Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon:
What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume.
I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product.
The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there.
Adding on thoughts:
One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable.
Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical).
Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right)
Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
We use projen where I work for the past year or so for new projects. It’s pretty good and the devs are pretty active in terms of responding to bugs and not being shit at documentation.
Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)
> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).
Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)
The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.
I might have just drunken too much of the koolade and believed in the mythos of lowflyinghawk + customer obsession.
What I meant by this is, in my personal opinion, there were a bunch of half baked products they should have just not mentioned at reinvent because said products never really materialized or had significant usage oncerns for a long, long time after the announcement.
The pressure to announce more and more at reinvent while the quality of what was being announced dropped was the specific feeling I'm talking about.
Sorry kind of on a caffeine high and brain isn't working too well right now. I'm also reluctant to throw shade on the products/teams I'm thinking of because I didn't work on them and I don't want to give them any heat, but I'll say it was in the 2017-2019 era I felt it start to change.
I think it contrasts with the really cool launches like Lambda, Aurora, API Gateway, Sagemaker, etc that has just come out before then.
Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.
That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.
> if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction
The path I took was to just start doing it and expecting it for critical topics within my team (which was around 200-250 people when I started it). It takes several iterations to get good at it and the first few feel like it’s quite foreign and even wasteful. (It puts a lot more work on the author, by design.)
Eventually, it escaped just my group and (with support from others, including the CEO, who liked the process after seeing some of the documents that I or others shared with them) and is now fairly common in the corporate center for our standardized processes, though not nearly as standardized as I perceive Amazon to be in its use.
Basically: start doing it and stick to it for at least 5 complete cycles. Make sure that influential people (not necessarily org leaders) are public in their praise of well-constructed and effective documents.
From experience, yes / kind of; for the project I'm on right now, I introduced ADRs (https://adr.github.io/madr/) as a not-too-formal, but still formal way to talk about technology. This was after ten years of working in more hype-driven culture, where the choice was made by one person, or it was the tech du jour, or some guy spent a weekend playing with it so obviously we should integrate it.
It's a simple shift where people have to do their homework instead of just yeet something over the fence. You want to solve X? Present us with three options and we'll talk about it. You want to introduce Y? But we already use X to solve that, present us with new insights and the justification to spend the time on it.
It's far from perfect and it requires buy-in and (self) discipline, but it's still better than what happened before. Because some companies are still paying the debt of hype-driven development even though the people that introduced it are long gone.
- People leave 2 bullshit comments like "justification needed" for participation points and then go drink coffee instead of actually reading the doc or googling for said justification
- People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
People taking calls from cars (and thinking it's OK in the first place) is exactly why we're going back to 5 days in office. People are simply taking too much advantage. You're being paid to work those 40 hours a week, not do whatever the hell you want to during the day and try to cram in work while you're driving from one errand to the next.
Why does any comment always assume the average American is commuting ludicrous distances each morning. People do this, but its very, very rare. Hyperbole is getting in the way of discussion.
1-hour one way commutes are NOT rare at all in Amazon's hub locations. Housing near the office is supremely expensive, school districts are also not the best, and most people have partners and need to live in a location that balances 2 peoples' commutes. On top of that, Amazon is such a big employer that they single-handedly make the traffic worse in at least Seattle.
Also, keep in mind that it isn't just the commute time. For a 1-hour commute I also need to prepare for the 1-hour commute, which includes making and packing up a lunch (because many offices have no cafeteria or no options that I'm able to eat), packing up my electric toothbrush and water flosser (because I need to brush 3 times a day for my braces and they won't let me leave shit at the office). Others need to deal with feeding pets, blah blah. For people with train commutes they need to deal with uncertainty in traffic just getting to the train station, so they have to leave an extra 15-20 minutes early and kill time waiting for the train on the platform because the next train won't come for a fucking hour (this is America), and leave time to line up to buy the goddamn parking ticket for the train station.
For the past 2 years people were able to roll out of bed and into a meeting, grabbing something from the fridge on the way. That's why stuff was efficient. Now we're going back to an inefficient world with the same high expectations of an effecient world.
Again, if we are talking about FANG HQs, anything in the Bay Area, Austin, or NYC then yea sure. I'm just suggesting that rhetorically this is a losing strategy because it's such an outlier. Most Americans don't work at the headquarter(s) of the most successful company on Earth.
Counting the time to get dressed and brush your teeth towards the office is comically absurd, in my opinion, even if I take your point. THAT SAID good luck with the braces I don't miss the constant brushing. That would make me want to WFH. Cheers
I haven’t seen a single instance of someone taking a call from their car since working remotely, likely because no one was commuting. It was fairly common prior to the pandemic and I was in office.
but why be so controlling? imagine someone is so busy they have to commute at 45 min commute in the 15 minute gap between meetings. so you’re refusal to be more understanding is blocking progress. likely it’ll be you removed from the meeting and going forward you’ll be included less. have fun being a low level IC!
lol you have too many meetings. I don't care if the manager with back to back meetings listens in from transit or something. im literally suggesting being more flexible
> People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
I’m very much a writing kind of person when it comes to organizing my thoughts and I worked at a place where we did a ton of written documentation kind of like this. Then I left there and worked remote with a different company whose CEO, when I sent him an email, would pick up the phone and call me. We would then have the 10 minute conversation you’re talking about here. I came to love it because it’s true, a short focused conversation can be a huge timesaver. Since then, I’m often really frustrated by vendors and partners who steadfastly refuse to get on a call, when it’s very obvious to me that a quick call would be a far better use of time than endlessly going back and forth on email.
