My Interviews with Amazon
thesocietea.org
thesocietea.org
Amazon seems like a meat grinder, where getting hired isn't as hard as it seems, and they just burn through young people who don't know better. This is as someone completely on the outside who's only heard stories, though. When I brought this up to one recruiter a few years ago, they basically acknowledged the reputation and their intent to improve.
Perhaps unlike HN, I've never seriously considered joining a mega-corporation like Google, Facebook, or Amazon. I just don't see the appeal, nor do I want to work in a city (SV, Seattle, NYC, or otherwise).
The first step - before speaking to anyone about my background or interest - was going to be an intensive, one-hour coding session. It looked like it would be more "independent proof of competence" than "friendly programming task to evaluate you". I was expected to be on webcam the entire time to verify identity and prevent cheating. No joke about the entire time part - there was a reminder to get any water or office supplies I would need before sitting down, because the interview would be terminated if I left the frame of the cam.
Between the blind hostility of that opener and the meat-grinder rep, I passed without interviewing (and passed with the next Amazon recruiter shortly after, who had no idea they'd pinged me before). I'm sure this routine is reserved for new grads, and the weird "don't lean out of frame" stuff seemed to be from some interview-management third party, but it was still the most stilted process I've seen from an actual software company.
Reflects their attitude of treating ppl as mere 'resources' , I would work for amazon if I have no self-respect.
That's pretty common recently for companies. I'm not sure why.
I understand that, but when it's a purely technical decision they could easily enough give you constructive feedback.
You missed these two edge cases. Your code crashes on certain inputs. This is very inefficient, you could have done XYZ.
You could automate chunks of this, and protect yourself from any discrimination lawsuits by just making any engineer who reviews the code have zero knowledge of the candidate.
I have no idea how a commission-based business manages to do something like that.
Which makes this utterly weird - it was literally a matter of giving up (potentially) several grand by not forwarding an email.
Because as a culture, we stop thinking of candidates as human beings the moment we decide we aren't hiring them?
Not saying anything about YOU... experience is important... but 15 years experience doesn't mean 15 years of good experience or lack of bad habits.
Two coders that each had "silos" with wedges to keep the two sides communicating together. One did web side - ordering, registration, etc on a Webform MVC customized hybrid. The other did floor applications.
New customer? New database, website, etc. Sql statements? "If company a then select * from blah where field like '{text}';" everywhere. Why select *? Because the different code bases diverged... why like/text? Because sql injection doesn't exist. Almost everything text fields... 2 wide inventory fields that house more than 99 items... 10 wide inventory fields that house 2 items...
I will have some posts for TheDailyWTF once I get my feet a bit more wet...
As to why it took so long? They were able to keep it running with duck tape and bubble gum... once the company started expanding, the better of the two programmers knew they couldn't keep up and left earlier this year. The other is due gone soon... Good guy, but... unwilling to accept that his code is shit.
* No separation of UI/Code. WinForms in all it's glory.
* SELECT * in code behind. Never anything else.
* WHERE field LIKE '{}' - never 'where field ='. Always like.
* {} is a from text entry fields. Sql Injection? Sanitation? Boundaries? What's that?
* Separate code paths for different companies because each customer had their own unique stack that diverged - Database tables, Winforms, processes. IF Company A then SELECT * FROM DBA.dbo.TblA WHERE FieldA = '{}' ELSEIF Company B then SELECT * FROM DBD.dbo.TblB WHERE FieldB = '{}'... etc.
* Copy Pasta all the way down.
* Never used source control until New Guard arrived (me being newest developer).
* Test environment? Waste of time... Everything done against production. I saw the old programmer jack up a sql query resulting in a data restore, and I've been here less than two weeks.
Trust me (as much as you can trust a random guy on the interwebz)... Their code is shit. Not "I'm an artist and think your artistry is shit" shit... but every bad idea you can consider in coding shit.
Necessary, but not sufficient. If you can't code you're worthless as a developer. You can be a great coder, but if your other skills are poor you aren't worth a senior engineer salary.
But, separately from programming, I absolutely love teaching/mentoring. I found that, if I was helping someone with a programming problem, I could code just fine while burnt out. As long as someone else was doing "the programming"—the part involving wanting to create something and actually typing it—I was fine with them "borrowing" my knowledge and expertise in the form of doing all their design work, finding libraries and API functions for them, correcting their syntax errors, doing all their debugging, and basically every other part of programming that isn't typing words.
If someone handed me a college intern—or, hell, even a really passionate and patient elementary schooler—to serve as my "assistant", then I could make them appear to be a great programmer. If you hired me to wander around a team and pair-program with everyone, I could have a multiplicative effect on that team's productivity. But, by myself, I wouldn't be able to code for beans.
What do you call me?
You might still need someone above you to function as the team's abstraction layer to the company at large, but it sounds like you'd be a great leader among the actual workers.
I can't hand you an important task and expect it to get done unless I give you a second resource?
You are talking about burnout. Would you really walk into an interview and respond to a coding question with "Oh, you'll have to write with me directing because I only pair program"?
I'm going to stand by my earlier statement. Being able to code is a necessary skill for a senior developer. Or any developer really.
