
Working at Amazon - kawera
https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/10/26/Working-at-Amazon
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xchaotic
The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their
size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but
Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig
going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given
neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're
late, like applying to Amazon now would be, you're just a blue collar worker,
with higher turnover - you earn more and spend on rent. Especially in places
like Seattle if I was to relocate with the family, I'd be an indentured
servant, with obligations to pay high rent/mortgage, I'd probably have nowhere
to change jobs to, if Amazon didn't work out.

One can dwell on small things like which version control does a company use,
but ultimately, they are failing to deliver on the "quality of life" thing.

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sumitgt
> Especially in places like Seattle if I was to relocate with the family, I'd
> be an indentured servant, with obligations to pay high rent/mortgage, I'd
> probably have nowhere to change jobs to, if Amazon didn't work out.

That's quite the opposite. Wouldn't living in a big city mean more choices?
Seattle for instance has high paying job options from Microsoft, Google, FB if
you decide to leave Amazon.

However, yes having more acceptance of remote work would be great.

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methodover
Aren't the Google and FB offices in Seattle relatively small, satellite
offices?

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sumitgt
Google Seattle-Kirkland is the third largest Google office. I wouldn't
classify it as "satellite".

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marssaxman
There is no such thing as "Google Seattle-Kirkland", no matter what the
managers and recruiters may tell you. There is "Google Seattle", which is
located in the Fremont neighborhood, a small and friendly office which I would
definitely classify as a "satellite"; then there is "Google Kirkland", located
on the other side of a large lake, over in the direction of Microsoft, which
is certainly a big place. Still... Google is all about the mothership.
Everything is centered culturally on Mountain View (called "MTV" internally).

Well... that's how it was when I worked there; things could have changed a lot
in the last five years, perhaps. It sounds like the new Seattle office they're
planning to build will be less of a satellite.

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amznthrow
Amazon has one thing going for it that I think is a huge deal for a standard
BigCo job: if you don't like your initial team, you can switch ANY TIME. And
if you're an engineer, you can probably join any team you want.

The reason this is such a big deal is that when applying to any company,
you'll get placed on a team and it's really hard to get enough information on
the culture, mission, management, etc. Once you're inside? Tons of
information, and a lot of coworkers you can ask. This really reduces the
downside risk of a new job.

I know this because I work at Amazon, and switched teams very early. I'm much
happier on my second team, and probably would have quit on the first team.

~~~
Danihan
What was wrong with the first team? How large are teams, generally? Are we
talking like, six people, or sixty?

~~~
amznthrow
I didn't like the project I was assigned, didn't like the underlying design of
the org's charter, didn't like the hours. I also got transferred between
managers. I didn't really like it from the director down. It sounded way
cooler from the pitch the hiring manager gave me. Team size is not a well-
defined concept, TBH -- hierarchies can be structured in very different ways,
and a team can be comprised of people with different managers. Also, if you
love your director and adjacent teams, it would be unlikely you'd hate your
own team.

Once I was inside, I found a few teams that sounded cool. At that point, I
could easily meet people on those teams, read survey results on the managers,
ask around about the new teams, visit the offices at 6-7 PM and see who was
still around. This is somewhere between 10-100x the information I could get as
an internal employee than as an external applicant. This led me to joining a
team where I'm very happy. And if things went really badly -- I could have
switched again! (Might look bad if you switch a ton though)

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maxxxxx
I think AWS is probably the place to be Amazon. The whole idea of the cloud is
that everything gets automated so good and clean engineering will be rewarded.
I think working on the Amazon e-commerce is much less fun because it's much
messier to deal with issues like customer support, taxes and other stuff.

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top256
it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1
employer.

They used to be a tier2.

AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle
of the night.

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falcolas
> pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night

For multinational corporations, this has never made sense to me. Why do we
insist on relying groggy, "at the bottom of their performance curve" engineers
to keep your system up, instead of someone in the middle of their work day?

IMO, if you're waking someone up in the middle of the night, something is
horribly wrong, and it's not the issue you woke that person up for.

~~~
mabbo
Having done Amazon on-call for five years, I can give some background on that.

First, the front-line pager duty is usually hit by an ops eng team first. Each
of those teams has an India group and an North America group. If they can't
resolve the issue, they page in the developers. Having good Ops Eng guys
supporting you is a blessing.

There's also a very strong incentive for teams to write good software and test
before deploying when you know damn well that if you're deploying something
that doesn't work, you're the guy who will have to deal with it at 3am. Having
strong integration and system tests suddenly becomes incredibly important.

Edit: and as dsfyu404ed said, the Ops Eng guys will be smart enough to narrow
down where the problem is usually. If you're being paged, it's usually your
team's fault.

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asdfasdfasd333
Thanks for writing this, and with all due respect:

This exact article could have been copy/pasted from any of the other big-tech
companies. What makes Amazon different?

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faitswulff
The author says as much:

> ...but at the end of the day it’s just an­oth­er high-tech com­pa­ny,
> noth­ing sur­pris­ing.

~~~
peterwwillis
So, basically:

"If you like being shunt into small teams to work on small projects that take
too long and go nowhere, being unable to effect larger changes that actually
improve things upon the sprawling mass of wasted effort and reinvented wheels,
no long term organization or planning or realistic goals, no semblance of
cross-group communication or organization, total enslavement to a disjointed
hierarchical mess of disparate initiatives that are ignorant of one another
(to say nothing of even caring to help each other), and wasting half your time
supporting legacy systems that nobody has the energy or balls to finally put
in the dirt, welcome to working at a big tech company."

I might be a little cynical.

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news_to_me
> I could go on about di­ver­si­ty ... and so on, but at the end of the day
> it’s just an­oth­er high-tech com­pa­ny, noth­ing sur­pris­ing.

Dealbreaker. "On balance" in this industry isn't good enough, and if any
company can take a leadership role in promoting diversity, it's one of the Big
Four.

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gtsteve
The site is now offline, probably due to load.

Google cache link for the lazy:
[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:70Vxjs...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:70VxjsUrScIJ:https://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2017/10/26/Working-
at-Amazon+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=uk)

~~~
Danihan
Thanks for the mirror, but my God this is a tepid article.

TL;DR - Working at Amazon AWS is just fine and pretty much what you'd expect.

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gamedna
While informative, this post is extremely non-contentious, and i suspect on
purpose. Much of what is said here can be said about most companies that are
at scale. Probably by design b/c if his employer or manager found out about
it, i am sure there would be backlash.

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0xbear
I heard they will actually cut your base pay if stock goes up “too much”. Is
this true?

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skookum
This is not true. However there is a target total compensation range for your
[level X review ratings] and if the stock price growth results in your future
total compensation projecting above your target compensation range you won't
get refresh RSU grants.

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0xbear
What’s the justification though?

