Why do you stay?
> I'd be lying if I said I didn't see this seemingly happen with multiple people across multiple Amazon development centers.
> I'd be lying if I said I didn't see this seemingly happen with multiple people across multiple Amazon development centers.
- Reasonable work-life balance. In my 3 years here, there have only been a few "crunch times" the whole team has had to work weekends. We viewed it as a failure in planning and conducted a post-mortem to understand what went wrong.
- Nice people. Honestly, I've never experienced poor treatment like that which was highlighted in this article and the NYT exposé. I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but in my experience, Amazon has no singular culture. It's more like a federation of start-ups with distinct cultures; if one team isn't a good fit for you, it's pretty easy to switch.
- Competitive pay. This is partly due to timing (the coincidental soaring of the stock price when I joined), but in general, my experience has been that Amazon offers strong stock compensation.
- Fascinating, hard problems. Pick _any_ specialty within software engineering or data science, and there's a team within Amazon at the forefront. I'm always learning, and I never feel like the smartest guy in a room. I get to work on "moonshot" projects that few other companies would have the resources to finance or the risk tolerance to stomach.
I'm not writing this comment to brag or imply my experience is representative of everyone at Amazon. This is just one perspective to even out the chorus of voicing saying it's a terrible place to work. In my experience, it's the polar opposite.
Amazon is not for everybody, and not everyone figures out how to identify bad teams and avoid them, and they have a bad time.
But if you have decent EQ, some backbone, and good technical skills, you can work on solving really hard problems with awesome peers that disproportionately do the right thing without being asked (because we cluster together).
> I've stayed for the following reasons:
The parent puts the question before the quote so that might be a bit confusing
All the people I know at Amazon in Seattle consistently get home after 7pm most nights, and a handful of those people come in on the weekends for 10 to 12hrs to fix mundane bugs that aren't in need of immediate fixing. Amazon's high pressure work culture encourages this terrible practice of burning the candle from both ends, but Amazon definitely doesn't create quality products on the first try in part due to this.
I've always had an atypical (read: not traditionally competitive) background, both for schools and jobs. As a result, I've found universities and firms that are willing to take a chance on me the best. They are great for me because the tacit agreement is "I know I don't meet the traditional standards, but I'll work hard to prove I'm worth it. And if I'm not, I know you'll fire me." No one ever says it, but it's the strategic system that underlies this.
In short, Amazon offered me a job and a salary no other tech company would have. Not even close. I've had to work nights and weekends not on Amazon, but just on teaching myself the tech to do my job (I'm a data scientist who could barely code when I started). And I'm not doing bad. I'm not a genius, but I'm valuable enough. Once I get all my stock and a promotion, I might look at a 40-hour type company. On the other hand, my team is pretty fun, so I don't know.
I can't speak on everyone at the company, but the campus is basically empty at the times I leave at 7-8 (which isn't often and usually happens when I show up at 11-12). My own building is 95% cleared out by 6pm on a daily basis.
Not saying what you hear isn't true, but it's definitely appears to be the exception rather than the rule from my experience.
When your stressed out by work, interviewing just piles on the stress and can decrease performance.