet provider
is and threaten to switch to other option. Internet goes down often, and there
is a person or a group that goes to the affected location and fixes the issue
during day/night/rain/snow. Now think about people who's livelihoods depend on
AWS to be up, or customers being able to purchase products on amazon.com...
business owner, track driver, manufacturing worker, and bunch of people who
have work and income because those workers do. If programmer's job was so
easy, everyone would be able to do it. Problem with today's society is that we
see people's success and desire a piece of it, we do not see work and sweat
that was put into achieving that success. Programming not for everyone, if you
not used to stare at the screen 16 hours/day, maybe there is different career
for u somewhere.

------
unbalancedevh
>\- Near-Instant Gratification

>There is something great about having code you wrote be actually executed by
thousands of people every day. So few people get to show their friends and
family a site they visit often and say "I did that thing there." Maybe it will
wear off eventually, but it's still my favorite.

It has never worn off for me! I've worked in automotive for over 20 years, and
it feels great every time I see something I worked on drive by.

------
WalterBright
> Revisit your bonus/relocation payback strategy ... if that's what you need
> to keep employees, that's fucked.

The reason for it isn't employee retention. It's to stop people from accepting
a job from Amazon just so someone will pay for their move to Seattle and give
them a free bonus.

Would people do this? Yes. I've seen them try. It also discourages people who
aren't serious about the job.

------
curiousllama
I don't want to minimize what this guy went through - anything that takes you
to the edge is too much - but I can't help but interpret this story as a story
of professional & personal growth rather than an example of why Amazon sucks
(Sidenote: I happen to agree they suck, just not for this particular reason).

How many people in other professions have had similar experiences from the
perspective of intensity/amount of work? I-banking is _built_ around this
level of intensity for years, and I've heard similar stories from people at
other tech companies, plus VC, PE, consulting, medical residencies...

My big takeaway here is much less that Amazon sucks than that in a high
pressure job, it's critical to know your limits: "I can go so far and no
further." The author seems to acknowledge this; why are so many comments
implying Amazon is uniquely terrible?

~~~
valbaca
amznymous here

You are absolutely right.

As other have pointed out, it's probably 1000x worse to be a doctor saddled
with med school debt who is literally operating on people. I will not argue
that, ever.

But that's also not me and so I told the story I could; mine.

I really want this to be more about how vital professional and personal
boundaries are.

While also highlighting how certain company behaviors make it challenging
(on/call, etc.)

Before Amazon I had worked at a company that (due to the nature of the work)
necessitated a strict 9-5. You literally couldn't work a minute more.

Before that, I was in college and had hourly jobs.

So you could say this was my first big-boy job with salary-hours, as well as
_real_ responsibilities (rent, car, wife, life)

------
aripickar
I have had a different experience with working at AWS. I've heard really
terrible things working in retail, but AWS has been a pretty good place to
work, with normal 9-5 hours. I can go more into detail about how my experience
has been different from the article if people want.

~~~
jkingsbery
I'm a software engineer at Amazon in Retail. (This is just my opinion, I don't
speak for Amazon in any official capacity, etc.)

Different software products have different severity levels. For my team, the
oncall burden is not so bad. We have an internally facing tool. When we do get
paged, it's usually requires acknowledging a ticket, a few minutes to validate
something, sending an email out, and that's it. For teams with more externally
visible products, a particular page can be stressful, but my understanding is
they also spend a lot of time in ensuring system robustness in order to limit
the number of pages. The "15 minute" response time the post referred to is
generally to acknowledgement - the expected time to resolution can be quite
variable.

The working hours are generally pretty good as well. The general expectation
is that you're not working crazy hours.

I've ran into "project crunch time" at Amazon, but the experience at Amazon
was like everywhere else I've worked. This also will vary by team: teams that
need to make changes to support Black Friday obviously have a pretty hard
deadline. Or if your team is getting ready for a re:invent announcement,
there's no way to work around that. But from what I've heard, teams that have
such a hard deadline also have a corresponding quiet period in December or
January.

Most people I know within Amazon that get burned out on one team and feel like
there's no resolution within that team (or just feel like they've had enough
with one area) solve that by switching teams. This is generally pretty easy,
since most teams are hiring at any time, and they would rather take an
internal transfer than an outside hire.

Amazon has a pretty good system around having a senior individual contributor
track (I haven't worked for any of the other big tech companies, my
understanding is that they're similar). Part of the benefit of this system is
that SDE1's/SDE2's have someone to reach out to for helping navigate
management. Anyone at Amazon who reads this who is experiencing something
similar to the OP should feel free to reach out to one of the senior engineers
for help.