These are informal quick chats work nicely, until it doesn't, then it's a disaster and docs are needed.
With certain people I can work like that. With others that I don't trust, have seen don't shoddy work, don't communicate well, then write a doc and we'll discuss it.
The doc culture is great and I prefer meetings having the time upfront to get everyone up to speed. However, I regularly saw six page docs written for 25 line lambda functions.
Was it an important lambda function though? How often would it be called, would it still be around in 10 years, etc? If the six page document justified the existence of a separate deployable, then clearly it was important enough to warrant it. If you claim six pages was excessive, did the lambda even need to exist in the first place?
> - People waste inordinate amounts of time writing docs for things that could be discussed in 10 minutes
What about if someone wants to know what was discussed? You end up telling and retelling the same thing over and over again to get people in the loop, vs pointing to the doc and its remarks. (Depends on the subject of course)
Technical things (algorithms, locations of docker images, code, data, checkpoints, things that were tried but failed) should be documented.
Unfortunately most of the doc culture is people trying to convince each other within the same team that we need XYZ even when everyone with half a brain already knows it. Like "we need more GPUs to get shit done" should be a 10 minute call, not a PRFAQ.
Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides.
Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
Oof, must suck to work for a company who doesn't use technical design docs well. I quite like Oxide's RFD model, based off Joyent's I assume, given who their CTO is. https://rfd.shared.oxide.computer/rfd/1
In my experience these documents were actually never good. I’ve never seen anyone ask for estimates either. Surely it’s better than some other companies but if it were good they wouldn’t need this absolutely horrific oncall
My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.
During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.
Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business.
And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?"
Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo. It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where everyone is left confused.
> line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.
Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.
Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?
That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.
Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.
Is this similar to what Sidney Dekker says in Drift Into Failure. That any "root cause" is more likely a narrative tool than a reflection of objective reality in a sufficiently complex system.
Im ex AWS and the internal tools _try_ to get away from the myth of human error and root cause. But its difficult when humans read and understand in a linear post hoc fashion.
Amazon culture was still really rather root cause oriented when I left. The COE process they followed to do post-incident analysis was flawed and based on discredited approaches like the "5 whys". I don't know if it has changed since I left, I rather hope it has.
I genuinely believe there is no such thing as a root cause. The reason I believe that is both grounded in personal experience, and in the 40+ years of academic research that demonstrates in far greater detail that no failure comes about as a result of a single thing. Failure is always complex, and that approaches to incident analysis and remediation that are grounded in it are largely ineffectual. You have to consider all contributing factors if you want to make actual progress. The tech industry tends to trail really far behind on this subject.
A couple of quick up-front reading suggestion, if I may:
* https://how.complexsystems.fail/ - An excellent, and short, read. It's not really written from the perspective of tech, but every single point is easily applicable to technological systems. I encourage engineers to think about the systems that they're responsible for at work, their code, incidents they've been involved in, as they read it.
Everything we deal with is fundamentally complex. Even a basic application that runs on a single server is complex, because of all the layers of the operating system below it, let alone the wider environment of the network and beyond.
* If you're willing to go deeper: "Behind Human Error" ISBN-10: 9780754678342. It's a very approachable book, written by Dr Woods and several other prominent names in the academic research side in to failures.
My favourite example to use when talking about why there's no such thing as a root cause has been the 737-MAX situation. Which has only become more apt over time, as we've learned just how bad that plane was.
With the original 737-MAX situation, we had two planes crash in the space of 5 months.
If we follow a root cause analysis approach, you'll end up looking at the fact that the planes were reliant on a single sensor to tell them their angle of attack (AoA). So replace the single sensor with multiple, something that was already possible to do, and the planes stop crashing. Job done. Resilience achieved!
That doesn't really address a lot of important things, like, how did we end up in a situation where the plane was ever sold with a single AoA sensor (especially one with a track record of inaccuracy)?
Why did the Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) keep overriding pilot input on the controls, which it didn't do on previous implementations of MCAS systems?
Why was the existence of the MCAS system not in the manuals?
Why could MCAS repeatedly activate?
If the MCAS hadn't behaved in such a bizarre fashion, where it kept overriding input, it's arguable that the pilots would have been able to correct its erroneous dropping of the nose. If you're sticking with a "root cause" model, there's a pretty strong argument that the MCAS system was the actual root cause of the incident.
Given the fairly fundamental changes to the controls, and the introduction of the MCAS, why were pilots not required to be trained on the new model of plane? Is Boeings attempts to avoid pilots needing retraining the actual root cause?
Why was an MCAS system necessary in the first place? It's because of the engine changes they'd made, and how they'd had to position them in relation to the wings that tended to result in the planes nose wanting to go up and induce a stall. The MCAS system was introduced to help with counteracting that new behaviour. Was the new engine choice the root cause of failure?
and so on and so forth..
If you look at the NTSB accident report for the 737-MAX flights, it goes way deeper, and broader in to the incident. It takes a holistic view of the situation, because even the answers to those questions I pose above are multi-faceted. As a result it had a long list of recommendations for Boeing, the FAA, and all involved parties.
Those 2 crashes were the emergent property of a complex system. It's a symptom. A side effect. It required failures in the way things were communicated within Boeing, failures in FAA certification, failures in engineering, failures in management decision making, the works.
No one at Boeing deliberately set out to make a plane that crashes. A lot of the decisions about how they do things are reasonable, and make some sense, in isolation. But they all contributed together to make for a system to which it became a question of "when" and not "if" a major disaster would occur.