2. Why hand me the task? Why not hand someone else the task, and I'll wander in and make sure they get it done twice as quickly? Why does everyone need to be modellable as a task-queue that atomic problem-statements can be dropped into?
You don't expect, say, your office manager to program; but you do expect that, by hiring an office manager, more programming will get done, because now your programmers aren't running out to buy drinks for the fridge and toilet paper.
3. Remember that I did say that I could get work done by pair-programming with an intern, not an employee. The phrase "second resource" implies that you're imagining yourself handing me someone who you could get Hard Problems done on their own. My point was that, with a few people like me around, you could mostly just "hire" people (often for free!) who have no idea how to get Hard Problems—or even Regular Problems—done, and me and my type of person would guide them and the work would get done in the process.
This is usually known, in the trades, as an apprentice system. Apprentices do all the "work", you know. They're the hands that build most things that get built. Masters just stand there guiding those hands.
Because that's what this entire conversation is about.
Last week, I interviewed someone about to complete a master's degree from Georgia Tech who also could barely do FizzBuzz.
What should we be doing to identify people who fail FizzBuzz but we should actually be hiring? Honestly the bar for our initial phone screens is very low, and yet experienced and well-educated people still manage to fail, sometimes spectacularly. FizzBuzz is one of the most important questions we ask because of this phenomenon.
Based on my experience as an air traffic controller which requires more tests than I care to state, when we would transfer facilities we were given oral tests to gauge our experience. We would mark down the areas deficient that needed review and check areas off where knowledge was deemed satisfactory. There would be zero air traffic controllers if we dismissed candidates answering one question wrong regardless of simplicity.
But it still seems weird to push heavy coding sessions without even speaking to the candidate, and that seems weirder the more experienced people are. You might assume that a new grad doesn't care what work they're doing and can just be interviewed for a job in "software", but why throw somebody with 15 years behind them into a funnel without even talking about what it's a funnel for?
For comparison's sake I'm an experienced dev and have been hacking on embedded Linux stuff for more than a decade, though I have doubts that's the trigger for "webcam or not."
Was there any data retention period mentioned regarding your interview? Do they keep those videos forever, or are they discarded as soon as they're reviewed (assuming they're not live)?
What you experienced is part of their experiment in figuring out how to make this work. They've got a number of variations of interviews going on right now. I believe this is so that they can scale up as rapidly as they need to.
Apologies for the lack of citation but I don't believe this is something Amazon has spoken publicly about.
A little break to talk to humans is good. Shouldn't be your main job, unless you work in HR or something...
Sure, you can compromise and take lower quality people, or pay more than anyone in your city, but if you want great people for top 20% of the market pay, it's a lot of work on the hiring side.
Somehow I saw "fully automated hiring" and couldn't believe it - I just assumed it would be automated until the onsite part. If you're hiring 100% automated, I can definitely see why you'd be paranoid about cheating, but you'd better have an answer to memorization!
That would be one way to remove bias from the process.
I've often thought college admissions should be done in a blind manner. Applications go to a subcommittee that removes all race/gender clues from it, then the scrubbed applications go to the admissions committee.
That's new and stupid.
I'd tell them to get fucked.
My complaint was that it seemed both ineffective (imagine candidates with the Big-O cheatsheet taped above their monitor) and obnoxious (I wasn't even going to talk to an employee until I jumped through a bunch of hoops). If you're going to be demanding (and uncommonly so), then security theater with no engagement with the candidate is a bad way to go.
You need some interesting mental gymnastics to explain why this is even a problem, given that they could easily have the same cheatsheet taped on their cubicle wall after getting the job.
I recently interviewed, one of the interviewers actually brought up the NYT article and said that the retail side is intense, the tech side is more laid back, for whatever that's worth.
Try a startup?
Knowing what I know now, if I had gone to a startup straight out of college I would have been worse than useless.
Also, maybe I haven't been an Enterprise Fizzbuzz Java Developer for 6 years, but I've been keeping busy by having personal projects that most enterprise developers would probably not be able to understand.
I think that was understood (at least, that's how I read it). In a good environment at any company, your ideas will be fairly weighed against other options. Most environments aren't "good", by that definition. Don't be surprised if ideas that don't support the status quo are thrown aside.
> I'm sorry you think it is funny that I actually want to participate in the development process.
They weren't making fun of you because you'd like to take part in the process. They were making fun of you because you think it would be that simple.
> I've been keeping busy by having personal projects that most enterprise developers would probably not be able to understand.
Condescending statements like this make me glad not to know you. I've done things that some of my coworkers don't understand, and they've sometimes done things that I never have. Personal projects are fine, but there's a difference between the short+sharp bits of brilliance that you might put in a personal project of a few thousand lines and introducing a major feature into a project that has a whole file for every line that your personal project has.
> When did I ever presume it would be simple?
Your tone implies a process like this: 1. Get a job at Amazon 2. Never be bored, and have a good chance for input.
You may be lucky and have an experience like that, but the general consensus seems to be that it isn't the most likely outcome. #1 is the easy part. The parts of #2 will be false to varying degrees, separately and together, as time goes on (every job has boring parts, for example).
And anyhow, you wrote a post that was easy to make fun of, with the tempting mix of inexperience and confidence. You can't set yourself up for ridicule and expect that no one will take you up on the offer.
