
Who’s in charge at Amazon? Moves on secretive S Team signal giant’s priorities - wallflower
https://www.seattletimes.com/business/amazon/whos-in-charge-at-amazon-moves-on-secretive-s-team-signal-tech-giants-priorities/
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Pfhreak
One of the things I really liked about working for AWS was the accessibility
of the S-team. Even as a fairly junior engineer I was in meetings where you
could get their opinions, see where they were going, and understand their
goals.

AWS has a lot of things I don't love (not least of all, their policy towards
developing games in your spare time), but they had a ton of rigor around
setting goals while still giving dev teams the opportunity to (mostly?) drive
the details of what those goals were. (I've heard this is maybe not the case
in all AWS teams, but I had some great local leadership as well.)

If they could fix a couple of deeply set cultural issues (open source and side
projects were definitely hard or impossible), not lean quite so heavily on
their employees (I was oncall 24/7 for months in the worst times and received
no extra comp), and disconnect themselves from _whatever_ is going on with the
retail side's treatment of labor.... Well, I'm not sure I'd come back,
actually. They'd have to change quite a bit more -- the promo process, the
stack ranking/"top grading" twice yearly, better benefits and comp...

But I do genuinely miss working in the AWS org. There's a lot of incredible
things to learn there. While I don't see myself coming back, the lessons I
learned there have been absolutely invaluable.

~~~
lowiqengineer
> Well, I'm not sure I'd come back, actually

I’m at Amazon right now (Ads) and honestly this makes me really sad. It feels
like I’m not allowed to be proud of where I work.

~~~
Klonoar
You're certainly allowed to be proud... but others don't have to respect your
career choices (and many won't, which is fine).

Personally speaking, I've had Amazon try to pull me a few times and I just
stopped responding to their emails. It's a large company and I can agree that
there's leagues of separation between, say, AWS and warehouse operations...
but I also just don't care, I can't co-sign the kind of stuff that you hear
about (and has been verified by people coming forward).

The tech industry is large enough that if you're good enough to work at
Amazon, you probably have options.

My 2 cents, I guess.

~~~
lowiqengineer
I've been rejected at Google and Facebook and most of HN doesn't think my
total compensation is all that impressive, so, I probably don't have many
options to be real with you.

~~~
heymijo
> _my goal is to make ~$250k a year as fast as possible. To do so at my
> current company would take at least 3 years and 2 promotions_

Hi,

I don't want to dunk on you, but I would truly encourage you to gain some
perspective on just how myopic a view this is.

(I couldn't reply to your comment below where you said this)

~~~
lowiqengineer
I don't think it's myopic if everyone I follow on twitter and see on instagram
is getting Hawaiian offsites and European work trips at Google and Hudson
River Trading while I can't even go to Seattle for our internal ML conference
because it got filled up too quickly for the last 3 years or whatever.

I enjoy what I work on..I just wish I was treated more like all of my friends
and former coworkers.

~~~
hamburglar
Honestly, interview around with no expectations if you haven't. You may be
surprised at what else is going to be offered. I'm not going to tell you it's
necessarily 400k or anything, but the variance is quite high if you're willing
to relocate to, say, Seattle. An amazon resume is worth a certain amount of
money, and there are other companies that will offer you things you enjoy
working on too.

~~~
lowiqengineer
I’ve tried, but haven’t gotten interviews from the companies I’m interested
in. I did get a offer from a hedge fund, but it was a severe lowball (50-70%
of typical offers) probably due to my interview performance.

~~~
chillydawg
If it was a good hedge fund, they won't offer anyone they don't rate. If they
offered you because they think you're mediocre and can get you cheap - do not
work for them, they're charlatans.

~~~
lowiqengineer
It was Citadel. I think Two Sigma is considered more impressive.

~~~
chillydawg
Citadel are certainly not charlatans. Are you sure you're not just good at
what you do but have crippling imposter syndrome?