If resilience and incident analysis just focuses on a singular root cause, the systems that produced the bad outcome, will continue, and will inevitably make more bad decisions. The only thing that would improve is that they would probably never make a decision to sell a plane with a single AoA sensor.
As we've seen over time, the whole broken system has resulted in a lot of issues with the MAX, beyond that sensor situation.
the really dumb thing about working at AWS is they pay so much lip service to Ops, literally you can spend a third of a week in meetings talking about Ops Issues, but not a single long term project to improve the deeper architectural problems that cause bad Ops ever get funded.
> Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.
While I get what you mean, I think most people who've been in the situation know what I'm talking about. The same alarms are going off constantly and you keep doing the expedient thing to make them stop going off without investing any effort into stopping them from going off again in the same situation in the future.
Of course there is a chain of causes, and maybe you need to refactor a module, or maybe you need to redesign an interface, or maybe you need to throw the whole thing away and start over -- we did all those things in different situations while I was there -- but there's a point at which looking at deeper causes loses value because those causes are not in our power to fix and we're left to defend against those failures: a system we rely on is unreliable; machines and networks go down unexpectedly; a lot of people have poor reading comprehension so even good docs are sometimes useless; we are all sinners whose pride and sloth sometimes leads us to make crappy software and systems; etc.
> They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.
You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.
Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.
Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!
Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.
And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.
FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
> The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.
This is untrue for Amazon, at least in the US. Your total compensation is guaranteed for the first 4 years. If your total compensation in your offer was 500k, you'll get ~500k per year.
The first two years you're paid in cash so it'll match the offer exactly, the final two years you're paid in RSUs (stock based) with the stock price calculated at the time of the offer. Your salary may vary due to stock price. Historically it's gone up, not down, and this is how people have made 600k+, for example, as a senior engineer there.
Starting from year 2-3, you'll receive new stock grants that will vest in the years after 4 if you stay that long.
> When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
Yep, lots of idea-snatching, not crediting each other, teaming up to not including a particular team member to try to ensure that team member is the one that gets PIP
Regarding your last point, I’ve witnessed two different engineers cry on two different calls because they weren’t getting any support from senior engineers and were at risk of being pipped. It’s that ridiculous. And these were not incompetent engineers. One went to Meta and another went to Cloudflare after Amazon.
It's not interesting, it's preposterous to think that you can make that money and just kick your feet up every day and twiddle your thumbs. Yeah, there is going to be fucking stress. That's why the pay is so high. My non-FAANG job is 100% constant stress day-in and day-out and I don't make even half of these comps.
Well then you also have a crappy job. Good money doesn't need to equal high stress. You can do a good job, create positive value, and live a low stress life. Step 1: Don't work at Amazon.
People burn out and have nervous breakdowns dealing with the stress of working retail (violent customers, sick customers, terrible hours, short breaks, coffin-like break rooms, benefits like "50 cents off a bag of pistachios") for $15 an hour. I wager most would go back in a heartbeat for $400k/yr.
The remuneration is certainly a large part of the point, because a SWE who makes mid six figures and burns out from a high stress job has accumulated enough money to not have to work again for awhile, potentially ever, and can rest and recuperate. A cashier on minimum wage working a similarly high stress job can't ever stop working because they're never not going to be living paycheck to paycheck.
Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
Stress isn't less stressful just because you get to take a holiday afterwards. A broken leg doesn't hurt less when you break it because you have health insurance.
Sure,the duration of the stress may differ, but that's a different variable too.
Can a millionaire experience the same or higher levels of stress than a cashier? Absolutely. Can a cashier and millionaire be in a position of high, inescapable stress for prolonged periods? Yes.
Stop comparing relative hardship based on your own bias... Unless you promise to never complain about anything you eat or drink ever again because of "starving African children"
>Yes but you can't demote the stress element because the remuneration element is larger. They're not dependent variables at the point the stress is felt.
GP just explained how, though. Higher remuneration = eventual recovery period. Focusing on the stress is only human, so you can't be faulted for that, but considering the comparative situations holistically, it is objectively more advantageous to get paid more for similarly, or perhaps even more, stressful situations.
From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite some time while I was there, my peers with the same industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself at Google and Meta.
Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.
Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.
If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".
After you get woken up by pages enough time you really start to question the monetary value of sleep. You will also miss life events such as birthdays, helping friends move, your child’s sporting events, etc.
Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs.
if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means.
I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.
From what I could tell, the equivalent level (in terms of scope/responsibilities) at the other FANG companies pays more. So even if you are just after the money, it doesn’t seem worth it if the others are also willing to hire you at the comparable level. Of course, there are exceptions - like there’s some managers I would follow anywhere, or some projects are just that exciting.
For software engineering, I have heard stories from all around about the PIP culture due to an 8-12% mandatory URA quota. This results in gaslighting and forced firings to engineers that have a history of performing well.
I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to.
Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all.
The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish."
In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away.
The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.
For many, many people, (majority of programmers, really) morals don't have a price tag. That number could be anything. When you make a programmer choose between some number and customer damage, it becomes increasingly harder to damage the end-customer. This is known as "prioritizing customer obsession" over business function (which is what we're supposed to do).
Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS.
That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough.
What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results.
This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.
There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.
Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.
MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.
AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.
It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
It depends on what you mean by "what happened". If what you're talking about happening to those companies is how much money they make, you're totally right.
That said, your reply is a bit of a non sequitur. The thread is largely about answering the question of "why do you work at Amazon?", and I haven't seen anyone saying the answer is because of how much money Amazon makes. I also haven't seen anyone say they quit because Amazon appears to be on the same financial trajectory as GE or Boeing.
