
Ask HN: Amazon software engineers, how is the work culture now? - tinderliker
Was there any change from the time New York Times article was published? And does the pay + stock compensate for the bad work culture (if there is?)
======
anonazon123
No change since the NYT article.

Amazon only changes things when it has to, and only in a lip-service kind of
way. There was a flurry of discussion and proposals when the article was
published, but it's all died down and we're back to where we were beforehand.

Compensation, culture, and perks are infinitely better at Google, Facebook,
Lyft, Uber, etc. All of them start vesting your stock monthly after 1 year,
whereas Amazon has a ridiculous vesting schedule (5% after year 1, 15% after
year 2, 20% every 6 months thereafter). Not to mention the awful 401k
matching, no free food/drinks, terrible drab offices, etc. All in the name of
"frugality." Leadership claims that our competitors waste their money on these
things, despite all of them being insanely profitable with higher employee
happiness and retention.

I'm working on moving to one of the above competitors now. I recommend
avoiding Amazon, even if the role you've been offered sounds cool.

~~~
sjapkee
>no free food/drinks

It's sooooo important.

~~~
CalRobert
To each their own. I struggle with compulsive eating and free food at a
workplace correlates with weight gain for me.

Of course, that's just me. I'm not saying you should be deprived. I like
getting a free beer or two on Thirsty Thursdays but if I were a recovering
alcoholic I would hate it.

~~~
amenod
I believe GP was being sarcastic... That said, while I don't mind free food
and drinks, I also don't mind taking care of it on my own. The only difference
is if there is a weekly event for all company with food + drink, sort of a
gathering. That does wonders for morale.

~~~
CalRobert
Yeah, where I am now has after-work drinks on Thursdays and I really like it.
We chat, play some video games (we make them so it makes sense), have a beer
or two - it's good.

But I would not be shocked if at least some of the people who I know never
come do so because there's a not small percentage of the population for whom
being around alcohol is incredibly challenging. I'm like that with food - and
truth be told, on those Thursdays I tend to eat too much. But eating too much
doesn't have the same impact professionally as getting drunk (it's still not
great, though).

------
frmramzn
Moved to Google and TBH have cried once or twice because I didn't realize an
employer could be so humane. Amazon was terrifying, but the academic culture I
came from normalized self brutalization to succeed,so I didn't realize how
much they were relying on my lack of a sense of boundaries and personal
priorities to extract excess labor.

~~~
dieterrams
Mind if I ask what team(s) you were on at Amazon? Looking to avoid the worst.

I’m starting to get the impression, though, that if I want to be happiest as a
Big Tech Co. engineer, I really just need to work at Google.

~~~
throwaway84742
I heard FB is good as well, though I still don’t get why they need so many
people to do what they do. Heck, even MS is probably better than Amazon. I
delete all Amazon recruiter emails (of which I receive about 2 per week) as
soon as they arrive.

~~~
stevenwoo
You can tell them to stop contacting you and it works.

~~~
throwaway84742
Not in my case. I’ve asked them numerous times to remove my email, it subsides
for a while and then comes back at the same rate.

~~~
stevenwoo
OK, it happened to me just now, two years after telling them to not contact
me. But it was a different group, was gaming, now is AWS.

------
mter
I work under 40 hours a week with no pressure to work more, I get along with
my coworkers and look forward to going to work in the morning. I have worked a
crunch time that was pretty terrible, but that was a once off. It's been
almost 2 years since my last crunch time.

The comp is decent. It doesn't match google/fb but it's better than a non tech
company. I have a target of ~170 total comp as an SDE II with just under 4
years of experience out of college. This is my last year of my initial stock
grant so my take home is quite a bit over 170.

I've never seen anyone cry at work. Closest was a guy that got pip'd, but he
was genuinely struggling. I can/could see glimmers of truth in the NYT article
but I've never seen it that bad. That said, I am aware that tech (SDEs in
particular) tend to be treated a bit better than everyone else.

~~~
stochastic_monk
What does “pip’d” mean?

~~~
Cofike
Performance improvement plan. Basically a chance to get your act together
before they fire you.

