Amazon keeps asking me to interview and everyone tells me it's a terrible place to work. After seeing this compensation via equity I'm thinking it might be worth it. Anyone work at Amazon and loves it or think it's really worth it?
It's a truly horrible place to work and I would never ask my worst enemy to go work there. Engenders the worst in humanity (people review, anyone?), terrible technical architecture, many systems based solely on tribal knowledge that leaves the door every day, comp structure that is nearly outright lying... I could go on.
Some people say that it was just the group I worked in but I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years). There's virtually no difference. I still have PTSD (or at least what feels like PTSD) about by 3.5 years there, and I'd give anything to get that time back.
BTW, I'm now at another 20k+ person company which is doing very well, and making 30% more than my total comp when I was there.
> I am a former Amazon employee. I worked there for exactly a year. I assume I was doing well, I was offered increase bonus and base after my initial year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10413966
Just to clarify, did you work at Amazon for 1 year or 3.5 years? It seems like these messages are contradictory, but perhaps I've misunderstood. In the message I'm replying to now, you wrote:
> I worked in retail (1 year), new businesses (1 year) and AWS (1.5 years)
In the previous comment, I was worried that people would know who I was if I had said where I worked (what groups and how long). The truth is I had worked in the group I moved to for exactly a year, but I had been at Amazon for 3.5 years.
The level of retribution at that company is substantial, and I was quiet worried they would hurt my ability to get a new job.
I have a nice new job now (I was still searching when I posted that), and am less worried. It's really not hard to figure out who people are on HN.
When I started, I expected that I'd be there a couple years then move on to Google, but I'm not even excited about talking to Google, Facebook, Uber, or the others at this point.
P.S. We're hiring on DynamoDB. We need for software developers and SRE-type folks. My e-mail is in my profile if you're interested in finding out more.
"Amazon's vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, and 40% over the 4 years"
This is a significant deviation from the industry standard, which is to have a one year cliff, and have stock vest month-to-month afterwards. What happens if you leave in the middle of year 3?
If you leave in year 3, you lose 80% of your signing grants.
What you call "signing bonus" I call "guaranteed raise if you stay"
and there's also refreshes that vest at (probably) a different time of half-year.
SDE3 is a quite senior role at Amazon. I don't know very many of them, and almost all of the ones I know are extremely bright. Seems like they're getting ripped off.
Additionally, last time I interviewed there they did not have remote work in any form. If you get a 2am page, you have to drive in to the office. (And you have to commute.)
Amazon generally has a pretty strong remote work culture - I can even get my ipad onto the VPN and SSH around to get my work done.
That said, one of them is the kind of person that I would expect to do really well in an Amazonian environment, and the other now works at Nintendo.
Example I witnessed during people review (obviously anonymized):
A: I think X is one of the best members of the team, he took a bunch of customer requirements and put out something super fast that addressed some customer needs. (Invent and Simplify, Bias for Action)
B: I disagree. His product didn't think about scenarios a, b and c [ed: these would be things that caused the product to slip a year, and would leave customers in pain during that time] and he did not investigate g, h and i [which would have taken 3 months to figure out, still with customers in pain]. I think he needs to be put on a PIP. (Dive Deep; Insist on the highest standards)
Yes, I'm highly biased here - this person was on my team, and I endorsed his plan, as did person B, until we got into People Review. One of the most brutal and subtle things about the entire process is the fact that you're consistently asked for negative feedback about EVERYONE... even if you don't have it.
I moved from that group (AWS) to new businesses shortly thereafter.
I don't see them as arrows to knock people down. I see them rather as, well, principles to use when reasoning about a situation. Giving a name to a concept is a good way to reason about it and discuss it. They are used when reasoning about performance, it's true, but it's used across the board: when justifying a promotion, when praising a high-performer who excels within their level, when identifying areas of growth, as well as while discussing job performance with people who are doing less well.
Performance and leadership in a creative job like software engineering cannot be perfectly objective (it's not like an assembly line where you process N units per hour), but the LPs provide some objective concepts and terminology to apply while discussing performance; they break down performance into dimensions that can be discussed individually in the context of examples, which is an advantage over just vaguely discussing things at a high level. For example, "Bob found a creative way to pack more software onto existing servers without harming performance (Frugality)" or "Sally spent two hours on the phone helping our biggest customer (Customer Obsession)" or "After causing an outage, Joe wasn't able to identify anything he'd do differently next time. I'm concerned that he's not vocally self-critical." I'd much rather have a discussion of my performance or leadership in concrete terms like these, rather than vague ones.