I bet you a tonne of people would agree that there's a culture shift away from valuing the experience of the boots-on-the-ground operational folk at all of those companies, which is why they don't want to work there.
Really, none? IDK, I've always thought DynamoDB and S3 were amazing, and Lambda, albeit not perfect on launch, was highly innovative and useful for many, many, many circumstances you'd either needs a k8s cluster or fleet of little used servers at the time.
SQS and Cloud watch were legit to, although cloud watch metrics are a bit aged and logs were really difficult to use until insihhts came into place
Also Glue, while it has some tenancy issues and rough edges, takes a bunch of work out of managing a datalake
Oh and Aurora + Aurora serverless weren't as flashy but from an ops perspective game changing at the time
Cloudformation is definitely showing it's age and I hate writing it compared to CDK, but it was also pretty game changing at the time. I don't know if it was the first infrastructure as code language, but it definitely kick-started the revolution.
The shopping site is the worst mainstream shopping site. Find stuff is hell. It’s missing criteria, finding the shipping time / cost when comparing products is painful.
Shipping is fast and prices are good, but you’re never quite sure you ordered the right size / color / edition.
>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.
What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?
It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).
Like the amazing story where a L7 insisted rewriting a python-based CLI tool in Rust, all in the name of performance even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
What's more amazing is that the manager of the team thought that was an L7 scope and a great achievement.
> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?
I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.
I took that to mean the tool was IO-bound, so it wasn't using much CPU to start. So if there was even that tiny sliver of slack CPU (and that's almost definitely the case on a desktop or other dev machine), then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money, since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments. That just leaves the cost in engineer-hours to rewrite the program.
IO-bound doesn't mean it doesn't use much CPU. A tool can use a lot of IO and also a lot of CPU.
> then saving that tiny bit of CPU actually saved no money
this doesn't follow
> since it was already riding on the spare capacity of other investments
nor does this
Take for example a CLI that downloads and verifies the Bitcoin blockchain. It may spend most of its time downloading blocks, but it spends a ton of time calling SHA256 to verify those blocks. Similarly with a tool that downloads and checksums large files like Docker images.
If you have a fleet of 650K developer machines all running this util, then at some point it becomes cost effective to optimize the CPU usage.
Whether that point was reached in this example is not something I know. It seems like the L7 and their manager believed it was. But OP believes it wasn't. Either way, we don't know from OP's description of the situation.
Sure, something like that is technically consistent with the description, but unlikely to be relevant. If you're thinking of a program that downloads a bunch of data and then does a bunch of cryptographic operations on it, what are the odds that the first description in your mind is "spends most of its time on HTTP requests"? Slim, I'd say, even if it's technically the majority of the time.
The question isn't the "hey what's the first description that comes to mind?" The question is why people on HN are mocking the idea that saving HUGE_NUMBER*B is a bad investment just because there is some other A satisfying A > B.
I was on that team. The rewrite was NOT valuable. Heck there is even a pinned Github issue at the top of the repo that tries to explain why this rewrite even happened and it doesn't have a good answer.
And high ranking managers never make silly judgments based on hype or cool-factor, is that right? Come on, the overlying context was specifically the claim that upper level management had lost touch with reality, and that this was just one example.
I get that people want to make fun of management. But the complaints were that Amazon was stagnating and frugal. The idea that they're spending extravagantly on programming language fads is amusing, but isn't really consistent with what others were saying or with what we know about Amazon generally.
Rewrites to save compute resources are done pretty frequently at huge companies. It's a relatively easy source of projects for high level engineers because they can see the fleet-wide metrics and have figured out how to choose projects that have clear dollar value in their performance write-ups.
Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project? Of course. Could an L7 have wasted a bunch of time on a fruitless project at a notoriously cutthroat and frugal company AND be super proud of it? That seems much less likely since they have to show some numeric impact at that level, but I obvious still possible. Would their manager then also be proud of it? That seems even less likely.
So when the only description of the project also accurately describes a large class of valuable projects (i.e. decrease fleet-wide cost of a ubiquitous tool) I was genuinely curious if there was more to the story.
Have you used many cli tools that consume a meaningful amount of cpu (in terms of cost)? They are generally used by a human, so the scale can’t be all that big.
Yeah, go to a place with poor bandwidth and run any tool that downloads and hashes large files. It will spend a large time waiting on the download and also a large time hashing the files.
I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers.
So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at.
But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
Yours is a heartfelt, sincere take on a successful 21st century career in tech, but I feel it is so one-sided.
Yes, you seem to have benefitted greatly, but your examples of efficiency and availability are flawed. For example:
"apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences": I don't see any benefits. When Youtube recommends for the billionth time a stupid soccer short because I previously watched one soccer short, I want to scream. Also, privacy or lack thereof.
"hailing a cab virtually": made possible due to full-time workers who have none of the benefits of full-time workers, in other words, exploitation.
"a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers": One word that encapsulates the other side of your "bonkers level of selection"--Temu.
"low friction same-day delivery": Made possible due to our reliance on fossil fuels
"far greater access to online services including education and financing": I'm not sure about the financing part. Education? Yeah, if I want to learn about something like video-editing. But I could've bought a book on that in the past and probably learned it much more in depth. If I wanted to learn something like German Idealism, not so much.
I think your pocket book has benefitted immensely, but all of the other benefits don't seem like benefits to me on a macro level. But kudos to you for doing so well and believing the world partakes in your good fortune.
There seems to be an argument here against markets, energy use and entertainment. While criticism is legitimate, little there is related to tech specificially and it is more a complaint against the construction of modern society from the 1700s onwards.