~~~
jamiethompson
Some would argue it's more of a "start looking for a new job, we're about to
fire you" warning.

~~~
smueller1234
I don't know whether you're making this statement about Amazon, in which case
I have no insight and you can stop reading now, or whether that's intended as
a more general statement.

If it's the latter, I'd like to challenge the assertion that a PIP is
necessarily the company trying to get rid of someone. In my experience as a
manager, I've always made sure that PIPs are as honestly designed to get
people back on track as could be. In, say, the last five years as a manager,
and in my organisation of a couple hundred engineers, there were exactly two
cases (and the key point is that I recall both specifically) where a PIP was
primarily motivated to document the already extremely obvious (to anyone far
and wide) underperformance and attitude problem. And even then, the managers
in question had the professionalism to design the PIP to be eminently
achievable.

Generally speaking, I find the likelihood of a PIP to be adversarial and/or a
tool to be able to fire somebody to be much more strongly connected to whether
there has been an adversarial relationship between the employee and their
manager. For that reason, I found that it paid off hugely to make sure people
move to different teams & managers and get a reset there before taking any
drastic action. In the same way as people are said to leave due to their
managers, not jobs, it's key to take that personal component out of a bad
situation.

~~~
ergothus
> In, say, the last five years as a manager, and in my organisation of a
> couple hundred engineers, there were exactly two cases....where a PIP was
> primarily motivated

In my workplaces I would consider 2 PIPs over 5 years among 200 (highly
filtered) engineers to be a normal rate, yet you are implying this is a small
fraction of the total PIPs.

I'm not a manager so it is definitely possible that I'm unaware of many
instances, but to have a pip for more than low single digit percentages of
your workforce seems like a big red flag. Whether the motivation is cya or
honest encouragement, a pip still means their current performance is
unacceptable, so you seem to be describing a harsh environment (or a large
collection of unmotivated employees, but the former seems more likely in this
industry).

Can you clarify?

~~~
smueller1234
I can try. :)

The industry this was in was moderately high pressure, but by no means a grind
like you might see in games, etc. We painstakingly avoided bs deadlines, for
example.

To a first order approximation, five years by 200 engineers is a thousand
engineer years. So naively, that'd be two PIPs per thousand engineers per
year. Of course, you can argue that this isn't true since the performance of
an individual from one year to the next is correlated. But this was a very
rapidly changing organisation where people move between departments regularly
and there's a lot of growth. The latter means that you get a lot of new people
that might turn out to be a poor fit. So I actually think the original
approximation of quite conservative: 2 out of 1000 engineers being
disagreeable about their performance assessment sounds like a total luxury for
managers!

But you're right to point out that that's only the bad cases. Our company had
a(n HR imposed) rule that anyone receiving sub par ratings (needs improvement)
for two consecutive quarters had to go on a PIP.

In a growing organisation, complexity keeps increasing: more coordination
overhead. More things all going on at the same time, more scaling challenges,
etc. So naturally, performance that was just about alright last year just
about DOESN'T cut it this year. This means that in my experience, it would be
a sign of rating inflation or managers that avoid difficult conversations if
the fraction of "needs improvement" in any given quarter was less than ~5
percent. That's a number I just pulled out of thin air, but in the right
ballpark in my experience. And there you go: you get several times as many
PIPs as the "bad" ones discussed above.

------
jamdamu
Amazon has taken steps to prevent abusive behavior from occurring, such as
creating a process for engineers to challenge managerial pips and allowing
engineers to transfer while on development plans. In my opinion, these steps
seem more like treating the symptom than the cause. The overall culture
remains the same. Engineers are still treated by management as resources to be
allocated, and for me, this is the hardest pill to swallow. Even though my
manager, my skip, and my peers tell me I do good work, at the end of the day,
I feel that all I am is X capacity points per sprint. The feeling of being
disposable in the huge machine that is Amazon is quite depressing.

~~~
gigatexal
What gave it away? The fact that there’s a department called Human Resources?
The only way to not feel like a cog in a wheel is to be your own boss.

~~~
sokoloff
> a department called Human Resources

And in that phrase, "Human" is the _adjective_...