My experience at Amazon has been great. I don't know anyone who cries at their desk, works 80 hours per week, or feels like they're being pushed through a meat grinder. I worked for Microsoft before Amazon, and that was brutal. You'll find bad teams at every large company. One of my friends was on one at Google.
I kept getting calls from Amazon (Seattle number) claiming I had not done the test (which I had already done) and the HR folks mentioning I was not selected - and to try 6 months later.
I would definitely like to have another go at it, if possible.
I've had two coding challenges within that last year. One for an internship and one for a full time position (earlier today no reply yet don't expect one). The problem for me is I freeze. As soon as the "testing" type pressure gets put on I go cold and freeze. Then as soon as the test is over I can pull alllllll the information forward. It sucks because I struggle with CS exams too. Every time I have a test I freeze until I'm out of time and as soon as I leave a room it all comes back.
Big companies do really big thing. Google is literally changing the world. But if you get a job there, you are employee #145,231. Maybe if you work hard for 5 years you can rise to the rank of middle manager, and attend a meeting with someone that reports to the CEO, and maybe you can try to get a project you want done scheduled. More likely you will just do the work you are assigned until you quit.
Now a startup is the opposite. Blank startup has no power to change anything. But within that startup, you have 100% voice. If you work really hard, in 5 years maybe your startup will be big and you can change the world. Or more likely, they will go under or get bought out and you have not changed the world.
With Amazon, however, there's something qualitatively different. The anecdotes and evidence of it being a terrible place to work far outweigh the positive. Its bad reputation is confirmed by things you read about their policies, quotes from Jeff Bezos, etc. Poor treatment of employees is consistent across both the corporate and warehouse contexts. This reputation has persisted since at least 2007, the first time I considered working there and did some research on it.
Even in Seattle my pay definitely puts me in the upper middle class. I can afford Seattle property reasonably well ($600k range).
Interviewing at Amazon is kind of weird. They keep trying out new ideas to see how they work and includes things like: standard phone screen, coding test (don't know a better word for it), on site all day interviews, group interviews, etc... Chances are that if you had a weird interview process it was probably because you were trialing some different interview format.
I guess I don't really have a point in this post but I didn't see one positive post about Amazon and thought I'd share (at least anecdotally) that it's not all bad.
People don't live in the national average, they live in limited geographic areas, and the salaries that make people try to characterize tech workers as rich tend to come in - you guessed it - SF, NY, and DC.
I got a random email saying they were coming to my hometown, so I did the "2hr" coding test everyone is complaining about... which was actually really easy and more like 1hr.
then the day of, I biked down the river for coffee and lunch, then spent the afternoon coding on paper/laptop, and talking about past tech things I've done and why/how I did them. It was mostly a half and half split between the discussion and problem solving, then me trying to code one of my solutions in the last 10min of each interview, and mostly running out of time:P
The next day they invited me to move to seattle, and out for beers that evening.
Isn't the startup deified on HN more than any other type of company? Of course there are all kinds on here; it seems strange to stereotype HN posters that way.
I still maintain that in most comments portions, "startup" generates more hits than "Google". And "SRE" is still pretty rare.
This thread contains more "startup" than "Google". And we're the only two posters talking about "SRE".
I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out. (A couple of people I know left because they didn't want to do any oncall at all anymore, but noone was misled, and as far as I know they are not bitter about it)
But, the key is that there is no one "Amazon". A lot of freedom is given to each individual team and org, and as a result wild variations in work culture and expectations. I know teams that are great, and I know teams that are tougher. But, my reasoning for why those teams might be difficult to work with is because they are working on new bleeding-edge services (AWS, Echo/Alexa), and as a result there is a lot of pressure to stay ahead of our competitors. Which is completely understandable when Google and Microsoft are either just behind or just ahead on everything.
Maybe I've just been lucky? But I work with a lot of teams in a lot of countries, and generally by and large people are challenged and content.
I'm not saying there are no problems. And I'm sure all the people in the NYT article are not lying. But at a huge company of 200,000 employees, there's always going to be some unhappy and disgruntled people.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you otherwise - I am a city-dweller through and through, so I sense we have probably quite different personalities.
edit: I should acknowledge that I don't have direct experience with American work culture. Y'all work way too many hours, but that's not just at Amazon. And Silicon Valley is even worse.
In Amazon it can vary quite a lot across countries, cities, teams.
> I love it, and I don't know anyone that left disgruntled or unhappy due to being burnt out.
I met plenty. Heavy on-call rotations being the primary reason. Many people were quite bitter about the real VS claimed on-call load.
But again, I agree that this varies a lot.
I'm a hiring manager at Amazon (in natural language on Alexa). One thing I can say about Amazon culture is that teams can vary quite a bit. This is because Amazon gives a huge amount of ownership to each team, which naturally means each team's leadership has a lot of control on their culture.
Amazon does try to instill certain cultural elements across the company, but despite that, things can vary based on the leadership and the part of the company you're in. Prior to Alexa, I was in supply chain systems and I would say the culture there was quite different there.
Personally speaking, I really enjoy this team. It's definitely not a meat grinder; on the contrary, I think our team has great work-life balance while providing sufficient challenges to keep us motivated.