That’s a pretty cynical view. In essence, what you’re saying is “all the things you care about are not things I care about and/or actually despise.”
And that’s OK - you don’t have to work at Amazon! But the implication is that the OP has the “wool over their eyes,” so to speak, and I think that’s unfair. They’re allowed to love their job and find it impactful, even if you don’t. :)
It’s possible I misread this somehow, so if that’s the case, apologies in advance.
It's not cynical to point out external costs, the alternative is to take corporate propaganda at face value without ever questioning if things are right or not.
GP isn't arguing for subjective preference but objective value. People are of course allowed to find their work impactful. Doesn't mean it actually is.
Working at a missile factory could be one of the best/most important things you do with your life. Anti-air interceptor missiles save innocent lives every week in Ukraine, for instance.
As a current Amazonian (and one that, as mentioned in my other comment, enjoys working at AWS largely because of interactions with brilliant tech minds and projects), I agree with most of your comment.
However...
>choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join
I love my team, and even my organization that I work with. Multiple people on my team have stated that ours is the best team they've ever been part of in their career. But I don't love my company. I'm still at Amazon because even though my company is actively pushing me away, the love and enjoyment working with my team has been enough to get me to stay. So your advice here really strikes a chord with me, and I wish I could echo it.
Unfortunately, this advice isn't actually tenable, because no matter how great your team is, it's only one company leadership decision away from being ripped apart. I've watched this happen multiple times now, and this announcement is going to make it happen again. Caring less about your company just doesn't work when your company has shown multiple times that they are willing to throw away your team like that.
The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your company, but that caring about your company is going to be far less important in your day to day.
And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.
So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.
If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.
Everything is ephemeral though. Not just your team at work that you enjoy, or a team at any workplace that you enjoy, but everything. So don't worry about crossing that bridge until you come to it. There's no good situation that is a sure thing to continue indefinitely, so enjoy them while they're there and then be prepared to make moves if they end.
> But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs.
aka "its a wall to wall hustle that will never get better, and when it comes to trade-offs, you're the one making them"
Yea, words like "driven" and "relentless" and "urgency" betray the reality: It's probably a pressure cooker with constant, needless hustle and urgency. Agree with OP: It's not what most people are looking for out of their work.
I mean I know a few people who seriously do want that type of culture. They want to work 60+ hours a week and they want colleagues who arent to be punished. Amazon is a good fit for those types.
I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico).
A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that.
Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
Beware of generalizing behaviors and qualities based off people races and origins. This is what is called racism and is frowned upon or illegal in many places.
If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have had an excellent Indian manager.
Ooh and I've worked with several Indian people who are great as well. I was just mentioning the stereotype of how mexican people in tech see them.
I even had a great indian engineer who emigrated from India (his parents are still there) who actually complained about Indian work culture.
It's like myself when I complain about mexican culture (for work, ethics, corruption or mediocrity)... I know that not everyone is like that, but shit where I'm from (southeast Mexico, Campeche) you'll be lucky to find someone that breaks the stereotype.
And I've several friends still there.. I just don't like the education and vslues society imparts us there
Close, that's the definition of stereotyping based on race and can lend to bigoted acts and decisions.
Racism emcompasses a bit of a different scope, including policy, institutional structures, and norms, of which stereotypes is directly related to norms and can be indirectly influential on the others.
Interesting. The word "racisme" in French has also yet another meaning: the word "race" (identical spelling in French) cannot be used for human beings in French (works for cows and dogs) as "racime" is defined by the belief that there are several human "races" (which is scientifically wrong). The word race as used in English is translated by something like "ethnical group" for example.
However, the comment I originally reacted to would be definitely qualified as being "raciste" by most French speakers (and be illegal in France)
The word definitely is completely idiomatic with regard to humans in French. Look up any dictionary definition. And there’s no law making it illegal in France. Besides, even if it had such a law, the French state doesn’t have a monopoly on the French language. It’s an official language in 29 countries.
Well, try to use the world "race" for human in France at least yes (sorry I'm talking about what I know of, I don't know for other French speaking countries), and you will see the reactions (maybe not as outraged than if you used the N word in the US, but something like that).
As for the legal part, calling all people of a given origin "bad managers" is definitely illegal here in France (once again, speaking only about what I know of)
Well I definitely have seen race used for humans in English, where ethnic group would have been correct as their is only one human race, which is why I believe the distinction is more blurry in English
That's just "structural racism" which is a subset of "racism".
If we were to believe that structural racism was the only kind of racism, we'd be forced to conclude that people can't be racist because people aren't structures.
But it's precisely the opposite as structures are composed of people and racist people are often the reason we have structural racism.
Some scholars think it's making judgement based on race. Others scholars think only those in power opinions matters and those without power can make judgements based on race and that wouldn't be considered racism. Others think it's a natural and norm thing based on tribalism.
But in your example a person of color would have a higher status in America compared to an Indian national. So the person of color is being racist.
In the future the only acceptable version will be the first because keeping track of who had power in what context is going to be impossible to track and can get easily shifted. That's the definition the law uses currently.
This is one of those cases where a word can have multiple meanings. And anyway, prejudice based on national origin is, in fact, frowned upon no matter what you call it.
That definition sounds very convenient for someone who wants to be racist to a group they've decided has institutional power. I can see why such a person would want to twist the plain meaning of an understood term in such a nakedly manipulative way.