Overall, I don't doubt that the post in the original article is that person's
experience, but it has not been my experience.

------
mouzogu
I enjoyed reading this.

'Encourage employees to be critical not just of ideas, but also of
expectations.'

From my experience as a developer; I've never really been involved in the
process of setting expectations. Something I find incredibly frustrating at
times. It's like sure you can give your opinion but it's too late to make any
difference. I think it comes back to the main point in the article about open
communication.

I think open communication needs to be inclusive. However, that's rarely the
case at least in terms of setting business expectations. It's only natural to
want to be involved in shaping some objective or some expectation that impacts
you and for which you may be one of the more qualified to discuss.

~~~
bozzcl
>I've never really been involved in the process of setting expectations

Nobody will ask you. You have to be upfront about it from the start.

Request time estimations and fully fledged requirement definitions from the
start. Review them before accepting a project, push back against overly
ambitious plans and propose changes that allow you to deliver value quickly
and iteratively. It's easier to react to surprises if you are able to test the
ideas as you go.

Stick to the plan as much as you can. Push back against changes to the
requirements if they're not vital. Let others know about blockers clearly, as
soon as you run into them. If you get behind schedule, communicate it
properly. Stuff happens, unfortunately, and deadlines not being met is a part
of life. You just get better at estimating with experience.

There's no way the upper echelons will adapt if they don't receive input
timely and loudly enough. If your boss is any kind of decent, they will listen
to you and trust your input. If they don't listen, then you should reconsider
your current job.

------
xyst
This is why you don't let upper management walk all over you.

I would personally love to tell Bezos to "fuck off" if the ask was
unreasonable. Worst case scenario, I have to find a new job (which I usually
have a few companies/recruiters in my back pocket), or best case scenario I
get "respected" and the deadline is pushed to a more reasonable date.
Typically massive corporations like this put you on a "performance improvement
plan" which can give you few weeks to a few months to find a new job (or
"improve").

Also learn to make friends with your teammates in the trenches. Presenting a
push back to management in a unified front is much more compelling than a 1:1.

------
thrr23434
Amazon seems to be an annoying company to work for, even overseas.

1-datapoint (@India): Their interviewers have uniformly managed to be both
obnoxious, and somehow simultaneously also quite insipid.

------
rdiddly
_" If paged, you have 15 minutes to get online and respond to the page. If you
don’t, your manager is paged. You do NOT want this to happen."_

I want it to happen. I'd like a word.

~~~
ignoramous
> _I want it to happen. I 'd like a word._

You could be shown the door in no-time. Amazon has forced attrition and the
manager decides who gets the cull. They may make a mountain out of a mole to
further their objectives.

~~~
cbanek
As someone who came from a similar environment (MSFT during the stack ranking
days), the forced attrition and manager's arbitrarily blackballing employees
are the ingredients of the toxic stew. If a manager hates your guts, there's
really nothing you can do, even if you are great at your job.

~~~
zamalek
Does your manager love your guts? Are you good at your job? Hopefully that
paycheck can bleach the guilt of your colleagues losing their jobs because you
are good at yours. That toxicity could _also_ be because they are either
selecting or creating people who are okay with this.

~~~
cbanek
Yes, yes, and thankfully I left that environment. Now I work in the public
sector, I guess you could say. Mostly because of the gas-lighting of reviews
and performance "feedback." I've been on both sides of it, and seeing that I'm
the same person, it really made it obvious how arbitrary it is.

I feel like it's common wisdom now that forced culling is not a great strategy
and has lots of perverse incentives, but still not universal.

------
azuriten
GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days.
I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.

~~~
nordsieck
> GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these
> days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.

IMO it's the lowest effort blogging platform (for people who already know how
to use git). You don't have to go to a webpage - just write some text in the
editor of your choice.

You don't even need to use something like Hugo since Github will render
markdown files properly.

~~~
azuriten
If you're just writing some throwaway content then sure, I guess the low
effort is worth it. But if you want to write more than a single post it's
probably better to spin up either your own blog or somewhere else.

------
ex_amazon_sde
Ex Amazon here.

> SDE II basically means a software developer with at least 2–3 years of
> industry experience

If this is true, the hiring bar has been lowered incredibly.

