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Comment by u489utaa | Hacker News Reader

Amazon screws employees in ways unseen in other companies. From the perspective of an engineer, this is a terrible place for people to work and grow. To list a few things:

- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years

- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.

- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.

- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.

- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!

This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!

SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.

The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.

* I worked at AWS for 2 years.

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The worst part to me was that despite all of the claims of meritocracy, there was zero financial incentive to perform well during my four years there. That's because any previously-granted equity is counted against you when determining your total compensation for the next year. When those big year 3 & 4 equity vests kick in, they just stop giving you additional stock, because the stock you already had went up so much.

What this means is that in four years, despite glowing reviews every year and a promotion, I never got a meaningful raise/bonus/stock grant, because the stock was doing so well. My W2 income went up, but it was completely unrelated to my performance -- I could have done just enough to not get fired and would have made essentially the same amount. People who performed worse than me were regularly given larger stock grants.

It was super demoralizing to figure that out. Big part of the reason I left.

The cult of management seems to think that they have some magic that will incentivize workers without any increase in monetary compensation (or often percentage increases below inflation). I've seen it at work for C and D players but anyone with half a brain won't stick around once Oz is exposed as just a man behind a curtain.

I was at AWS for six months as a contractor and a year as an SDE3.

Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year.

The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered food is a cute perk, but it's hardly critical.

I don't drink soda, but they had free coffee and tea. Tea is my drink of choice, so I was happy. Soda is bad for you anyway. ;)

They did have free "snacks" if you count breakfast cereal. Which many people would grab a cup full of as a snack (there were no bowls, oddly enough). There were a mountain of breakfast cereal boxes on every floor near the kitchen. But yes, they also had paid snack machines.

The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.

Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.

And I think the latter really makes the difference. There are 20,000 people working at Amazon, according to the article. When you scale that big, some corners of the org are going to suck, and some will be better.

I may someday return to Amazon, now that they have an office near me in Colorado. But I'm still working on the game that I put on hold while I worked at Amazon, and I need to finish it before I reattach the golden handcuffs.

> Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall.

I've been in many teams and I can agree there are many strong developers.

> Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop.

Maybe not like sweatshops, but I've met many tenths of people that left because of the constant pressure to deliver combined with the oncall duties. Once I witnessed a whole team disappearing in a short time.

> We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.

We too, but phrased like this makes it sounds like Amazon is a relaxed and laid-back company. Far from it.

>We too, but phrased like this makes it sounds like Amazon is a relaxed and laid-back company. Far from it.

Amazon is strict about a lot of things, but as far as workload -- well, I'm quite a fast developer, and I almost always was way ahead of the curve in getting things done. Very low stress for me.

Big reason I quit is that I was bored, in fact. Despite asking for more work. Despite taking on random extra team projects to create tooling to improve source control processes. And writing tools that were used elsewhere in the company. Etc. etc.

The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.

I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.

No incentive at best, disincentive usually. There is a steady stream of new grads willing to put up with it for a couple years. The horrible vesting means you aren't paying much for them, not to mention salaries are mildly low to start with.

I have repeatedly heard these stories about Amazon -- it is one of the known-bad places to work, unless you have found a truly special situation.

Keep in mind this is only compared to other tech employers. It's fine compared to games companies, non-tech companies that won't value your work, and most jobs if you're not privileged enough to be a software developer.

> if you're not privileged enough to be a software developer.

Being a software developer isn't a privilege, it's a choice.

Being able to make that choice is a privilege.

How do you figure?

Not the OP, but:

* Access to educational opportunities as a child (the "easy" path to developing the right brain structures software engineers need)

* Lacking the first point, the extreme amount of time and the tolerance for the effort involved in "learning how to think" as an adult.

* The free time to learn to become a software engineer.

* Ideally the money to get a CS degree or equivalent.

* Raw aptitude. Some people are genuinely not cut out for it.

A privilege is a special right reserved for certain people. Making good choices isn't reserved for those who are middle class and above.

No doubt the path to career success is easier for those with parents who made an a collection of smart decisions, as well having made past smart choices.

If I must accept this definition of 'privilege', then we can simply call all outcomes in our life to be a direct result of the amount of 'privilege' we have.

Personally I reject this broad definition of privilege as it strips away peoples need to accept the fact that at the end of the day, they have the ability to make their own choices and develop their own self discipline.

