Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pfhreak | Hacker News Reader

One of the things I really liked about working for AWS was the accessibility of the S-team. Even as a fairly junior engineer I was in meetings where you could get their opinions, see where they were going, and understand their goals.

AWS has a lot of things I don't love (not least of all, their policy towards developing games in your spare time), but they had a ton of rigor around setting goals while still giving dev teams the opportunity to (mostly?) drive the details of what those goals were. (I've heard this is maybe not the case in all AWS teams, but I had some great local leadership as well.)

If they could fix a couple of deeply set cultural issues (open source and side projects were definitely hard or impossible), not lean quite so heavily on their employees (I was oncall 24/7 for months in the worst times and received no extra comp), and disconnect themselves from whatever is going on with the retail side's treatment of labor.... Well, I'm not sure I'd come back, actually. They'd have to change quite a bit more -- the promo process, the stack ranking/"top grading" twice yearly, better benefits and comp...

But I do genuinely miss working in the AWS org. There's a lot of incredible things to learn there. While I don't see myself coming back, the lessons I learned there have been absolutely invaluable.

View on HN

I'm just curious, what was your experience trying to develop games in your spare time? Were you told to stop?

People sometimes do, they just don't publicize it. It's specifically noted in the intellectual property agreement, though nobody seems to be sure why.

Search inside for the 'Game Development Policy', it's separate from the intellectual property commitment. Reasoning is likely from Amazon Games Studios? I think there may be a concern that someone at Amazon might make the next flappy bird or Minecraft and Amazon couldn't capitalize on it.

The one time I met an Amazon games studio employee my response was, “Amazon has a games studio?”

He said it was a common response.

Heh. I worked in Amazon Games for a bit. It was a very common question. Along with, "What games have they made?" (Breakaway a 'sports brawler', The Grand Tour game a tie in for the show, New World an mmo about being a colonizer, Crucible a third person shooter.)

Woah, totally surprised by the New World mmo.

That looks like a PR landmine.

This is the only rationale I can come up with for the game development policy: AGS hasn't produced anything in 8 years and what they have in the pipeline looks disappointing so...cross your fingers and hope one of your employees makes the next Minecraft.

If it's in your own free time on your own hardware why would Amazon be able to capitalize on it? Employees are not slaves.

Salaried employees don't have free time.

I'm going to assume this is sarcasm.

Noncompete agreements are legal in many places outside California

There's an explicit company policy about game development that is separate from their open source policy. It, among other things, prevents you from working on a game project with anyone else.

Why games though? I don’t see any obvious reasons why they would care.

I always thought that they were doing it because they had a really low opinion of their own game studio. Maybe they were trying to kill as much future competition as they were able to (legally).

I’d say that opinion is fair considering I had no idea they even had their own game studio.

Their first (and only) title they seem to be pushing hard to the public (in my opinion, at least. The Grand Tour Game wasn't really marketed): https://www.newworld.com/en-us

I see some. Top of my head :

Games development are limitless in scope and technical complexity and very passion driven. So, a developer could spend countless hours each night improving his game.

Next day, all the team has is a tired developer, drinking coffee and unable to code straight or analyse issues without missing subtleties.

Opening a wordpress for your mom and her gardening hobby is a significantly less time consuming task.

If they're trying to avoid people coming to work tired, presumably they also have a no-children policy for their staff?

I'm sure they would if it wasn't against the law.

That generally wouldn't be legal.

In the early days of Amazon, Bezos rejected bus passes for employees stating bus passes encourage people to leave work to a a timetable and he would prefer them to be at office and leave only when they can.

Wow. They say that policies are organizational scar tissue. I'd love to see the blow that inflicted this particular wound.

This why I won't leave California. Employers can't tell me what i do in my spare time and can't sue me over a "non compete" if I leave.

Average tenure of an Amazon employee on the tech side is something like a year or so.

Based on what citation? Here say isn’t useful to the conversation.

The length of tenure by level would make more sense. Senior and Principal SDEs (L6&7) in Amazon are like semi and full god, while lower level ICs are design to “hire fast, fail fast”

I think you gave it backwards. Or at least it goes both ways. Long tenure naturally results in becoming L6 if you have a boss who develops you and aims to get you there (+ understands how to work in the review/promotion system and check the boxes.)

Maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounds like you deify L6 engineers as "better" and that's why they remain. I don't think that's exactly it lol.

Also..people leaving in 2 years as L4/5s aren't "failing fast." They're bailing for better gigs with a few Amazon projects on their resume - I'd even go as far as to say that's many of their plans coming in!

It's a good plan. You can learn from some great engineers. But you definitely need other experiences, as Amazon's internal tooling feels like 2005 and isn't very transferable knowledge. (Why they don't spend more money on this is beyond me, the terrible tooling really ruins productivity.)

Which is a very sensible plan to have. My biggest mistake was to not have an exit strategy I followed from day one. But than LVL 5, or 4, at Amazon isn't that bad. You have probably more responsibility than a LVL-6 equivalent at any other non-FAANG corp.

Heh, the guy who referred me even let me in on that common exit plan ;)

I agree with you on Amazon not being so bad. I had a lot of autonomy and was asked to both be an engineer and build technical solutions and own processes end-to-end (which included some project management.) It was a great experience!