~~~
thor24
Most of the campus hires that I know or have seen in the last 5 years became
SDE2 is 1.5/2 years.

~~~
ex_amazon_sde
It's quite shocking compared to how it was 10 years ago.

------
diveandfight
>I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other
profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal
lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and tells
you “holy crap, this is serious.”

... or literally thousands of people in the military right now, oil rig work,
countless other IT help desk jobs, etc.

------
balladeer
> During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way

Then next:

> are you willing to work nights and/or weekends

To be fair I'd say this is mention enough.

If someone is willing to (or has to) look the other way at the time of hiring
when something like this was explicitly said, then even a "hey, we have on-
call here, you fine with that?" would be okay.

~~~
txcwpalpha
I think it goes both ways (in fact, most of this post seems to go both ways in
that Amazon sounds brutal but OP could have taken actions to mitigate it). If
your team is going to be requiring on-call, you should say that during the
interview process. "Are you willing to work nights and/or weekends" is
indicative, but is still too vague. Some might interpret that as just
"sometimes you might have to work late if you are on a tight deadline", not as
an on-call situation.

However on the interviewee's side, if you see something in a job description
that asks if you're willing to work nights and weekends, that should be an
immediate indicator to you that you should ask why you possibly would have to
work nights/weekends and in what capacity. It's the interviewee's
responsibility to ask questions like this even if the employer isn't
immediately forthcoming.

------
endlessmike89
>Be upfront and as precise as possible with what a position entails. "Working
alongside smart and passionate people" is lazy hiring.

I understand that this person was coming straight out of school, but the onus
is on the applicant to figure out more about the job during the interview
process.

~~~
sidlls
Interviewers, if they're coached properly by the organization, will lie. "Sell
the candidate on the company" is a thing. Human beings aren't conditioned to
have their skepticism alarms ramped up to 100% constantly in every
interaction. At some point a certain level of trust to be honest with one
another is required for society to have any cohesion. In my view businesses,
especially software/tech companies, are quite poor at this on a good day and
frequently work in ways that undermine it.

------
dfgdghdf
Based on my experience with the various AWS SDK libraries, I don't think
Amazon has very good developers, or perhaps they have good developers but a
poor development culture. The architecture is convoluted, heavily OOP and just
generally reminds me of Java in the early 2000s.

~~~
openasocket
The SDK? Those are all auto-generated

~~~
rienbdj
That would explain why it reads like a UML diagram

------
throwawaypal
Palantir Technologies also beats the fuck out of their coders. Be warned. Same
traps.

------
bambataa
Anyone working over their contracted hours needs to realise they're being
exploited by their employer. _Sometimes_ this is justified: we pay more than
the going rate because we expect you to step up occasionally. Maybe it's kind
of expected with Amazon in particular.

But when it descends into perma death march and your manager flings you "a
few" days holiday in recompense... does that make up for it? If it doesn't, to
whom has the profit gone?

~~~
teej
These employees do not have employment contracts and do not have hours that
are set by a contract.

~~~
bambataa
Wait, you're saying Amazon SDEs don't have a contract?

~~~
ncallaway
They have a contract, but the contract will specify them as "exempt salaried"
employees. That's pretty standard across the board in the tech world (as well
as many other professional roles).

Exempt salaried employees aren't paid by the hour, and don't have a set number
of hours they are expected to work. There is no overtime, but there's also no
(contractual) penalty for working fewer than 40 hours in a week.

------
Datsundere
Really glad I got a chance to work on a team that values personal time.
Overtime is basically non existent for me.

------
samaws93
As a bit of background upfront, I'm a 6+ year AWS employee who went from an
intern to full-time SDEI after graduation to relatively recently an SDEIII.
All of the below also specifically applies to white-collar tech employees.

There are two big issues with a lot of employees at AWS, not knowing their
worth and not having backbone.

It is not a privilege to work for Amazon. It is a privilege for Amazon that
you work for them. In this particular case, this person says that he was an
SDE II. That's great. You should be able to pretty easily go get a job at any
of the other large tech companies. You're not locked into Amazon. You likely
have a CS degree. You've got a couple years of industry experience in a field
where most companies can't hire fast enough.

That said, don't leave Amazon. Leave your team. Internal transfers are easy
and no longer gated on you being on a team for a certain amount of time. Start
talking to other people from other teams and find a good fit. Most internal
transfers are about culture fit and you likely won't be asked any coding
questions.

You are not obligated by anything to stay on your team. End of. Amazon is one
of the largest companies in the world. Don't feel some sort of personal
responsibility to stay on one team. That's just not reasonable. They'll find a
way to make do without you and if they can't why do you really care? At some
local mom and pop shop, sure you may not want to leaving the owner hanging but
Amazon ain't that.