There are world class developers who have arisen from 3rd world country level educations, there are elite athletes in third world countries who have self-coached their way to olympic level performance. Class mobility exists, and stripping away personal responsibility via the process of redefining language does not help anyone except for those who wish to just continue their life without critical introspection.

At the core, this is a political argument hidden under the shroud of being a linguistics argument.

> If I must accept this definition of 'privilege', then we can simply call all outcomes in our life to be a direct result of the amount of 'privilege' we have.

You can accept this definition without reducing your entire life to a preordained path. There’s middle ground where you can accept that some portion of your life was your choice, but the rest of it was due to circumstances you were raised in or had no choice in. Nobody is suggesting you didn’t work hard to get where you are, but it’d also be crazy to pretend that the white child born to rich engineers has the same path as a poor person of color who had to help work at a young age to support their single mother and siblings.

>I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.

It is all automated. To the point of paging you when an alarm goes off. But when the alarms go off, someone has to figure out how to fix the problem. Apparently some newer developers dug into the problem, they were able to fix it so that things were Much More Sane.

On our particular team, the server guys had just set too many alarms without really:

a) Documenting exactly why a particular alarm was potentially bad

b) Documenting what to do when a particular alarm went off

c) Really thinking about alarm thresholds -- frequently alarms were going off just because a client was using the product

The hell of oncall for our team was that we were the client team. We knew nothing about the server side. So if someone on our team was oncall and got paged, they'd basically have to call someone on the server team at 3am or whenever anyway because WTF is this stupid alarm?!

I had the Weirdest Commute Ever [1], though, and was as a side effect exempt.

[1] I live in Colorado. Amazon send me an offer to be an employee that allowed me to work from home ... but not in Colorado, because sales tax. So I rented a house on the edge of Kansas (3 hour drive), worked M-W, 12 hours/day, and drove home for the weekends. I couldn't do any work in Colorado or Amazon would risk having to pay sales tax on all purchases from Colorado. So QED I couldn't be oncall. Amazon has offices here now, so I could work for them without the weird commute. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm currently obsessing over finishing a game.

Yeh, I imagine another Bezos directive is coming soon. "automate it all or close down!" like he did with service api's so where's his smarts on this?

the conspirator in me thinks maybe he figured out its better to hire lots and fire lots churn/burn em out. amazon is always having those hire-events where you go like cattle to get filtered for a likely bad job b/c you won't appear all that selective to them.

They have automated it then, just not in the way we like to think it should be done :)

SDE3? Isn't that a semi-mythical level with just a handful of people? I suspect your experience is atypical.

Not really.

Principal, maybe, but SDE3 is a position you can be easily hired into with enough experience. As a promo it's a bitch, though, and absolutely not worth it. Jump ships for something level equivalent at a company with better comp and get promoted there.

I say this having stuck it out at Amazon for SDE3 before jumping ship. My only regret is that I stayed too long.

How long did you stay at Amazon? Did you start as a SDE1?

I should really find a better way to phrase that comment. I wasn't actually there for that long (a bit over two years), but I still regret not leaving sooner. I was hired in as an SDE2, which at the time was probably the right level due to lack of experience with large companies, but I outgrew it pretty quickly. The SDE3 promo process involved a staggering amount of hoop jumping specifically so my manager could put together my packet. My manager was fairly transparent about the checklist nature of the process, but it clearly involved an even more staggering amount of work for him preparing a packet for me.

When I say I should've left sooner it's because for all the effort put into it I ended up taking a substantial pay raise and a level drop when I finally did leave five months later (and went through a much lighter weight promo process shortly after joining my new gig that I would've been able to pursue regardless). It's possible the promo put me in a better negotiating position, but given that I didn't disclose my current compensation during negotiation I can't say that with any confidence.

From what I remember almost everyone will get promoted from SDE1 to SDE2 in around ~2 years. Getting promoted to SDE3 is not as easy but it's not really that rare either. It'd be really bizarre for almost everyone to be stuck at SDE2 considering how easy it is to get there.

I don't work in SV so maybe my comment doesn't matter but most of these things seem pretty trivial....

> - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years

I haven no equity in my company or opportunity to get any.

> - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.