~~~
dasmoth
The alternative seems to be something like “people operations”. I don’t find
that any more encouraging, really...

~~~
CamTin
Back in the Dark Ages when people still had pensions and unions, this
department was called "Personnel," which was perfectly descriptive and non-
humiliating. This is obviously the reason it had to change to something
orwellian that lumps in a company's employees with its inventory of pig iron
and staple removers.

~~~
dasmoth
Yikes, I had totally forgotten that term (which perhaps reinforces your
point..)

------
mproust
I was at Amazon for 8 years, left in January of this year. VP I worked for
routinely belittled very senior engineers, made some of them cry/move
teams/quit. The VP was never disciplined or had his scope reduced.

Had projects cancelled on a whim without an actual replacement/reason.

At Amazon, I wasn't a person, but some resource.

Some orgs were fine, most are not.

A manager from a "no jerk policy" org told me there is a culture of cruelty in
Amazon management, and if he played the game he would have been at a higher
level.

ymmv.

------
uji
Worked in an AWS team, and the biggest issue was constant fire-fighting and
oncall/operational load. Code quality is really bad across all teams in AWS
due to constant prioritization of features over stability. We use to get 20
pages a day, and it was very common to get 2-3 pages in the middle of night.
It was horrible and yet management didn't pay much attention on fixing it. At
the end devs starting leaving the team one by one. Recently I heard that the
team hired twice the number of devs to reduce frequency of oncall rotation.

~~~
mabbo
Fulfillment was like that 5 years ago. Just widely reputed to be the worst
place. New upper management came in and started rating the L6/L7 management on
their highsev counts. Things got a lot better very quickly.

~~~
shanghaiaway
What's highsev?

~~~
mabbo
Every software team is their own operational team as well. A highsev is a high
severity ticket/incident, leading to someone being paged in for immediate
assistance.

------
BigTex420
Out of the 6 coworkers I’m close with, I’ve seen every single one of them cry
for work related reasons at least once over the past year. Peak is hell.

~~~
not_real_acct
I'm a software consultant so I've had the opportunity to work at nearly a
hundred different offices.

I've seen employees driven to tears at two companies, and both of them were
wretched to work for.

It became my barometer of whether the company was a good place to work for.

I really like working for companies in finance. They're generally laid back
and the pay is decent, not great.

~~~
gnahckire
I find that interesting b/c I have a few friends who work at large banks in
the finance side of things.

They would not describe their work culture as laid back.

------
amzn12124
We lost "anytime feedback" and end of year reviews changed dramatically. This
is a horrible loss.

Previously, the anytime feedback tool had you, at any time, give anyone else
in the company feedback (positive and negative) in the form of "Situation,
Behavior, Impact". What happened, how did the person react, how did it impact
me. It went to the person's manager and into a record somewhere. At the end of
every year, you were asked to give additional anytime feedback to you entire
team and anyone who asked for it. Managers read through all that feedback,
summarized and gave you a full year end review that was the source of a lot of
my personal growth.

The NYT referred to this as "ratting out your coworkers", so now that's gone.

Instead, there's a short, stupid and less-than-anonymous version that takes
about 5 minutes and is done just once per year. Your manager doesn't read any
of that feedback before they give you your year end review and pay changes,
but they do give you a verbatim copy of what was said- you can figure out who
said what pretty easily.

The problem was that 1% of the managers were sociopaths who abused their
power. The response was to increase their power.

But I'm still here, for some reason.

Edit: no, let's be fair here. I'm still here because I like what I do. I like
the problem space, and I like the people I work with.

------
cm2012
The talk here about sticking at a job that makes you cry, when you have in
demand skills and can work anywhere, is nuts to me.

~~~
sadamznintern
This is incorrect because i cant pass a Google or FB loop and im convinced its
eventually going to lead to my suicide.

~~~
fromcscq
Mate get a grip. I see you posting everywhere — Blind, Reddit, here. And
different aliases everywhere. Seriously, stop defining your self worth by
where you work. It's sad. If you're so dissatisfied with Amazon's "prestige"
just quit.

~~~
dang
Telling someone who expresses suicidal feelings to "get a grip", and using the
J-word ("just") to tell them a supposedly easy way out of it, is cruelty. I'm
sure that you don't mean to be cruel, so please don't do this.