The chances of your having a manager of Indian descent are higher in tech compared to other professions. That's a function of the 'ingestion pipeline' that's built through the US education system (H1B through higher-education). In a high-expectations field (tech), coupled with a high-expectation company (Amazon), folks who manage to stay back, tend to be seen more, and will be rewarded by being managers (till Peter Principle kicks in). Most middle managers in exacting teams (for products like AWS) are likely to be demanding.
My hypothesis is that a part of what you're observing is just some form of 'survivorship bias' - changing jobs with visas isn't easy (been there done that) so folks are more willing to 'bend' to the culture being driven internally than just moving out (esp. with the long wait times).
At some point, its hard to distinguish the people from the culture, and what came first, but that's a different conversation.
Right. There's even an in-famous story of 3DFX lost the 3d graphic cards war: The quality of cards made in Mexico just couldn't compete with that of Asian countries. https://level2.vc/a-short-story-of-3dfx/
Which sentence was toxic or bigoted? "Hate to say it but Amazon was hiring the folks getting laid off from major banks a few years ago." or "[Amazon] abandoned hiring only the best a long time ago."?
On top of that, many banks have a hiring bar for their software folks that's far, far lower than one would expect a company whose primary job is ensuring the correctness and integrity of its records to have.
(Also: "profoundly" toxic and bigoted? *Seriously*?)
If you're allowed to get out! There are some vicious managers out there. The worst among them will force a PIP if they so much as think you might be hoping ship.
Luckily, in my time here, it has seemed like managers with this egregious behavior tend to get forced out of the company. However, they do insane amounts of psychological damage while they're here. Some teams have faced real tyrants :(
I had a friend who had exactly this happen, they wanted to switch teams and suddenly they had a PIP( that they were not even told about but which blocked the process ). She had to get the manager on the other team to investigate and once he started digging he found a completely empty draft PIP in place of a actual one. When he brought that up it disappeared the next day without a response from the original manager :////
Hey Colm. I briefly met you at my stint in Amazon around 2011.
You were an inspiration and a wonderful example of the calibre of talent Amazon has.
I especially remember the ease with which it appeared you navigated informally between teams, building relationships and bridges to help the company and fellow engineers. Although I'm sure it was actual work, it was still inspiring.
Thanks, that’s a really interesting perspective. I had a similar tenure at Google, and it was a great fit for me, but for very different reasons. Working towards technical perfection, almost divorced from any real world implications. Just puzzles to solve as elegantly as possible.
But I can see how that would not be for everyone. And I did see people who were more customer/outcome oriented really struggle.
What do you say to the warehouse workers peeing in cups because they're not allowed enough time to use the bathroom? Who get fired for being a few minutes late to stuff boxes? How can you rationalize your wealth while they work harder and live in poverty?
Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money for my employer and after that I go home.
I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.
I wouldn't go around bragging about not caring about people I spend 8+ hours a day with for years on end. It's not the good look you think it is, and you haven't reached some modern level of enlightenment here.
L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.
Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.
This is surprisingly more difficult than it seems. You could go by VC fame, but even those have only a 10-20% hit rate, with a decent chance you end up at Juicely or whatever.
You could go by VC dollars raised, but that often sets you up for sales-driven companies rather than true engineering-rich cultures.
You could go for obvious stand-out products (OpenAI, Claused) but you notice there arent that many positions except in rare cases.
Yes, making sound choice is hard, just as our life often hinges on a handful of choices. That said, a coworker of mine mentioned an algorithm that seemed to work: first you pick a company that solves a problem that fascinates you and that has people are you willing to work with. You can check LinkedIn for the employe profiles, and you can rely on friend recommendations. The bottomline is, you minimize your chance of regret when it comes to choosing a company. If the company folds, at least you get to work with interesting people, build friendship, learn something new, and work on something fun and meaningful. The second second step is to rely on math. Give the company a time box, say 2 years. If the company does not have satisfying momentum in two years, then jump ship. Note it's about growth and momentum, however you define it. Everything else is secondary consideration. In 10 years, you will have 5 times. Now, the chance that you will succeed at least once 1 - P^6, where P is the failure rate of the companies. Even if the failure rate is 30%, you success rate will be 99.76%, an almost guaranteed success. And now, if you always join a top-tier company in the corresponding sector, your chance of success will even be higher. There are two catches, though. First, you need to be able to switch job whenever you want, so leetcode hard and study hard in your focused domain of experience. Second, 2 years of experience hardly can be enough for progressing your level of expertise, so you will have to work like hell to make 2 years of experience worth four years, instead of having one month of experience repeating 24 times.
That's a different topic. A large number of E8/E9 in Google have been pushed out recently too. The key challenge is continuous growth. High-level ICs tend to become gatekeepers as the growth of their orgs stagnate. What they don't realize, though, is that gatekeeping accumulates debris and resentment over time, and the value of gatekeepers diminishes over time. A high-level IC either has to make things happen every few years, or reset their project by joining a new org, which means risking losing their institutional know-how.
I don't know about Cloud, but I saw lots of L8/L9s get laid off in CorpEng. Basically, anyone at those levels who didn't have a significant level of scope (i.e. enough FTEs under them), and even some who did, got laid off. I don't know exact figures, but you're probably looking at at least 50 FTEs for an L8, and over 100 for an L9, as a minimum bar to not be perceived as an unnecessary level of upper middle management that can be flattened away.
Wealthfront's former CEO gave this advice. Ironically, even though he was a long term investor at one of the Valley's most storied VC firms, he himself did not run a breakout company. Instead, Wealthfront flamed out after 14 years with a mediocre acquisition at the peak of COVID startup mania.