I don't think my company offers any relocation packages (I could be wrong on that) but even so this policy doesn't strike me as completely crazy.

> - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.

My vesting schedule only vests after 6 years (with 20 percent vesting every year after the first). It's not great but on average it's not the worst AFAICT.

> - No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself

> - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.

Both of these... We have nothing like it at all, I'd kill for a "shitty cafe". We have coffee and that's about it. This comment comes of as extremely spoiled to me.

> - Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!

My job doesn't include being on call but I work with people who are, I don't fully understand what this bit is talking about. Are you woken up just to be told your "shift" is starting or is this just referencing being woken up because there is a problem? Cause that's kind of the definition of being on call....

Maybe I'm just naive and stupid to think my job is good (every job could be better of course) but from where I'm sitting 90% of your comment comes off as entitled and spoiled and it colors the rest of it.

I understand where you're coming from as I've worked both in and outside of SV (Amazon isn't in SV but shares the culture). Though it may look like they're asking for a lot, it has to do with the demanding nature of the jobs they're working.

To answer your question about being woke up in the middle of the night, there is no such thing as a "shift". Most of us are expected to work at the very least 60 hour work weeks (no additional pay, everyone is salaried), with many jobs beings 'always on', extending our work into nights and weekends with take home laptops. A typical (though not universal) day at Amazon is like follows:

- Wake up and open laptop to check emails and get some work in.

- Shower, eat, etc. before going into work.

- Work until around 7-8pm.

- Come home and eat, then open up laptop to work (maybe with the tv on in the background) up until going to bed.

Waking hours are pretty much consumed by work, and on weekends a lot of people will do a couple hours here and there and between other things, to stay current with issues.

If people in SV look like they're asking for a lot or getting upset over petty things, it's because of the sheer soul sucking amount of work that's being imposed on them. Small conveniences like a catered cafe makes the difference in helping them work through it.

That culture sounds depressing. Not all companies (in and out of SV) work like that. The good thing is that you likely have a skill in high demand and can find a company with a better work culture. There are definitely many that value work/life balance and still pay well.

It's definitely not an ideal life, but seems to be increasingly the norm among individual contributor positions at the big guys (Google, Apple, Amazon, etc). What's more is that on paper, these same companies espouse 'work-life' balance, while those who try to leave there laptops at work after hours end up on probation like the individual in this article.

What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?

When you say "check emails", can you describe the typical task that would be assigned to employee?

I ask because it all seems very vague as to what the employees actually do. Are they all software engineers? Customer service? Which ones are overworked?

I specifically kept it vague for reasons of anonymity, as these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past, and also due to the fact that what I described was work habits of people I talk to across different engineering roles (software, hardware, infrastructure) in the company I work for.

You can work less than 60 hours, but it will show in your output, as deadlines are aggressive and set tops down.

Examples of the kind of thing someone is answering emails in the early morning for is bugs discovered in your code, a regression that's failing, or something found that's blocking another coworkers' progress (since they were working late into the night as well).

I appreciate the clarification, but keep in mind that "keeping it vague" means you're adding nothing to the conversation.

Without specifics it's much harder to get a grasp of the issue and nearly impossible for someone who already isn't a part of that culture/workforce.

> these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past

I'm able to appreciate that, but this is why we're on the internet, and anonymity should be theirs and your personal responsibility and no one elses.

> What exactly do they do that requires 60 hours of work and no less?

It's not so much the type of work, but other factors like volume, availability and perceived engagement. Even if you were capable of getting done in 20 hours what takes 60 hours for someone else you'd be expected to be available to help the team or respond to issues. Often times, in these types of environments you'll be expected to reply to issues quickly, respond to managers/leads if there's a question and these will arise at any moment within those 60 work hours, because even though you finished "your tasks" the team is still working to finish theirs and you're expected to be around "adding value".

As regards to the "checks emails", the task can literally be anything: a question regarding code, a response to an inquiry, a prompt for a decision on some topic, or a request for information that's needed ASAP. I've seen organizations that track the time taken to get a reply to these emails and they keep track in Excel sheets the average response time from individuals and their number of responses.

For example, I've also seen people get reported to management for taking a nap during their lunch break, even though they had finished their assigned task. The details of the tasks become irrelevant in those types of toxic environments.