By the way, I'm sorry to hear some of the negative stories from others about their interviews. That's certainly not deliberate; our goal is to create a positive experience for every candidate irrespective of whether or not they successfully clear the interview. I personally work with some very professional and courteous recruiters on Alexa, but if anyone has had a negative experience interviewing for Alexa, I'd be happy to follow up and see if I can take some action on your feedback.
I had a fantastic team to work with - they were all either ex-tech-sector CTOs or equivalent or they had that level of potential. So as the team manager I had permanent case of imposter syndrome. My manager was the kind of engineering leader you want to be, a listener first and foremost, smart and principled and demanding but not harsh. The technology is all the more mind-blowing when you look under the bonnet. The culture and corporate structure is remarkable and in my opinion a major strategic factor in the Amazon success story. We were always hiring, all the time. When you have such strong ICs, they don't want anything less than A-list peers. As an AWS manager I allocated roughly a third of my time to hiring and promotion, and more during certain internal cycles.
So it was hard work in a demanding environment but I loved it, and that made stepping away all the more difficult. Would I return? If my startup tanked, in a heartbeat, if they'd have me back.
I also think that those who loathed it are far more vocal than those who loved it. Part of the culture is a strong sense of nondisclosure, and if you have positive memories of the place, that's going to carry over.
I will say, the hiring process described may differ between teams. There are consistencies that the recruitment folks systematically enforce, but as a hiring manager (at least in my region) we had latitude to vary screening steps and the mix of the in-person interviews. I didn't futz with it much though, to avoid screwing up procedural fairness.
I am not surprised this author got an offer, they seem bright enough, and engaging with the process and the company with genuine interest and an open mind (without trying to game it) is definitely a very positive framing and I imagine this came across in person.
Your first paragraph is exactly how I describe Amazon to people. You either love the culture - or you hate it. There are very few people I know who are ambivalent about working there.
It's hard work. It's important work. It's demanding work. It's not for everyone.
It's needlessly hard and too much of it is unimportant.
Do you really think people at Google/Facebook/Microsoft/etc... aren't working hard? Aren't working on things they think are important? The job isn't demanding?
Yet the horror stories consistently come from Amazon.
But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls (which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff)? And once there, talking to each other about work stuff while doing, you know, their "business"?
Taken together, these anecdotes paint a picture of a company that's not just hard-driven, but... weird.
And in some corners, apparently kind of gross.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/at-amazon-employees-treat-t...
Particularly this little vignette:
Even more alarming was the bathroom culture. I can only speak to the men’s room, most of which each had two urinals and two stalls. I come from a background where a bathroom is a place where you do a certain kind of business, in silence, and you leave. At Amazon, the men’s room is an extension of the office. People chitchat about work in the bathroom, as if it is just another meeting room where you can piss everywhere.
The most horrifying moment of my employment at Amazon was the time I was using the toilet and a coworker began talking from the stall next to me. He asked me why I had not responded to his very pressing email. I closed my eyes and pretended this wasn’t happening. What email could be so important that it could not wait five minutes for me to use the bathroom? He began tapping on the wall between our stalls, asking why I wouldn’t respond, as if inter-stall conversation should be a totally normal, not disgusting means of communication.
He became more specific about what he needed—referencing a project I’d never heard of, nor would I ever have involvement in—and I realized he had misidentified me from my shoes. (Many brown dress shoes look alike, apparently.) We both exited our stalls around the same time, and he realized his mistake. He didn’t apologize, only explained that he thought I was someone else. As we washed our hands, he just laughed, and I vowed I would never use the stalls on that floor again.
Is the guy lying? Just imagining things?
Please share your thoughts.
There's no where else to put it if you need to go to the bathroom and you take your laptop. I mean, some people just leave it at the sink but eh. But laptop into a stall to work? No.
> which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff
Most of the buildings weren't owned by amazon. So they have a normal amount of stalls. Which is a problem on the floors with lots of devs because we have the normal dev demographics.
And then there is the Fire TV team who had to work under a director who was indicted for being part of a sex trafficking ring and is currently awaiting trial in King county courts. The women were slaves who were forced into prostitution to pay off debts to organized crime bosses in Asia. Yes, Amazon hired a sex trafficker/pimp into its management org. Parts of Amazon are totally corrupt. We can only imagine how much worse the people that hired this person are.
I worked on some really cool stuff there, and learned a lot. But then after a while AWS grew rapidly and I ended up spending most of my time on pretty boring stuff, such as operational firefighting, endless deployments, config updates, and of course that oncall thing.
That said, in my experience, Amazon was still a bit of meat-grinder. I've come to realise though that its just part of an extremely long interview process, with the goal of weeding out those who just aren't thriving in Amazon's environment of "organised chaos". New grads who don't make SDE2 within a certain amount of time will eventually be PIP'ed, which is basically a signal that its time to find greener pastures.
It's still like that. All of my friends who've worked for Amazon burned out within a year or two.
On the other hand it is only a handful people who get to flesh out interesting products for AWS.
who isn't a meatgrinder these days? (serious question.)
