Hacker News Reader

Comment by amznthrow | Hacker News Reader

Amazon has one thing going for it that I think is a huge deal for a standard BigCo job: if you don't like your initial team, you can switch ANY TIME. And if you're an engineer, you can probably join any team you want.

The reason this is such a big deal is that when applying to any company, you'll get placed on a team and it's really hard to get enough information on the culture, mission, management, etc. Once you're inside? Tons of information, and a lot of coworkers you can ask. This really reduces the downside risk of a new job.

I know this because I work at Amazon, and switched teams very early. I'm much happier on my second team, and probably would have quit on the first team.

View on HN

At FB in engineering, you generally don't get placed on a team, you choose which team you join, only after 6 weeks of "Bootcamp" where you ramp up on the technical and cultural environment. That said, you're right that even with that, people can end up joining teams which are a poor fit, so internal mobility (switching teams) is definitely valuable here too.

What was wrong with the first team? How large are teams, generally? Are we talking like, six people, or sixty?

I'd also like to hear more on this, if possible

Teams are generally 4 to 8 people. At Amazon you frequently hear the term "two-pizza team", meaning the team can be fed with two large pizzas. That's the size they usually target.

I didn't like the project I was assigned, didn't like the underlying design of the org's charter, didn't like the hours. I also got transferred between managers. I didn't really like it from the director down. It sounded way cooler from the pitch the hiring manager gave me. Team size is not a well-defined concept, TBH -- hierarchies can be structured in very different ways, and a team can be comprised of people with different managers. Also, if you love your director and adjacent teams, it would be unlikely you'd hate your own team.

Once I was inside, I found a few teams that sounded cool. At that point, I could easily meet people on those teams, read survey results on the managers, ask around about the new teams, visit the offices at 6-7 PM and see who was still around. This is somewhere between 10-100x the information I could get as an internal employee than as an external applicant. This led me to joining a team where I'm very happy. And if things went really badly -- I could have switched again! (Might look bad if you switch a ton though)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com