Whatever your work conditions may be, it still stinks for him to be given an offer on paper which looks comparable to other companies of Amazon's reach, and yet in the small print wind up being a lot worse.

If you don't like the fine print, don't take the offer?

Why be offended by an offer? It's just an offer. Counter or just say "no".

Being offended is a waste of time.

Well, they didn't post their offer letter, so we have no idea if those details were in "small print" or not.

i think his complaint is in the context of amazon's aggresive and stressful work culture. For all of that, you ought to get some pretty good benefits

Yeah, same here (more or less): I think Amazon doesn't compare favorably to Google or Facebook, but it compares pretty well to almost every other employer out there...

At IIT Bombay Amazon arrived for recruitment. The AC in the hall was not working so all students tried to catch the window seats. The HR shouted at us claiming "If you want a job come and seat here else get out of the room" despite a student politely explaining why they are prefering to seat near a window. I learned that I should not be working there that very moment.

I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure; they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google. Also, according to the article 20k people work for them, although I am not sure if that was total or engineers.

I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.

Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.

Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.

Remember that the most vocal are the most dissatisfied. Also remember that at a company that large there are going to be more dissatisfied than smaller companies. Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company. People like seeing big brand names fail and we as a society are a sucker for a negative drama.

They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news. There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.

There are significantly more of these stories out there on Amazon than the other major tech companies it seems - I haven't heard of anywhere near as many stories coming from Google, Facebook, or Apple.

Negative stories that make it into the press are rare events and therefore it's difficult to compare if there is much more dissatisfaction in one company vs another. A better indicator is turnover rate.

It is obvious just from having lived in Seattle for a good long while that something is up with Amazon. They are notorious for employee churn, and it's easy to see this in my circle of acquaintances, many if not most of whom work in software. People do quit Microsoft, Google, or Facebook from time to time, but it's generally a long-term engagement; Amazon is a place where even relatively senior people don't seem to stick around more than a couple of years.

It's not a scientific study but I don't need scientific accuracy in order to get a pretty clear idea where I would or would not want to work.

Completely agree, I have only heard of a few stories so I don't think we can conclude about one company over another. Turnover rate does sound like a much better general indicator.

> Remember that the most vocal are the most dissatisfied. Also remember that at a company that large there are going to be more dissatisfied than smaller companies. Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company. People like seeing big brand names fail and we as a society are a sucker for a negative drama.

If that was the sum of it, you'd expect to hear just as much bad stuff about Microsoft, Google, Apple, and so forth. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.

> Lastly, don't forget that no one wants to read a story about an upset engineer from a small no name company.

People also don't particularly want to read a story from a happy engineer at a big company either.

Additionally, the unhappy person who has an axe to grind is likely to go out of his way to publicize it, talk to reporters about it or write comments on the Internet about it. Happy employees are less likely to go out of their way to comment on the experience, and what they have to say is less notable on average.

The volume of stories coming out of Amazon far outstrips those from Google or Facebook for example.

"Far outstrips" feels like an exaggeration of the problem considering the publics lack of data.

Interviewed with Amazon, and they were offering less than my current salary in a market where housing isn't nearly as crazy as Seattle.

Did you try negotiating? Despite conventional wisdom, (at least with some offered salaries), you can negotiate a raise. I got a significant increase in salary when negotiating for my return internship offer.

Your post sounds strangely onesided. Amazon turnover rate for engineers is the highest across the usual names. 50% of engineers leave before 2y.

Its not one sided, its a general statement that the people who love their job don't go jumping off buildings or having suicidal thoughts. They wake up, goto work and come home.

Also, where do you get a 50% of engineers leave before 2y?

As does yours. Any data to back up that number, or just anecdotal evidence?

The nightmare stories are often from years ago or non devs. There are some pretty awful oncalls though.

I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good (<=40) except around launches.

2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor.

When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I stayed because I liked the people and the work was fine. If my team culture changes and I don't like it, I'll look external and internal then leave.

I'd be interested to know what you think after 5 years there and a few more reorgs. You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.

Well, I'm >5 years, two orgs, one of which re-shuffled a few times while I was there, trying to find the right fit between software engineering and domain expertise.

I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.

I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.

In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.

It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!

I've been reorged quite a few times. More than most people who have spent 5 years here.

> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.

I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.

Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.

> But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.

This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.