If there were an easy way out, the commenter would have found it. What he or
she needs is respect, empathy, and support for finding a not-so-easy way out
of it. If you can't do that, please don't reply, regardless of how annoying
you find the comments.

~~~
fromcscq
You're right. I didn't mean to be cruel... sorry about that, but I can't seem
to edit/remove my comment.

------
jkingsbery
I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and have been at Amazon for almost 2 years. I
work in the Retail org in the NYC office.

Overall, I've been happy with my choice to work at Amazon. Compared to most
other tech companies I've worked for, the hours are predictable and not that
intense. Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's
the same way everywhere in the industry. I like what I do. I like the projects
I work on. I like my coworkers. I'm happy with my compensation.

In terms of perks, there aren't free lunches every day, but most orgs that I
know of have some budget for a snack shelf. There are also other perks though
- there are are opportunities to learn from other software engineers in the
form of tech talks, internal conferences and the like. There are also
opportunities to learn about the business side as an engineer.

I've generally found other people at Amazon very willing to help. I've had
people outside of my team review designs and give feedback (and I've done
likewise for other teams). I'm currently working on a project that's required
me to reach out to a bunch of different teams to get input on how to approach
a problem, and all of them have either accepted a meeting invite or responded
to my email with the info I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time (a
couple days).

Amazon has 14 Leadership Principles, and I've found that people mostly take
them to heart. For example, it doesn't mean that you can use "Insisting on the
Highest Standards" as a blank check to refactor your code to the point that
it's immaculate, but it does mean that most of the product people I work with
get that tech debt is a real thing and slows down product development at some
point, and they will budget time to address tech debt when given suggestions
by engineers.

Most of the people who have left our team in the past 12 months have left to
go work on other teams. Some of them left to work for a different org, some
because they wanted to work in a different office.

Amazon's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and most of the things that are
frequently raised as issues on HackerNews are, in my experience and the
experience of everyone I've talked to at Amazon, generally not issues.

~~~
apexkid
You seem to be a well conditioned Amazonian because you possess the same
nature of dismissing concerns instantly rather than accepting that something
is probably wrong and needs to be fixed.

If people have complained on similar lines throughout on Hacker news or NYC
article or other sources, that means there is a pattern. Maybe you have been
fortunate enough to not have experienced some of the misery faced by others,
but please follow amazon's most important principle of being data driven and
think about it.

~~~
paxunix
One sometimes-unfortunate thing about the Internet and global accessibility to
other peoples' opinions is that it's easy to find other people "just like
you". This leads to a signal amplification that doesn't necessarily mean the
problem is as bad or as far-reaching as the group would have you think. It
certainly can be, but concluding that from a limited news sources with
unspoken agendas isn't accurate. We can all get in a huddle and complain about
things, but there is a non-small number of people who just ignore it--even
though they would have a positive counter-argument to offer--and instead go on
about their business because they don't want to get involved.

Remember that when you're reading the news (here or elsewhere, since rarely is
news generated on HN) you and your outrage are being used for marketing (and
possibly furthering some other agenda).

I agree with your closing sentence about being data driven and thinking about
it--getting out of the news bubble and using your own brain to analyze
something is good.

------
leoharsha2
I interned at Amazon a 11 months ago at Hyderabad, India. I used to go to the
office at 1PM and return home at 2AM. So much work pressure. They literally
treated as a robots. Yes, we did work as a robot because they lure us by
offering PPO( Pre- placement offer).

They used to give us a weekly task which was never supposed to complete if you
work even for 60 hours/week. Thus our whole weekend was ruined in completing
this task.

I have got a mentor who himself can't able to complete the given task so he
gives his some of his work to interns.

Amazon is a great place to learn but not for the work.

------
akerro
New entries are still being added, so probably great
[https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home](https://sites.google.com/site/thefaceofamazon/home)

------
apexkid
Nothing has changed.

I have worked in Amazon for many years now in India. Jeff himself doesn't seem
interested in taking work culture seriously. I have never seen any interviews
of him after NYC article where he accepted that something was going wrong and
needs to be fixed. Instead he turned the whole debate into work-life harmony
rhetoric.

In India, the situation is far worse than US. There is less transparency and
more opportunities by senior leadership to rule with an iron fist without any
accountability. Concerns are suppressed instantly. One might have been an
excellent employee for couple of years but for some reason if you are not on
top of your game for even a quarter, you will start hearing complains from
everyone and the situation can go upto PIP (Performance Improvement). The
culture completely lacks the emotion of "Let me help you". It is heavily
influenced by politics and survival of the fittest which might be fine for a
small period but takes a toll on you in long term. Probably this explains why
attrition is so high in Amazon.