I had this happen early in my career. Recruiter and I talked about a range, went through 3 rounds of interviews, and I got an offer below what I was currently making. Absolutely not in the discussed range. The offer came via email and I was insulted - I declined without negotiation. I still have the email, and I was apparently pretty polite. A week later they pinged me back to ask if I had considered it, if I was dissatisfied and that they could go up. I just politely restated my decline. They'd already wasted my time, and as junior as I was, my time was still valuable - I took time out of work, traveled, etc. That was almost 10 years ago and I'm still salty about it. That should tell you what kind of impression this behavior leaves behind. Looking back at the emails now, I am very surprised at how professional and polite I was about it - my memories of 20-something me are apparently overblown :)
Recruiters are just sales people. They usually have limited if any tech background and heavy business or sales background. They should be treated skeptically, like any other sales person.
If they clearly can't afford your salary range then this should be made upfront.
It was bad form to make an initial offer that far below the author's stated salary requirement, but I'd be shocked if there wasn't room for negotiation. The author didn't mention whether he tried pushing them higher.
The recruiter has no incentive to tell the truth regarding salary unless it's way off. Think of it this way: worst case scenario, exactly what happens happens. The recruiter gets someone to apply who everyone likes but they don't accept an offer. Best case scenario, something makes the guy take the lower offer - whether it's his wife losing her job or he gets wined and dined enough that he's willing to take the hit to COL to have Amazon on his resume.
The recruiter already got "credit" for having the person apply.
What isn't clear is whether he countered. It sounds like he didn't because he mentions family as the main reason not to leave. But I imagine had he countered he could have easily gotten to that $170k number or very close.
People often don't consider cost-of-living when making job decisions. I think the way to do it is to equalize the salaries based on cost-of-living across each company you're considering. So if you make $60,000 in a small midwestern town, that's the same as making $120k in Seattle or the Bay Area. If you make $80,000 in a small midwestern town, you're coming out ahead of the guy/gal pulling six figures in SF.
It's an important consideration and one I think many employers try to get you to ignore.
Not true at all. I made almost that exact jump when moving from the Midwest to Seattle.
You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are a % of your salary. Sign-on bonuses and stock benefits are common out here but rare in the Midwest.
Plus, even if your housing cost doubles, other expenses don't. Food costs, gas, vacations, and everything on Amazon is the same. I actually spend a lot less on transportation because I can take public transit instead of a car. We were able to sell one of our cars too.
Not to mention you can probably keep most of your salary if you decide to move back to the Midwest.
That's actually not true. I'm referring to cost-of-living, which includes housing, gas, food, etc. All the things you list. Here's a calculator you can use to try it for yourself [1]. Using that, if I live in Columbia, MO (which I chose at random) and make $60k, I must make $111k in the Bay Area to maintain the same standard of living.
[1] http://www.bankrate.com/calculators/savings/moving-cost-of-l...
> You're forgetting things like raises, bonuses, and 401(k) matching that are a % of your salary. Not to mention sign-on bonuses and stock benefits, which are rare in the Midwest.
That is definitely correct. But you can certainly find companies offering good (signing and regular) bonuses and 401k matching; I did. Stock is much rarer, as you say.
The biggest cost variance is in housing. In the Midwest, you can get a 2,500 sq ft home for ~1.3k +/- $350. [0] Under normal leasing standards (no more than 1/3rd your income to rent), you can pay that if you have a job in the $50k-$60k range. And that's almost the standard -- big houses and big yards for everyone.
In LA or SEA, you're looking at 2.5x-4x that, which is at least $3500/mo. [1] Under normal leasing income standards, you'd have to have a salary of $140k+ to barely meet the minimum requirements, and that's for a "cheap" rental home. The other option is to live way out in the burbs, where prices are probably closer to 1.5x-2.5x, and spend 2.5 hours commuting every work day.
(In SF or NYC, you probably can't obtain a comparable living situation, but a 2500 sq ft apartment apparently runs around $15k/mo, meaning you'd have to make almost $1M/yr to barely afford one)
If you're a single person or just have a partner, you can probably take a hit and go from a $800/mo 2-bedroom apartment @ $55k to a downsized $1600/mo apartment @ $110k and still make a lot more money than you did in the place with a lower CoL (even after calculating a 30-50% increase in the cost of some goods, like utilities, gas, and food).
However, if you have kids, this quickly becomes impractical, because it's way harder to jump from a $1300/mo home @ 60k to a $3500/mo home @ 115k.
For extra credit calculate the change to net pay based on differing tax laws. This is especially large if you're coming to CA, which has the highest state income tax in the nation at 13.3%. Most Midwestern states have tax rates between 4 and 7 percent. Some of the most populous "flyover" states (Texas and Florida) have a 0% tax rate (and to Amazon's credit, WA does too). [2]
[2] http://taxfoundation.org/sites/taxfoundation.org/files/docs/...
I think I've mentioned this before, but when I interviewed at Amazon, the topic of affordable housing came up. I asked the interviewer what was affordable these days, expecting Kent, Auburn, or maybe even Buckley. His answer was Puyallup.
San Leandro is a steal as well.
Dallas is the best of both worlds, high salary and low cost of living. I'm not a fan of Dallas but I may end up there again.