The amazon way is not always friendly to normal humans. That's just the truth of it. My team has taken pains to not be that way.

The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes need to be changed before I'd call the culture here awesome.

> My team has taken pains to not be that way.

But that's the thing though. Your team is not being discussed, but the entire company is. And if it feels to you that it's your team that's swimming against the current, then maybe there's a lot of truth to the general perception of the whole company.

> No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago.

That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.

Maybe some are biased here but i think non-devs are humans too.

I have no insight into their world so I cannot speak in any way to the truth of their working conditions.

I only know that for most of the devs, it is fine. It's not perfect, I'm not even sure I'd tell people that it's great. But for people that have a good team? It's fine and the quality of people makes up for it. If I didn't like my team I would have left a long time ago.

I did a 3-month internship there and saw some of the ridiculous situations others are replaying here (my favorite of which was 8am-8pm work hours every day).

I decided to not go back, but in the end having Amazon on my resume (even as an internship, as I'm relatively young) was basically a free pass to interview anywhere else I wanted. I'd say it was a shitty experience while I was there, but net positive in the long run if only because of Amazon's klout.

> if only because of Amazon's klout

"clout" :)

Amazon headcount from mid-2015 said over 24k in Seattle: http://www.bizjournals.com/seattle/blog/techflash/2015/07/ex...

Curious, why do you think they have more servers than google? A quick search didn't turn anything up.

I guess he was referring to AWS vs Google Cloud. AWS is clearly the market leader. However, including Google services it's likely that Google could've more servers. Don't think there are any numbers out there to check that.

I know not every part of every company is the same since your direct manager plays a big part in your experience but I have to wonder why people put up with the bad experiences. Maybe the pay for AWS consulting gigs is worth a couple years in that kind of environment.

Not so much the pay, as the wonders it works for your resume. Prior to Amazon, I tried applying to Google, Facebook, Microsoft, etc. Nothing. After Amazon, recruiters from those companies started contacting me.

I've had recruiters from 3 of the big 4 reach out over the past few years without having worked at one. It's hard to generalize across recruiters and the four companies, but I think they pay more attention to your number of years than where they were at in the early recruitment stage.

"Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure"

How do you know? Based on what they sell through AWS? This is not super evident - they might have duct taped bunch of shitty stuff and rely on people on-call 24x7 to keep system running.

There's only so much duct-tape you can throw at a problem before it becomes unmanageable. The scale, complexity and reliability of AWS indicates that they are indeed running a tight (and tidy) ship.

It's a mix. The code is good enough to get things running, but it still needs full time oncall who actually are constantly putting out little fires.

I have heard whispers of this, and the mention of common on call hours seems to lend it some credibility

Yes, seriously legacy software (still a lot of Perl in their production web code, including ancient Perl template engines) and the on-calls are truly bad. AWS is more modern, but still not entirely awesome from what I've heard.

On the plus side, hiring people out of there after a year is usually pretty easy.

What are the typical on-calls?

You are paged most nights and often more than once a night during your rotation and you are on rotation a lot.

> they sell it as a service and operate more servers than google

Citation needed.

It's team dependent. I joined (AWS) because it was a neat project, they pay high for my area, the Google office in my area didn't have interesting projects, and they offered to move me across the country. I will stay 2 years. Perhaps more.

Consider that to scale an organisation it is necessary that nearly everyone is just a small, easily replaceable cog in a big machine. Look at any other big org: the military, government bureaucrats, etc...

> I don't understand this. Amazon seems to have seriously cutting edge infrastructure;

I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.

Perhaps it'd be more interesting to understand what parts of Amazon.com don't run on AWS [1].

[1]: https://www.quora.com/Does-Amazon-com-use-Amazon-AWS

Amazon.com is a mighty broad statement to say "not run on AWS".

Almost all of Amazon.com has been migrated to AWS.

Seriously, from your initial sentence I was expecting something way worse. Those problems seem very trivial to me compared to most normal jobs where you don't get offered anything at all, ever. Not to mention the many jobs where you get abused for real.

Well, all of these are standard perks in SV. So compared to them Amazon is a really bad place to work.

To everyone outside of SV, this sounds like the smallest violin playing for the software engineers in their salary/perk bubble.