~~~
paxunix
Working for Amazon in India is almost like working for an entirely different
company and is not a great comparison to working for Amazon in the US.

Cultural norms in the US apply in the US; cultural norms in India apply in
India. I've generally found Indian managers and developers to approach the
work entirely differently than their US counterparts. Not a negative--just an
observation.

There does seem to be a pervasive undercurrent of "if I do good work on my
team here in India, I can get out of here and go to the US as soon as my promo
goes through". This sentiment naturally comes out in behaviour on teams and
around coworkers.

------
ssalazars
1\. It depends on the company (Amazon vs AWS) and it varies from org to org,
and team to team. Just like in every place there's going to be great and crapy
people. In 3 years at Amazon I had the opportunity to work next to great
people, but also with people at the complete opposite side.

2\. In my case, it did not. I decided my happiness/wellness and health
(physical and mental) were more important.

------
thelastidiot
Ex-Amazonian here (for real). Put up with almost 4 years of what I would now
consider some serious sweatshop practices from my managers (had a few in that
time lapse), for not much at the end but it felt good to leave the place.
After that, I took two months off to recover from stress and work exhaustion.
Work only, no life. Crunch mode was a daily pill. The mission sounded cool and
staying that long because it felt that we were helping each other in a prison
camp with my team. Frugality is a joke, because top execs will get rewarded. I
would never consider this company again and never will recommend anyone to
work there.

------
throwaway243424
Joined Amazon Dublin in the Summer of last year as SDE2 (that's the category
where most engineers will fall into), so way after the NYT article. Pay is
very good for Europe - AFAIK one of the best for the position and above G/F/MS
in Dublin (according to Glassdoor), though I think that at the end of the day
you might take more home if you're working for G/F and living in
London/Switzerland (due to lower taxes).

As for the work environment, like in all big companies, it really depends in
which team and project you land. My team and adjacent teams are full of
respectful people and work is pretty good. We're building some "large scale"
systems, and technology wise it's pretty cool. But I've heard stories from
people in other teams where they were relegated to doing oncall and fixing
bugs. I also know 1 person that didn't make it through the probation period
(he was in one of those oncall teams). The company is big and has a lot of
different projects, so YM(will definitely)V. I've had to interact with a lot
of different people across the company and my impression is overall positive.

In terms of work load, it's not light. At the same time, right now, it's not
that high, but that will probably change once we're closer to the deadlines. I
enjoy it, it keeps me active and not bored at work. I know people who do 8-17
(1 lunch hour) EVERY DAY. Pretty much everyone around me works 8-9 hours. The
teams around me are also very flexible with remote work (a lot of us work
remotely 1-2 days a week). In term of the actual work, me and my team have had
to design systems, write documents (the 6 pagers, design reviews, etc), and
we're implementing them. A lot of technical freedom. I also hear manager refer
to people as resources and I dislike it - not sure why/where that terminology
comes from, but I think it's something common inside and outside the company.

Yes, perks are pretty much non-existent. No snacks, no free lunch/dinner, no
gym, just water, fruit, and coffee. Heck, not even free tshirts and the
employee discount is ridiculous. But if that's what you're looking for in a
company, then I'm sorry, you won't find it here. Yes, you'll also get stack
ranked at the beginning of the year, and getting promoted to SDE3 is not easy.

One interesting thing, at least around me, the vast majority of people seems
to be 30+ old. From the teams around me, I think no one (apart from me) reads
HN. People come from all around Europe (and some from Asia).

------
gregdunn
I've been with Amazon for coming up on 5 years.

I love it here, and have for the entirety of the time I've been here. There
are some minor changes I would make if I could wave a magic wand, but I can't
imagine any workplace is perfect, and when I say minor, I really mean it.

