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Comment by amzn_throw_away | Hacker News Reader

I work for Amazon and this has not been my experience. I can't speak to what others have said, but in my org it would be extremely unusual, and considered alarming, for people to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The only times I've really worked over 40-50 hours would be while I was on-call, which occurs about once every two months for a week, and even then only during major issues (maybe once or twice a year?).

The culture, once again, at least in my org, is actually pretty chill - I had a doctor's appointment last week, I just sent an email the morning of saying "Hey everyone, I'll be in around 1:00, cya then, here's my status for standup" and it's cool. My boss actually chided me for checking my email too aggressively during my time off.

So yeah, I can't speak to everything mentioned in the article, I can only say that my experience has not matched up with this.

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So, let's see...

1. You check your email aggressively during your time off.

2. You think that 50 hours a week is normal.

3. You think 1/8 weeks of _unpaid_ on-call is reasonable.

How many sev-2s and sev-3s do you get during your one week on-call? If more than 10/week, can you think about how many are outside of business hours?

1) I do that regardless of where I work - that's part of my personality - I did that at less intense jobs - I've done that since college - my boss actually threatened to lock me out of my email if I didn't stop

2) I think 40-50 is acceptable, I would ask you to find anywhere salaried that 40 is the true upper limit - I'm telling you I can't remember a week I spent more than 50 - 40 is definitely the norm though.

3) I get paid for my time in the office, work outside of the office is highly unusual for my on-call rotation - it happens maybe once or twice a year as I noted.

Far less than ten - almost none outside business hours. Last time I was paged outside of business hours it was because someone messed up who they paged :)

I appreciate your reply, and it's certainly true that not all teams or managers are bad at Amazon.

I'd suggest that you're on a lucky on-call rotation, and seem to have a good manager!

If I were still there, I'd say get on VPN, head over to tt.amazon.com and see the stats of other teams' on-call rotations, and estimate how many of their pages are outside business hours ;)

Thanks! And sure, I appreciate other teams have different on-call situations, I had a friend in an AWS team that was decidedly more busy on weekends than I was...

For 3, that is really how it should be. Pages should be unusual and happen for real and immediate production issues.

But instead you get services built where dozens of pages a week is the norm.

I am also a current amazon employee (SDE-II) and on-call is certainly paid.

I'm not sure why you use going to the doctor as an example of a chill environment; that seems like a pretty minimal standard of decency to meet.

Aside from the on-call bit, this seems pretty standard for a dev. job, and seems to echo some of the other devs who have posted here.

I wonder whether the people quoted in the article where mostly working non-dev roles?

I can't speak to non-dev roles, but it's personally possible. As far as developer goes, it varies a lot by team I think, but overall it has been a pleasant experience for me - no one here wants me to fail, everyone around me wants me to succeed it seems like. One of the best jobs I've had, actually.

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