Comment by jkingsbery | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jkingsbery | Hacker News Reader

I'm a Senior Software Engineer, and have been at Amazon for almost 2 years. I work in the Retail org in the NYC office.

Overall, I've been happy with my choice to work at Amazon. Compared to most other tech companies I've worked for, the hours are predictable and not that intense. Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry. I like what I do. I like the projects I work on. I like my coworkers. I'm happy with my compensation.

In terms of perks, there aren't free lunches every day, but most orgs that I know of have some budget for a snack shelf. There are also other perks though - there are are opportunities to learn from other software engineers in the form of tech talks, internal conferences and the like. There are also opportunities to learn about the business side as an engineer.

I've generally found other people at Amazon very willing to help. I've had people outside of my team review designs and give feedback (and I've done likewise for other teams). I'm currently working on a project that's required me to reach out to a bunch of different teams to get input on how to approach a problem, and all of them have either accepted a meeting invite or responded to my email with the info I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time (a couple days).

Amazon has 14 Leadership Principles, and I've found that people mostly take them to heart. For example, it doesn't mean that you can use "Insisting on the Highest Standards" as a blank check to refactor your code to the point that it's immaculate, but it does mean that most of the product people I work with get that tech debt is a real thing and slows down product development at some point, and they will budget time to address tech debt when given suggestions by engineers.

Most of the people who have left our team in the past 12 months have left to go work on other teams. Some of them left to work for a different org, some because they wanted to work in a different office.

Amazon's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and most of the things that are frequently raised as issues on HackerNews are, in my experience and the experience of everyone I've talked to at Amazon, generally not issues.

> Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry

I would like to point out that this is just objectively wrong. There are many employers in our industry that do not impose crunch time, and who view crunch time as indicative of poor engineering practices.

Maybe your statement came out wrong, but I was surprised enough when reading it that I felt compelled to let others know that this is not reality. There are lots of good employers that practice sustainable development practices in our industry.

Reading this thread, I'm having a very hard time understanding why anyone would want to work at Amazon (other then the somewhat high salary). Judging by responses to many of the parent comments, I'd say that others seem surprised as well. I hope this surprise reflects the abnormality of the practices described in this thread because they are not as common in the industry as you suggest.

>Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry.

This is categorically false. Might be true for small startups, but most established companies do not ask a lot of engineers during crunch time.

The only thing that sounds out in your message is "crunch time". You didn't go into detail but regular crunch time is unacceptable imo.

To counter those objecting to your statement of "Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry":

Everyone likes to pick those nits. I also work in the retail org at Amazon and have only had a crunch time twice in the almost 11 years I've been here (and it lasted two to three weeks both times). Software is hard and planning its implementation and development is hard. Get over yourselves and accept occasional imperfections in the process. (If they are _not_ occasional in your work environment, consider that a suggestion that you get out--Amazon or otherwise).

Anyone saying Amazon is uniformly this or uniformly that is as full of shit as anyone saying it about any other company.

People who read these threads and decide "well, now that I've seen this, there's no way I'd work for Amazon" are doing themselves a disservice, just as much as if they substituted any other company for "Amazon". Collect your data; talk to people that work there--you will get a variety of opinions. Bash-posts on HN and Reddit suffer from severe confirmation bias.

People that like working at Amazon and have had an overwhelmingly positive experience (like me), often don't wade into these threads because separating their signal from noise is really tedious and we have other more fun things to be doing.

You seem to be a well conditioned Amazonian because you possess the same nature of dismissing concerns instantly rather than accepting that something is probably wrong and needs to be fixed.

If people have complained on similar lines throughout on Hacker news or NYC article or other sources, that means there is a pattern. Maybe you have been fortunate enough to not have experienced some of the misery faced by others, but please follow amazon's most important principle of being data driven and think about it.

One sometimes-unfortunate thing about the Internet and global accessibility to other peoples' opinions is that it's easy to find other people "just like you". This leads to a signal amplification that doesn't necessarily mean the problem is as bad or as far-reaching as the group would have you think. It certainly can be, but concluding that from a limited news sources with unspoken agendas isn't accurate. We can all get in a huddle and complain about things, but there is a non-small number of people who just ignore it--even though they would have a positive counter-argument to offer--and instead go on about their business because they don't want to get involved.

Remember that when you're reading the news (here or elsewhere, since rarely is news generated on HN) you and your outrage are being used for marketing (and possibly furthering some other agenda).

I agree with your closing sentence about being data driven and thinking about it--getting out of the news bubble and using your own brain to analyze something is good.

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