Amazon has a flatter structure than Google, and it used to be that L7 was the highest rank (an internal doc cautioned the newly promoted L7s to stay modest even though, and I quote, "people may treat L7s as demigod").
Presumably, anyone at a staff+ level position in big tech, is likely influential and their word carries weight. So, I'm not sure how this is a pro or con for joining Amazon.
If anything, someone at that level earns so much money, and has so much unvested stock waiting for them, that even if they grow tired of the work, or disagree with its direction, they are unable to leave for something more fulfilling.
Being forced into the office 5 days a week might be enough to force you to reconsider though?! Maybe?!
the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.
> Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc.
Does the average L7 person architect those services significantly, or just kinda maintain them? It's almost crazy to think about any old AWS employee (granted L7 is up there) conceiving those things, they've had such a massive impact on the ability to build things on the internet.
I'm not sure about those particular services, but in general the ground breaking and foundational things at the FANG and adjacent companies were convinced by people at much lower level than L7. It was a lot of L5-6 folks who then went on to be 7+ many years later.
But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch.
Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.
Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.
Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.
Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project."
The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
I agree with that, I think earlier in the timeline there was enough work of large scope / complexity / impact that it was obvious and self-fulfilling (ie: go work on big customer ask / initiative -> get promoted). When the influx of middle management came, people started looking for ways to stand out and carve out their own teams under themselves. Multiply this across the entire company..
Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died.
I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.
>> The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
Putting aside quality of life (though I agree that is a huge consideration) -- even when people show up to the office, they are on Zoom calls most of the day.
But they are using the property, meaning it is keeping its value. The whole point of RTO, so that investment funds, landlords don't lose money they put into commercial property.
Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.
This argument has never made any sense to me. Why would this collusion happen? I don't see any incentive alignment unless you're claiming that landlords are primary investors in all these RTO companies and can force something like this
I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available.
If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work).
This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates.
But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
> This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time).
Be careful what you wish for. The most likely result of this would be companies simply letting go any employees that had a commute longer than X minutes. And of course all the remaining employees would now say their commute takes X minutes too, to get the maximum subsidy. E.g. I currently bike, which takes 15 minutes, but I could easily walk and make it take 40 minutes instead, to get a nice bonus to my current pay.
If an Uber Eats guy brings you food from down the street, they get some amount of money. If they bring you food from across town, they get much more money to cover the extra time they spend driving. In both cases they brought you McDonalds.
That said, I think it's more like if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way, then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours. But I guess this has always been the difference between exempt and non-exempt employees.
I had a friend who lived 90 minutes from work. He complained that the commute sucked and wanted something for it. I talked to a friend who pointed out he took the job. It was his decision to take a job 90 minutes away. It was not the company's responsibility to pay him more than others because he chose to live that far away.
As I replied to a peer comment, my employer moved my office from a 10m walk downtown near my house to a 45-60m multi-modal commute to an industrial office park. I didn't sign up for that, but I like my job. Now if they'd had to factor in reimbursements for actual distance traveled for employees maybe they'd be more motivated to stick closer -- and to only hire employees within a distance budget they're willing to pay.
For what it's worth I like my job, if I didn't I probably would have made the move when the office relocation was announced. I was just pushing back on the idea the only employees are to blame for commutes. I take the train and bike now and it's chill, but certainly less efficient.
> if you're expected to work 40 hours per week, and your employer mandates you come into work an hour each way then you should either be expected to work 32 productive hours -- or you should be compensated for 48 hours.
That’s this person’s fault for choosing to live an hour from the office. I’ve always realized how stupid commuting is and the longest commute of my adult life (I’m currently 41) has been a 30-minute bicycle ride.
Now the people who live an hour from the office want less work or more pay than me? I say just fire them instead.
Or just let everybody negotiate the deal they want for themselves and let them price in their cost of commute or whatever into their ask. If somebody who lives an hour away wants to work 20% fewer hours or make 20% more money, let them shoot their shot and ask for it.
Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
My employer happened to move offices, so my 10 minute walk turned into 45-60 minutes multi-modal. Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value? In that case am I just being fired for not asking "how high?"
I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though.
I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate. If the employer doesn't want that they can choose to hire only people nearby. If they move offices they should factor that into their cost estimates. But what do I know, maybe they should just fire everyone ;)
> Where do you draw the line between "it's the employees fault for not wanting to live next to work in an industrial office park adjacent to a homeless encampment" and "it's the employers fault for insisting people commute in when they can achieve just as much from home without?"
There is no line. You are responsible for your choices.
> Do you expect people who change jobs to only work at employers they're proximate to - or to sell their homes each time? What if moving means the kids have to change schools? Or a married couple, do they both have to change jobs?
I expect people to take actions that make sense for them. Everybody’s different. I don’t like the idea of a long commute so I chose to live in a dense city and look for work near where I live. I’d be willing to move for the right job but I wouldn’t be willing to commute an hour for it. If I can’t make that work, it’s not the right job.
If you absolutely detest the idea of a long commute then you will only look for jobs close to where you live or you’ll move when you get a job that requires a long commute (in this case, renting probably makes more sense than buying).
If you think, “I’d never move to be closer to work, that’s nuts,” then it turns out you don’t detest long commutes as much as you thought you did.
> Does that mean I should be fired for their decision to move to a lower cost jurisdiction when I can provide the same value?
No, but if you think you can ask for more money for providing the same value, good luck to you. Or you might’ve been lowballing yourself up to this point and you’ll get a yes. Who knows.