I don't really have a lot to say about things as they relate to the New York
Times article, because the workplace described in said article was never even
remotely close to the experiences I've had.

I work on a fantastic team, and I work with some amazing teams. Some of the
smartest people I've ever met. I don't see myself leaving the company any time
soon.

------
user68858788
Twelve managers in three years. Quality of life changes dramatically depending
on who you get. Left after being put on a PIP - stack ranking in action. Not
worth trying to fight it with that particular manager.

------
kevan
I joined in mid-2016, My team is in a pretty good spot now.

------
wizardofmysore
In my team and all the orgs under my manager's manager is pretty chill. We are
a team out of India. In India the comp is really high compared to other Indian
companies. The vesting cycle is same as US though. I have heard about the bad
culture in US. I have never seen anyone cry or even stressed. We don't have
many crunch days.

~~~
tinderliker
TBH Amazon Indian org is known (from the Seattle folks I spoke to) for being
sub-par filled with employees from service companies, so no surprises there.

~~~
wizardofmysore
On the contrary I think the frugality strategy has lead to hiring the top
talent in India and not in the US. Therefore the pay here is higher compared
to the bigger companies (not MNCs but product as well), I am from an Indian
unicorn startup and the pay was very competitive. The US opinion of any
Indians IT worker seems to be the same, that is that we are service oriented
workers who don't code, therefore I'd take it with a grain of salt on what
they say.

But yeah, the talent here is good since hiring talent is cheaper here compared
to US. If you have to pay 170k$ to hire the best in US then in India you'll be
able to hire the best at 50 LPA which is about 70k$.

I have been part of many interview panels and they haven't been any easy
interviews as such.

~~~
vthallam
I'm curious as how are the salaries in top start ups in India compared to the
likes of Amazon/Google? Like for a mid-senior engineer. Appreciate any numbers
you know off.

------
tmaly
I am curious outside of the other companies of FANG, does Amazon represent
median representation of workplace culture or are they an outlier?

I have not worked at Amazon, but I have seen worse types of workplace culture
in some cases over my career.

------
pontianak
I joined fresh out of college about a year back, no one respects your gender
identity and everyone almost always purposefully refuses to use the correct
pronouns

------
alehul
Could anyone here comment on Amazon Robotics? What would I expect as a SWE
working there? Is it different (better/worse) than Amazon as a whole?

------
exBarrelSpoiler
Anyone who's worked at both Amazon and Apple want to compare the two?

------
lazypanda
depends on team

~~~
goostavos
It does entirely.

In an org consisting of hundreds of thousands of people, "culture" is a pretty
local phenomenon.

The Amazon experience is entirely dictated by the team on which you land.

~~~
ssalazars
I agree. But in my experience, even when VPs expose a vision of their culture,
directors/GMs are the ones who end up exercising their vision/culture to their
teams.

------
dewiz
Check this out [https://www.teamblind.com/article/Amazon---is-it-really-
that...](https://www.teamblind.com/article/Amazon---is-it-really-that-bad-to-
work-for-OApSnQ7V)

and more topics on the same site

------
alagu
Can someone share the mentioned NYT Article mentioned?

~~~
et-al
[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-
amazon-...](https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-
wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html)

(And an ad-infested blurb on Bezos's follow-up:
[http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-responds-nyt-
repor...](http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-responds-nyt-report-
amazon-working-conditions-2015-8))

------
sadamznintern
I interned at Amazon last year in the Alexa org (non-frontline team in ML).

My team was rarely in the office before 10:30 or after 6, even during crunch
time (we launched our feature during my internship) but i did see code review
responses at odd hours sometimes.

I enjoyed the project a bunch, and while my coworkers werent the most social
bunch they were pretty smart and effective. I did pretty well and exceeded
managers expectations for my project to get a return offer.

I shopped around a bunch after and interviewed at all the companies I could
but got rejected by all of the top ones (FB after phone, Google after onsite,
Airbnb and Cruise after coding challenge..) so I ultimately picked the return
offer despite getting a 3 other offers in the fintech space because I liked
the project and location at Amazon.

Does that mean I’m a happy camper? Fuck no. My total comp for the first year
is only $145k out of undergrad with a base of $106k. My friends at places like
Google, FB and Cruise are making more like $180k-$230k by comparison. Perks
are also nonexistent.