> They don't even know how to write bash scripts

Is this weird? I only know of one or two coworkers who knows how to write bash scripts..

Despite almost knowing no bash, I was hired as an SDE1 at Amazon so your story adds up though!

It's super weird that anyone exposed to a Unix system can't write a bash script!

Why? Do you think it weird that most Windows user couldn't write a .bat script? I've worked support at a large university that used Unix as its main desktop OS for staff and students in most departments. I'd bet that most people there couldn't write bash script. 90+% of peoples interaction with the OS was click browser icon, click e-mail icon, click text editor icon and click icon/type in name at command prompt of whatever programs they needed to get work done. Writing bash scripts is simply not something that ever came up for the vast majority of users.

Aren't we talking about software engineers not just generic users?

I would be very surprised if an engineer working primarily in windows couldn't write a .bat/powershell script

I can use powershell.

Never had to write a script, whatever for?

I wouldn't. I work with lots of (non-software) engineers and I bet that most of them couldn't produce an non-trivial .bat without a lot of googling.

I'm pretty sure the structural engineer next to me has no clue wtf a script is. Fortunately this conversation is about software engineers.

Actually this conversation is about "anyone exposed to a Unix system", of which software engineers is a small subset.

I guess that's the superiority of Linux admins. I'being one of them, can write scripts in bash, python, perl, and plenty of other langs. And just recently, taught myself powershell as well. Screwedup-LangwithLongKeywords...

I've been using Unix on and off for 20 years, and I've done a bunch of Unix development work here and there (and more than just "did some programming and it was on a Unix system") - but I've no idea how to write a bash script, or a zsh one, for that matter.

If I need to automate something, I use a GNU Makefile, or Python. That way it works on Unix as well as on Windows...

When you write commands for building targets in GNU Makefile, you are writing them in bash.

I have had what most people would consider a great career and I don't write bash scripts. If I need to automate something then Ruby is my glue of choice or for simple things Makefiles.

Ditto but sub ruby for node... Though Python is probably more widely available (already installed) in nix environments.

>It's super weird that anyone exposed to a Unix system can't write a bash script!

Why is it weird? I've been working with UNIX systems for more than 20 years, somewhat of a Vim expert and I don't think I can write a bash script. Never needed to. Sure I can modify .bash_profile and I can read bash scripts but writing them to do something useful? Nope. I'd use something like Perl or awk instead. The only time I ever wrote any kind of shell script on my memory was a tcsh (csh?) one in the 90s because the box didn't have any scripting languages installed.

That's choosing not to write a bash script. That doesn't mean you couldn't.

TBH, it depends... I usually have to double-check the usr/env shebang for bash in the first place.. even then, will google my way through it.

I work mostly in node.js these days, and will have others on windows or mac, and deploys to linux. A node script is usually safer for me, and I'm far more proficient... shell.js, mz and babel-cli makes it easier to do task scripts for automation. ymmv though.

It I had to write a bash script without the benefit of google, I'd totally fail.

Well, I think shell scripting is fun, so I might agree that you'd hope users who had spent at least a little time using the CLI _could_ write a bash script. That said, I suspect a lot of people, devs included, just haven't needed to automate/batch things outside of whatever their normal toolset is - and don't know what they're missing. Portability makes shell scripting especially nice - instead of fiddling with rbenv or npm or pip so that your elegant little script can run, your handy.sh is going to be easier to move to another box...

Those points you mentioned are pretty standard for any corporation that isnt an insanely profitable tech company.

Is tuition reimbursement a thing at companies? That would be pretty awesome. TIL

Absolutely. For example, Google will reimburse you up to $12k a year for courses you take that are related to your job, and even offers up to $1,200 for everything else. So if you want to take, say, a cooking class, they'll even help out with that a bit.

Almost all, I'd never heard of a tech company not do it.

My company doesn't and a whole slew of ones I've talked to don't either... I'm not sure what bubble you are living in where you've "never heard of a tech company not do it'.

Microsoft has this program but it's pretty bad. Only masters courses are allowed with managers approval. Rest is out of pocket. Most managers don't approve. Tuition benefit is very much a myth.

Microsoft tuition assistance is available for both undergraduate and graduate programs. There are annual limits to how much is reimbursed and you get more for graduate school. Yes, it does require manager approval too. (I work at Microsoft)

The parent said "companies" not necessarily "tech companies".