> I think in practice it ends up being "is this a hot job market or not" and if yes, then the employee gets to dictate, and if not the employer does. This doesn't really resolve the underlying issue though
I guess I just don’t see an underlying issue. If you want something ask for it and then decide what to do when you get your answer. That’s the resolution.
> I think a simpler model is just to allow employees to expense commute costs at the ~IRS rate.
You can do this already! Submit an expense report to your employer. If you’re valuable enough, I guarantee it’ll get paid. If you’re not, it won’t. If you think, “But I am that valuable and it still didn’t get paid” then you’ve learned you’re not as valuable as you think.
I live a 15 minute drive from my city, but it took me an hour and a half to get home in rush hour a couple weeks ago. I guess it’s my fault though for being stupid and not paying even more of a premium to live within a block of my office.
The logistics of having that level of granularity are probably a little unrealistic, but employers already follow a similar principle when adjusting pay scales based on cost-of-living for a given metropolitan area.
This has come to be known as "coffee badging" where I work, heh.
I usually schedule my in-person meetings in a block, come in for that, then go back home to do my coding. It's nice to get a change of scenery.
I am far less efficient this way of course since I lose 90-120 minutes a day, but if that's how my employer wants me to spend my time... I guess that's why they call it "compensation."
Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.
They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.
It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.
I seem to remember quite a few examples posted to HN over the past few years of companies "declaring RTO" and then finding that rank-and-file employees largely just ignored it, and the companies never did anything about it because they can't fire everyone.
"I declare RTO" can only work if you have critical enough mass of employees who believe the bluff and actually come into the office. This is definitely an area where a workforce that is organized and works together could hold out forever, but the tech worker mantra is "unions bad" so collective action is difficult.
> They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates
Citation needed. They may not be literally firing people for simply ignoring the mandates, but they sure as hell putting a mark on your performance record (at least at one big tech company).
IIUC one of the reasons for the original RTO mandates was to get people to leave (either willingly or through perf review pressure).
The joke is, this is what it comes down to: a question of who has the most negotiating power. It’s not a question of what’s best for the employees. It’s not even a question of what’s best for the company. It’s all about who has coercive power.
Market competition will decide which school of thought is right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will eventually have to explain why they spend so much money renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and why their asses are being kicked by other companies that don't encumber themselves similarly.
The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay pretty close to top among employers at that scale, executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn is expected.
Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.
This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.
> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms
A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.
Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.
I will two additional points. Executives assume that the upcoming recession ( assuming it is a recession ) will make most people hesitate. It is a rational, if an annoying calculation. Separate issue that is semi-related to the timing, is the benefit of not having to lay people off -- some will quit.
Naturally, some would question the wisdom of making people, who can quit, quit, but I get the feeling that the management,as a group, is pissed off about the whole WFH.
Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.
Looking for another set of statistics (ATF specifically, as they also love killing animals) led me to this website: https://www.puppycidedb.com/
It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value.
Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
> Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.
Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.
Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.
I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture.
Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp.
In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.
Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up.
Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.
Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion.
I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org.
Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked.
But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches.
I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there.
The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense).
Some other random things I miss not in any particular order:
- Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively
- smithy
- While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later.
- Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype.
- Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.
> But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it.
This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights.
Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product.
I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
>>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice.
i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.
How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave.
If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was
- 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus
- 6 "personal" days
- in Seattle at least, 3 sick days
Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible.
Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
4 weeks after 6 years seems absurdly bad to me. The last job I had with fixed PTO had unlimited sick time plus 20 days per year of vacation starting (pro-rated) on your first day, and most places I’ve worked in the last decade have had “unlimited” PTO, which typically works out to around 6 weeks of vacation time plus unlimited sick time.
not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.
Yep. The PTO policies of US companies are just terrible. Often even the ones with "unlimited" PTO have defacto limits that just happen to work out to typical US PTO policies. (What a coincidence!)
If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have
smaller offices here).
Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.
I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms, but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I wasn't sure how reliable they are.
Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.
That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).
Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.
Yeah, for sure. After all, it's a Tier 1 city in the United States. It's just different in the Bay, but it's different than anywhere else in the world.
Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.
Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.
I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen, I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.
I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.
I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here
I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.
All I can say is that while there are such companies you never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc.., but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.
Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$ and/or AMZN".
I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.
Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.
Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.
Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
> If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.
I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!
I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.
In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.
Yeah, the cost of facilities is real. The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one. Unfortunately that would be pretty much impossible here without support from a huge tech company or something.
Out of curiosity I looked at the cost of a rental industrial space in SoDo and the prices absolutely blew my hair back.
> The best makerspace in Madison was run by a really forward-thinking guy who worked for like 10 years to get enough grants to buy a industrial space instead of rent one
Oh, I'm not familiar with that one. What's it called?
Sector67 - run by Chris Meyer. They used to rent a building on the east side off Winnebago street (now demolished). They purchased an old warehouse off Corry St. in 2017 and did a really extensive renovation (almost entirely performed by members): https://isthmus.com/news/news/sector67-finds-new-home/
I spent a lot of hours welding, using the wood shop, and working on my car there.
That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.
Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.
It's all relative and I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison, it's just not pervasive like it is in SF. Also we as an industry seem to be heading into a funding trough, only AI promises are keeping the bubble afloat.
> I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison
Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.
I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.
A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...
Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.
Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT?
When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!
I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.
It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.
The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable.
Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.
I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.
In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.
speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.
1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up.
2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.
Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration.
Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.
If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.
If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.
Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band.
I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.
> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?
It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.
Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance.
The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.
Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.
I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.
For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.
I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.
Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).
Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:
1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.
2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.
3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.
They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?
Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.
I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.
Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?