Yes, there are rare occurrences where an org may try to block you from
leaving. In which case, again, you are a tech employee of Amazon. You should
be able to transfer to another large tech company.

As far as the loaner situation goes, have backbone. I've been asked to help
out another team before. I did some research and decided I didn't want to. I
told my manager and that was that. If he really pressed, again, see the prior
options.

Don't be afraid to escalate. Don't care about politics. Your manager may hate
you for trying to escalate on them but what the effect of that in the long
run? You only get a 1% pay increase on your 150K annual salary instead of a
5%? You have to go work for Microsoft for 150K instead of Amazon?

Rough oncall? Change teams.

Oncall but want to go places? Do it anyways. All teams should offer a hot
spot. Yes, this probably means you can't go hiking but it doesn't mean you
can't go other places. Being oncall doesn't really ever change my habits other
than having to bring my laptop with me. Sure, if you're on a team getting
paged regularly, that won't work but I'm not sure why you want to be on a team
that gets paged regularly after hours.

Come on people. If you work for a FAANG company, you are a very highly paid
employee in one of, if not the, hottest career field in the world. You are
very likely in the top 10% of world wide salaries. (118K+ year according to
numbers from US Social Security Admin)

------
nice_byte
on-call is standard industry practice, there's nothing especially egregious
about this. the difference is that some places like google pay extra for it.

~~~
aaomidi
Maybe we shouldn't allow companies to require on call without extra
compensation?

------
valbaca
Hi there.

So, I wrote this. I'm the original author. I'm amznymous (still proud of that
username)

It's wild to see this pop-up at the top of HackerNews 5 years later, but I'd
be more than happy to answer any questions anyone has.

I'm still at Amazon and have been on a couple of different teams since then,
but this was definitely written at my lowest time at Amazon. I've had low
times since then and high ones as well.

I'm still an SDE II but on-track to become SDE III soon.

I've interviewed elsewhere but was either unimpressed with the company
(Facebook) or the company was not impressed enough with me and asked to try
again later (Google). Facebook interviewers all looked absolutely exhausted
and stressed and lifeless. They zoned out in the interview and just in general
left a bad taste.

One low point was when I found out (years after 2015) that the whole project
that I had brutalized myself over was shutdown. Deleted. Scrapped. All of it.

It was devastating and cathartic. I've become a bit more balanced, jaded, and
care-free since then. Not totally, but just a bit.

It's all just code. It's all just business and sometimes the business fails
and everything you did doesn't matter anyway.

I'm still glad I wrote the paste, if it helped one person out there. Based on
reddit responses, I wasn't the only one going through this.

=============================

Since then things that help:

0\. Get that "Fuck You Money" I pinched pennies and followed Dave Ramsey's
approach to get 100% debt free and thriving to ensure I never was locked in as
I felt I was.

1\. Being absolute about my sleep schedule.

2\. Finding a good team. When you find a good team/manager, stick with it.
Manager matters 10x more than the company

3\. Therapy. duh

4\. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

5\. "The Depression Cure" by Ilardi. This is _NOT A SUBSTITUTE_ for therapy or
medication. ONLY use it as a supplement . The tl;dr is take care of your body
or your mind will pay the price.

6\. Soft skills: developing skills on how to provide estimates, pushing back
on deadlines, and finding compromises between what business wants and what's
feasible. It sounds obvious, but sometimes it really is just as easy as saying
"that will take 2 weeks, what can be cut?"

(Obvs, my opinions are my own and not my employer's)

~~~
romanovtexas
Was your original team in retail or AWS? Also how do you figure out what team
is good/bad when trying to switch teams?

~~~
valbaca
I never worked in AWS

Really just gossip is what you have to go off of initially.

After you've been at the company for a bit, when you're interested in a new
team, you can usually get some meet-and-greet meeting with current members on
the team.

That's the time to ask really tough questions, even potentially awkward
questions: how many times do you get paged? What's the worst project you've
worked on? What's the average tenure of team members? When people leave the
team, do they leave Amazon? (If they leave Amazon, then the team is less to
blame, otherwise, beware).

~~~
romanovtexas
I would have guessed AWS from your post since it's the more notorious one
about bad WLB. As a new grad SDE1, things are bit horrifying especially since
I've onboarded remotely.

------
diehunde
I would read a book by this guy.

~~~
valbaca
amznymous here

Thanks :)

------
chrledntsurf
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