Really? I know a bunch. Almost all startups, for starters.

As in university tuition? Or as in sometimes they decide to send you on a course and pay for it?

Facebook doesn't do it either at least from the last I heard, because supposedly they don't care whether you have a degree or not.

Yes, although the IRS only allows companies to offer ~5k/yr before the money becomes taxable compensation.

Travelocity paid for 100% of my tuition and books to finish my Master's degree. I did sign an agreement that I would stay there for two years after graduation, though, and I had to maintain a B or better average.

It's pretty common at manufacturing and (non-software) engineering companies.

"No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes."

This seems totally out of place to me. You have to pay for your own food, who cares? That's the way it is for pretty much everybody.

Those terms are insane.

They make it clear that Amazon prefer employees who'll stay there for a while because employees only become value after a couple of years, or if you're feeling less generous, Amazon know that they'll extract all the value from someone in under a year before they're driven out. Either way the terms aren't insane; they're just very much weighted to the employer's beliefs.

You're right. I should have finished that thought with "compared to a standard 1-year cliff and 25% per year".

In any case, dragging relocation out over two years feels wrong to me given that relocation is binary. I suppose in effect they are using it as a way to attach strings to a signing bonus.

By insane, I guess the OP was thinking "not moral"...

>>> they're just very much weighted to the employer's beliefs

That's no excuse. Hitting someone weaker than you is not "very much weighted to your beliefs".

A more precise word choice to convey my intent would have been "outrageous".

Compared to what?

I interviewed with AWS. What struck me was how different the people were. The would-be peer manager I spoke with was upbeat, really enthusiastic about tech, his team, creativity, and balance. My next conversation with his manager (presumably the person I would work for) was entirely different - much harsher tone, seemed uninterested in answers longer than a sentence, zero sense of humor. Now, I haven't been around for a long time, but I'm past the 10 year mark. That was the first interview I've ever had where I unequivocally lost interest in the manager and the company in just 30 minutes, despite being very enthusiastic about the product itself.

They did not make me an offer, which is just as well as I would have declined. I doubt I did a great job of sounding interested past the 15 minute mark, which is really out of character for me.

Now to address some of your points, tech must be a different animal. I'll tell you about my benefits since I really like that HN is a place to really get some transparency, and probably by design, there isn't a lot of Fortune 500, non-tech firm representation here. So you can stop reading if you aren't curious, but for those that are, here goes.

I work in finance tech, but with a large, somewhat oldschool company, not a startup. I recently became a (junior) officer of this company. Comparatively, I don't think Amazon sounds all that bad in terms of the fringe items. For instance:

- I don't even get a free cup of coffee here - the cafeteria is pretty good, but not cheap

- Most people here don't get equity. We do have an employee stock purchase benefit that lets you buy at a discount with a reasonable holding period (90 days or 6 months, can't remember). For those that do have what I'd call retention incentives (either cash or stock), our vesting period starts at 3 years. This is separate from our bonus, which varies by level (and all levels get something), but vests when deposit hits your account

- Our 401k match is comparatively better. We match 1:1 up to 5%, and then I think we kick in roughly the same as a defined contribution, since we no longer offer a pension. So 10% in "free" retirement money each year. I believe matching begins on day 1 and vests immediately

- Tuition reimbursement is a funny thing. I haven't tried our benefit here since I'm done with school. However, I've been around my industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Fortune 500. Most companies offer 5-6k a year, and they all try their best never to pay it. At one company, who I won't name, I was told that my degree was not related to my job, so no benefit. Great, but the policy makes no mention of that, and the recruiter certainly doesn't undersell the benefit

- Oncall sucks. I've avoided it since I manage backend financial/data engineering processes, nothing customer-facing. I've covered myself as much as I've delegated, though, it's only fair

- Relocation was I think a year, and they covered everything - packing, moving, transporting our 3rd car, etc. Package is based on level and some other factors. As an employee now, though, I don't think there's ever any repayment period for internal relocation. They just cover it, and from what I hear, it's pretty comprehensive

I realize I'm not entry level, but the above applies to everyone here, except where noted. I used to think we don't pay Amazon salaries, but a peek at Glassdoor says that Amazon doesn't really pay that well, particularly for the cost of living around the HQ.

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