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Comment by frmramzn | Hacker News Reader

Moved to Google and TBH have cried once or twice because I didn't realize an employer could be so humane. Amazon was terrifying, but the academic culture I came from normalized self brutalization to succeed,so I didn't realize how much they were relying on my lack of a sense of boundaries and personal priorities to extract excess labor.

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And, I'm already making 50% more at Google than I was at Amazon, after a bit more than a year.

That self brutalization stuff works on people who needs outside approval to feel good, and it's encouraged behavior in specially American culture to work hard and compete your entire life.

Sounds pretty terrible to me. When are you supposed to enjoy life if you are in constant competition?

enjoy life? people have to value life to enjoy it first.

> That self brutalization stuff works on people who needs outside approval to feel good

Prestige and the perception of it is a huge part of self-worth.

Mind if I ask what team(s) you were on at Amazon? Looking to avoid the worst.

I’m starting to get the impression, though, that if I want to be happiest as a Big Tech Co. engineer, I really just need to work at Google.

I heard FB is good as well, though I still don’t get why they need so many people to do what they do. Heck, even MS is probably better than Amazon. I delete all Amazon recruiter emails (of which I receive about 2 per week) as soon as they arrive.

You can tell them to stop contacting you and it works.

Not in my case. I’ve asked them numerous times to remove my email, it subsides for a while and then comes back at the same rate.

Wait till GDPR tell them you are in EU ;)

OK, it happened to me just now, two years after telling them to not contact me. But it was a different group, was gaming, now is AWS.

"even MS is probably better than Amazon" - what makes you think so poorly of Microsoft?

From what I've heard, Facebook has the most chill culture out of the big three.

This is not what ive heard. Hours are worse at FB (esp. the cool infra) because of nebulous “impact” metrics than Google despite the nice perks.

Google is far better in this regard.

The teams in the relational databases organization were in a pretty terrible shape when I left - most of the higher management comes from IBM IIRC, and it's visible. The operations teams get the worst of it (unsurprisingly).

Also, caused by years of neglect and patchworks, whatever teams deal with basic infrastructure (DNS, load balancing, corporate infrastructure...). Though none of those are in Seattle anymore, IIRC.

>but the academic culture I came from normalized self brutalization to succeed

What school did you go to? Went somewhere similar.

Honestly I've never heard of a college that respects these types of boundaries. By its very nature if you're taking 15+ credits of academically challenging coursework you're going to be working 60+ hours a week.

My school recommended 3.5 hours of work outside of class for every 1.0 hour of lecture (roughly equivalent to credit hours with rare exception). For the minimum full-time load of 12.0 this equated to 54 hours a week (12 hours of class, 42 hours of outside). 18 credits was 81 hours a week all in, and this was expected. 100-level classes were typically less but my junior year particularly it was pretty much spot on.

That describes pretty much every PhD program in the US.

And, frankly, many strong undergraduate programs, perhaps especially ones which are also very large (my school has 500 person class size even in your second-to-last and last years, so you need to go above and beyond to distinguish yourself enough to, say, get a professor to write you a recommendation)

I was also talking about an undergrad program, probably should have been more clear in my top comment.

I wish I could do that.

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