I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The mcmansion trend hit the bay area just as much as it hit anywhere else. The burbs are 20-30 minutes away with tech worker job hours. The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dollars, so your mortgage cancels out the additional bay area income. But that mortgage money doesn't go into a black hole, it's equity. So at the end of the day you can sell your bay area house, go back to oklahoma, and buy ten houses. This is probably the best opportunity going in the world right now to build dynastic wealth.
Searching for rentals within the actual city limits. Burbs are fine but already addressed; generally you are looking at 1 hour+ commutes before it starts to get into "affordable" range (looking at 1.5x-2.5x the median cost for comparable housing in other metros).
In LA and SEA, it seems it's possible to find housing that's closer than 1 hours' commute for 2.5x-4.5x the national median.
In NYC and SF, it doesn't appear that way -- these areas are so dense that it's not possible to get a 2500 sq ft home within 1 hours' commute (meaning freestanding homes that have a yard, not condos/apartments; such homes actually appear to be so rare within city limits that you'd have difficulty getting them no matter how much money you were willing to spend). That's why I singled them out. I'm talking about a rush hour commute here, the need to get to work to do a 9-5. For example, I know Daly City is only a few miles from SF proper, but that doesn't mean you can get doorstep-to-doorstep in under an hour given the transit conditions.
I've never lived in either SF or NYC so it's completely possible that I'm making an incorrect extrapolation here.
>The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dollars, so your mortgage cancels out the additional bay area income. But that mortgage money doesn't go into a black hole, it's equity. So at the end of the day you can sell your bay area house, go back to oklahoma, and buy ten houses. This is probably the best opportunity going in the world right now to build dynastic wealth.
This is a good idea if you can get the timing right.
I'm not claiming these homes are affordable inside SF, but they certainly exist - anyone who has spent much time in the city or searched zillow can attest (I would link you if I weren't on my phone). There are three-story single-family Victorians all over the place. The yard is usually in the back, though, as putting one next to city street traffic is a waste of space. There are some gated communities with front yards.
The preponderance of single-family homes in the city is one of the causes of the high housing prices. Most of the apartments/condos are actually subdivided versions of the victorians, because it is not legal to build anything taller. And now you have owners evicting all occupants of a property like this, converting them back into a single-family-home with an open floor plan, giant deck, lots of windows, and asking price in the millions. The circle is complete.
>For example, I know Daly City is only a few miles from SF proper, but that doesn't mean you can get doorstep-to-doorstep in under an hour given the transit conditions.
The BART train from Daly City reaches Montgomery station in 15 minutes. If you can't stand a train you do need to commute in off-hours.
>This is a good idea if you can get the timing right.
Granted, there are possible scenarios where this won't work, but all you need is for housing to appreciate at the rate of inflation over a few decades. If that happens fifteen years after you buy, you can sell and lock in your gains early. It's not so different from putting your 401k in equities when you are decades from retirement.
I'm not disrespecting their particular experience; it's awesome that their move worked in their favor. But I have interviewed for jobs in cities like SF and I have crunched the numbers on their salaries and so I have direct experience, too. Neither of our stories on their own are proof, they're just anecdotes; cost-of-living calculations are the result of lots of hard data.
You move and now make $120k and your expenses double to $80k. You're saving $40k; twice as much. But in reality, not all of your expenses increase that much, and the other benefits (bonuses, matching, raises, interest, etc.) are % based, so the discrepancy increases quickly.
I find the idea of overall expenses only doubling for a family moving from OK or MI to a place like Seattle somewhat silly. The vast majority of household budget's largest expense by far is housing. If they want to downgrade their standard of living from a 3-4 br 2000+sq feet house, then maybe it will only double. Otherwise it could easily triple or quadruple, as the original article discusses and evidence for is easily found. Salaries are not 3-4x larger in high CoL areas generally. The difference is pretty stark even starting from an area like Metro DC/Baltimore that isn't exactly known for being cheap, but nowhere near SF, Seattle, NYC or Boston levels.
Yes, the square footage of my apartment went way down. Pretty much everyone out here lives in less space, generally it's less a "standard of living" thing than a "that's the norm" thing, but obviously if you really need 2K sqft you're going to want to evaluate things separately.
I see you've gotten Stockholm Syndrome already :) But yes, it is definitely an individual-situation type of thing for sure. I'm merely responding to the blanket assertion that just because you ~double your salary in a ~2x CoL area you are always coming out ahead. As you say there are assumptions built into calculators that you personally have to decide how to value, and how you value things like a good commute, schools, and a backyard can change over time as well.
I also used to work in Nowhere, USA and now work in the Bay Area. While my "cost of living as a percent of salary" is much higher, so is my "salary minus cost of living" which is a more important measurement. To put it into concrete hypothetical terms:
Person A lives in rural Iowa, makes $50K a year after taxes, and their cost of living items (housing, gas, food, etc.) add up to $20K. Person B lives in the city, makes $100K a year after taxes, and their cost of living items add up to $60K. All other things being equal (I know, that's a stretch), who's doing better?
One school of thought is that A is better off because while they're making half the salary, their cost of living is 1/3rd. My school of though says that B is better off because he has $10K more to do things that cost the same as they do for person A: Investment, travel, Netflix, anything you buy on Amazon, whatever.