The worst part, though, is knowing that i have become stuck in a company with
a significantly lower hiring bar. Im honestly terrified that the value on the
resume will decline over time and i will never be able to get into a more
prestigious company. The idea of being relegated to a 2nd or third tier
company has been eating at me, and comments on places like CSCQ, Blind and
this AskHN nearly drove me to suicide before.

~~~
montyf
Sorry, but is this a serious post? Honest question.

> My total comp for the first year is only $145k out of undergrad with a base
> of $106k. My friends at places like Google, FB and Cruise are making more
> like $180k-$230k by comparison.

Heaven forbid someone is making more money than they know what to do with than
you are.

> Im honestly terrified that the value on the resume will decline over time
> and i will never be able to get into a more prestigious company.

Is this a real concern? Surely you can be hired on technical merit. Google
hires new grads! And people who only worked at "top-tier" companies still have
to pass an interview everywhere.

> The idea of being relegated to a 2nd or third tier company has been eating
> at me, and comments on places like CSCQ, Blind and this AskHN nearly drove
> me to suicide before.

That's sick. Not to be insensitive for you, but our priorities in this
industry are whack. Surely you can find a meaningful job outside of a megacorp
that's bleeding the world dry. Or do you just care about money and status?

~~~
dang
You have some fair points but your comment crosses into personal attack, and
that does more harm than the fair points do good. Could you please (re-)read
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
and not post like that here?

~~~
leohutson
What's the protocal for a commenter with suicidal ideation? I feel like many
of the replies here are unhelpful, and you should do something about it.

~~~
dang
It seems to me that the only human response is to express respect and offer
what support we can.

I agree with you about the unhelpful replies and am attempting to respond to
them all. If you notice one I missed, it would be helpful to send a link to
hn@ycombinator.com.

People don't do this kind of this kind of thing intentionally, but because
their interpretation of others' comments are distorted by cognitive biases
that unfortunately nearly everyone is aware of. It leads to inappropriate
responses, and occasionally cruel and even dangerous ones.

------
sadamznintern
I couldnt get into any of the companies you mentioned and picked Amazon as a
last resort. What should I do now? Ive contemplated suicide but i dont know if
thats a wise choice.

~~~
kajecounterhack
> Ive contemplated suicide but i dont know if thats a wise choice.

I don't think it's wise but you can't take it from a rando. So I'd seek
objectivity from sources you trust. Many get this from friends. Sometimes
friends can't provide everything you need.

If you've never tried therapy or are skeptical about it, I've found that the
healthy way to think about it is as an objectivity machine. It's a black box
for you to pay money (a.k.a use your nice tech healthcare plan) and get a
person who isn't incentivized to lie to you or hurt you / is sworn to your
best interest. The value they provide is objective feedback about how you're
thinking about the world. Your mind's way of viewing things has blind spots;
you're limited by what input data you got as you moved through the world. When
you're making decisions / synthesizing your experiences it's incredibly useful
to get validation data so that you can measure the performance of your brain-
model.

^ Also since every black box isn't equal, if you find that a therapist isn't
providing the kind of throughput or trustworthiness that you need, you can
shop around.

If you think life isn't worth living, please seek some objectivity because
it's a rather drastic decision you have to make that can't be made again.

~~~
sadamznintern
People have tried to talk sense into me in the past but I’ve been somewhat
distrustful. The black box analogy is a good way to reframe my thinking.
Thanks!

------
codeonfire
Thanks to linked in, I saw who was on a 1st level connection with the ex-
director there who was arrested for running ads for prostitutes in Bellevue.
Those 1st level contacts are still there and in higher positions now. Being
1st level on linkedin doesn't mean they are the same character or were part of
the crime, but they are all in management positions. I emailed some women that
still worked there and told them they should leave.

~~~
jonhendry18
That's a really bizarre way of thinking. 1st level connection doesn't mean
personally close. Are _you_ willing to be held responsible for the misdeeds
your own 1st level connections might get up to?

~~~
codeonfire
1st level and in the same small org. People that would have known,
interviewed, and hired the person. Companies don't just hire rando's of the
street they know nothing about into high management positions.