That is not what I see. Food seems to be about 10% - 15% higher than here in Dallas. Sales tax is slightly higher. Gas is definitely higher (about 20%). Travel from SeaTac is more expensive and less flexible than travel from DFW. I spend maybe $5000/year on online purchases and other things that would be the exact same price regardless of geography.
Everything, with the probable exception of insurance, is more expensive in the PNW than it is in the Midwest. It certainly is not as big a part of the calculation as housing, but it is not a wash.
Well, perhaps less than double, but still higher overall (except, obviously, stuff on Amazon will probably be the same, as I don't think they've implemented destination-specific pricing.) Gas is definitely higher in California than the national average, and higher in the Bay Area than the statewide average. Vacations will depend on where you want to vacation. Lots of services will be more expensive, because the people selling those services need to make enough money to live in the area. (Similar with goods where locally-sourced labor is a significant factor to the total cost of getting the good to you.)
Home prices have risen much more quickly out West than they have in the Midwest. If you're in a position to buy a home, I recommend factoring this into the equation and plan as well. It can be a great financial investment to move out west for at least two years, then back to the Midwest after selling or renting the home for some time.
In comparison, I know senior engineers in the bay area making 150K at companies you'd recognize, with stock packages that don't mean squat without liquidity events. And a SF house equivalent to the 200K St Louis house is 2M. They aren't getting a good deal.
It seems to me that the problem with your argument here is not that you aren't right, but that you are providing numbers so far away from reality that people can pick them apart and claim that the midwest is a bad deal. A 60K salary upgrade would make San Francisco appealing. But in practice, the range is far smaller, and that's without taking into account companies that hire remote.
Do you have a source for this? Anecdotally, cost of living/quality of life are two big issues with every candidate I've every talked with.
They do. People not living in the cities constantly bring this up. We know. We are not idiots because we live in a bigger city.
I have roughly 55k left over after taxes, rent, and 401k. In other words, I'm doing fine even with the higher costs.
This is not counting bonus and stock.
She didn't like this and put up a hard-lined attitude about it, insisted I needed more basic questions. Totally treated me like less than a person and didn't care that I had other offers that would expire. Acted like it was a gift that Amazon was interested in me at all.
Who seriously puts up with this crap? One can only imagine how working for a company must be if this is how their hiring process works. I hung up the phone and last I checked I wouldn't want to be working at the music thing anyway.
If you're going to be building search engines or whatever, OK. And, time complexity questions should be asked. But chances are, the broad majority will end up doing line of business apps that require three data structures of which you will never write a better version than your stdlib: list, hash, set.
There's only one time in my 20 year career I've ever had to implement my own data structure (Directed Graph), and I basically copied it line by line out of a book and ended up replacing it with Neo4j.
I'm glad to hear that Amazon kept the textbook-style questions light -- it's not what you usually hear about happening in interviews with big tech companies.
Yeah, this was a pleasant surprise about the process for me.
It's enough to generally know about caches. Databases have query caches. Memcache and Redis are memory caches. Retrieval is O(1) because they're based on hashes. You can influence object expiration and turn on LRU.
I can't implement a cache with LRU by the seat of my pants though, but I'm experienced enough to know you shouldn't do that anyways. And, I know enough to read the docs and ask intelligent questions.
None of that changes the fact that when my cache blows up in production, I'm going to be in the exact same position as my all-algo-knowing colleague -- scared, grasping at straws, and applying grit to fix the problem.
Plus there is a lot of open endedness that makes it easy to drill down into someone's thought process.
How do you prove this to a potential employer though? Also, it should be possible to read up on algorithms for the interview.correct?.
My favorite filter is to just ask the candidate to talk about technology, open ended, like they would to a friend. You get a real sense of what they care about, and you give them a chance to lead the discussion. Do they ask questions back to you (I hope so), or do they monopolize the discussion. Are they even prepared to have an open ended discussion? You'd be surprised how many 'software engineering' candidates can't do that.
But this one does build search engines or whatever.
I think the substance of dgemm's comment has merit though. It could be Amazon was trying to place the candidate so were assessing the breadth of his/her skill.
My OP was more generalized. Most positions in software don't require fine-grained understanding of algorithms and data structures, but interviewers nevertheless focus on those. A general understanding is good enough along with more important factors:
Are they talented at what we're hiring them for? Are they an asshole? Will they finagle their way out the door and on home when production is on fire?
I responded saying that working for Amazon would be awesome, but for me and Layla to move up to Seattle would require a 170-200k salary. I assumed this recruiter would take a look at that number, scoff, and politely end our conversation – but she affirmed that they could work with that, and asked if I wanted to set up a phone interview.
If you still get too many, then it's time to increase your salary requirement.
Amazon is in direct competition for talent with Google, Facebook and Microsoft and from what information I can gather they all pay significantly more while also lacking the bad reputation Amazon has accrued over the years for being a complete meat-grinder. (whether or not the others are actually meat-grinders is still up for debate: but they don't have a public reputation for being such)
Why does talent in our industry continue to accept this kind of treatment? If name brand law firms tried to pull this shit with associate lawyers I suspect they would get sent invoices for the billable hours.
The real question to ask is how many individual technical contributors does Amazon lose to the others?
Or is it likely to be somewhere in the middle...maybe if he blew everyone away in the interviews he would have received an offer for 180k, but he didn't so it was more of a 115k assessment?
The recruiter on LinkedIn said that it was for a senior Java developer role. We even spoke over the phone to go through some of what the role involved.
The actual interviewing process was half a day of being interviewed by various people from different departments, some asking sysops questions, some asking general BA questions, some asking network/IP related questions, and 2 (if I remember correctly) actually asking programming/developer questions.
One was shocked that I didn't have a laptop with me, which was not at all part of the instructions.
The process was nowhere near as organised as what's mentioned in this blog, and this was somewhat recent (late 2015 I think?)
Perhaps their overseas recruitment arm seriously needs better coordination?
Timezones are still an issue, but if you're willing to adapt your work hours to meet the majority, being remote allows you to work for fantastic companies without sacrificing your way of life.
Throwing half-baked specs over the fence to people from a different culture, who's main qualification wasn't that you could get them at all, but that you could get them cheaply unsurprisingly lead to catastrophic project failures. Sending consultants both ways to work locally together for a while, creating real mixed teams -- worked better.
Tell Stackoverflow, Trello and Gitlab that remote teams doesn't work. Of course it can work, but you need to plan for it. Oh, and team members that are any good, will command a high salary. Don't pay them, and they'll jump ship.
Big company salary (plus 401k match, stock, bonuses, etc.) in an area that is, from what I read, ~11% cheaper than average.
Life is good.
Statistically speaking, after the first week or so, you should have at least been pinged by a bot or two.
Perhaps your profile should explicitly say that you are a live human with a pulse?
While I got recruited about 10 months ago, all the information should be the same (besides a new job).
I think being aware of priorities for each person and each phase of life is important. There's times when big name or (relatively speaking) big salary is the prime factor, and that's great, and go for it! There's also times when being close to family, staying rooted, and being stable is the prime factor, and that's ok too.
Actually, I only asked for $130k base and felt guilty about that.
/shrug A week after the second screen, I got sent a form letter "no" from my recruiter, which was just fine by me. I've accepted an offer from a rival of theirs and I can't wait to kick their asses.
But I think it is in order to tell the author of the story as well not to waste their time. This time it's Amazon who most of us don't like, but in generic it could be any company. If your main reason for not going has nothing to do with the offer or job itself but only with something you could, and should have considered beforehand you effectively wasted the companies time, not the other way around. They gave you a free test.
The first reason he lists for declining the offer; salary was too low relative to housing prices.
I understand that, from the company's point of view, 1 day is still to short to assess someone. But it is still a lot of time dedicated to an offer that may or may not materialize.
taking day off from work.
If you give the number first, you lose. They will only negotiate downward from there. You can deflect in a million different ways (which are covered by Ramit extensively), and each time you deflect your advantage increases. They can persist in a million different ways ("I'm sorry, this is just procedure" is probably the most common), but if you cave and give them a number, it will only go down from there. If you give them a range, the best offer you will ever get is the low part of the range. Don't give them a number...wait for them to offer, then negotiate upwards.
Overall, your BATNA (and your counterparty's) is the most important factor in the negotiation. Numbers can certainly go up, especially with changes in your BATNA. Case in point: "I've just received a higher offer; I would accept yours if you could match it + $10k." People post articles on HN all the time talking about how they get companies to outbid each other.
More important than "never giving the number first" is being steadfast in what you want (within realistic bounds). I have followed both styles but haven't been penalized by starting with the number first. If you're the best candidate, the company will pay what you insist on. Otherwise, the "never giving the number first" was never going to work to begin with.
It's the difference between a polite "this offer doesn't work for me at the moment", and burning your bridges.
(However, this particular article doesn't seem to discuss any specifics of technical questions, so I don't see an issue here)
I don't share questions as a matter of principle, fwiw.
Usually they mention any sort of business practices or plans you might learn about in the course of interviewing; recruitment is highly unlikely to fall under that definition.
I'm sure it's possible to get a good job there, not everyone's life can be miserable there. But I wouldn't roll those dice, would you?
Upvote if your startup pretended that your offer would expire in 48 hours
#WordGamesFromSandHill
That said, I played beach volleyball all day yesterday with some friends as the sun set over the Olympic mountains in the background, and it was greatness. But it took me a couple of years to find my place.
Happy as can be at the moment, but it's odd how the gray can send me into a spiral of inward reflection that drives me nuts. Everyone posts the beautiful pictures of Mount Rainier and sunsets, which are gorgeous, but half the year you can feel lethargic and go into a hibernation mode which messes with your head if you don't have a strong social circle already.
And I think the weather here is good. (And the wheather in Seattle was wonderful on 100% of the days that I visited it).
That's the main reason; it also smells like pee, there are aggressive hobos everywhere, the public transit is useless, it rains every day, and everything closes at 6pm.
As a San Francisco resident who recently visited Seattle, I was amazed by how much less it smelled like pee (and other human waste), how polite the hobos were, and how efficient the public transportation was. It seemed like some kind of gleaming urban utopia, although I did visit on warm sunny days.
You should visit Toronto or Tokyo then, they'll blow your mind.