Yeah, I wouldn't miss it neither! Just not for long term, unless you are one of the few exceptions.

Nice guy that referred you! Not everyone is that open, usually people learn it the hard way.

For L6+ my point is more they remain because of the amount of authority/resources given and better fitness of the culture. Also I think there are many people stuck in L5 with 5+ years of tenure.

That’s a good point that some people leave by plan. On the other hands there are tons of L4/5s get into “PIP” within a year or less and generally we know Amazon holds a lower bar at interviewing, that’s why I think it “fail fast”

I'd say it's more around 2 thanks to their typical 2-year vesting cliff and one-year clawback on bonuses (which weighs the minimum towards 1-year and average further out). But yeah it's short.

It also depends on the share price. If the stock goes up, like it did in the last few years, then people keep getting "free" raises and stick around.

The number I heard (which was years ago) was that 18-24 months was closer to the truth. But yeah, not long either way.

Not just for the techies, other white collar employees have more or less the same tenure, from what I know.

> Well, I'm not sure I'd come back, actually

I’m at Amazon right now (Ads) and honestly this makes me really sad. It feels like I’m not allowed to be proud of where I work.

Hey, you are totally allowed! You and I probably value things differently! I'm a parent now, my values have shifted over time, and I got really burned out trying to improve things over there. I didn't like that once I became a manager I was pressured to identify and remove (rather than train/help) my people who weren't top tier. Those could have been things local to my org. If you are happy, be proud of what you are doing.

Like I said, I think it was a really valuable 6 years. I'm glad I was there, I learned a ton, met awesome engineers.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you're working in ads you are working to surveil & modify the behavior of your fellow humans against their consent. Make your own judgement about whether you should be proud of that.

> against their consent

I have worked in ads for over 15 years. I certainly don't believe it's any more "against your consent" than stores coloring their walls to modify behavior or placing goods in a more visible location to sell more, or that fluffy animals are perceived as cute. The work is good and I have never been happier than when I work in adtech.

It's a bit more invasive than "coloring the walls", right?

Is it? Superstore chain (let's say Walmart's) cost/benefit margins of coloring the walls is orders of magnitude larger day to day, than ad revenue budgets of most companies year over year. People like to be outraged about the most fringe issues, because they feel like it's championing the good fight. Advertising is the least of life's problems (local or at large). It's fucking 2020, can we get Pepsi and Coke in the same restaurant yet? That's an advertising issue that I wish someone would address.

That's because Walmart is gigantic, not because blue vs green walls make such an enormous difference.

It's the difference between having some vapid happy tunes playing in the super market and them analyzing your profile and previous purchases to bombard you with customized messages to make you feel bad because you'll buy more. The level of invasiveness is very different, and you need thorough tracking and denial of privacy for one but not the other.

You're certainly allowed to be proud... but others don't have to respect your career choices (and many won't, which is fine).

Personally speaking, I've had Amazon try to pull me a few times and I just stopped responding to their emails. It's a large company and I can agree that there's leagues of separation between, say, AWS and warehouse operations... but I also just don't care, I can't co-sign the kind of stuff that you hear about (and has been verified by people coming forward).

The tech industry is large enough that if you're good enough to work at Amazon, you probably have options.

My 2 cents, I guess.

I've been rejected at Google and Facebook and most of HN doesn't think my total compensation is all that impressive, so, I probably don't have many options to be real with you.

> The tech industry is large enough that if you're good enough to work at Amazon, you probably have options.

> I've been rejected at Google and Facebook

These two statements are not contradicting each other...

Perhaps, but my goal is to make ~$250k a year as fast as possible. To do so at my current company would take at least 3 years and 2 promotions, whereas even James Damore was making $400k+ 4 years into his tenure. I can't get offers at trading firms, so I'm kinda SOL overall.

The easiest path to $250k is to go to Oracle. The next easiest path is to go to a unicorn. If you can reach the SDE2-equivalent, you'll be earning over 250k.

Why do you care whether HN thinks your comp is impressive?

Money is a tool. Once basic material needs are met, tying personal self-worth to a numeric value is not a recipe for happiness, and chasing other people's expectations of what you should be earning is even worse.

I would say you probably do have options, if you choose to go for them.

>not a recipe for happiness

And certainly not a recipe for morality

Why morally? If you go for the money and you do not steal it, you certainly bring value into the world, that people are willing to pay for. Do not see what is morally wrong about it.

> If you go for the money and you do not steal it, you certainly bring value into the world, that people are willing to pay for.

Opioid manufacturers bribing doctors to prescribe more opioids so people get addicted and will buy more opioids.

One flaw in your reasoning is that often times people are willing to pay for things which are bad. For example, the Holocaust was bad (a lot of good people died), but people were willing to pay for help in carrying out the Holocaust. Therefore, it doesn't follow from the fact that people are willing to pay for a thing (the Holocaust), that that thing is a morally correct thing to do (the Holocaust was bad). That is to say, just because someone values something (people valued the Holocaust), doesn't mean that it is a moral thing to do (the Holocaust was not a moral thing to do).

To see my point all you need to do is imagine either a bad person or an ignorant person having money. If you think either of those situations is plausible, then you can surely imagine such a person paying for something which has a bad effect on the world. For most ideas of morality, doing things which can reasonably be expected to have bad effects on the world is considered immoral (this is very loosely stated, but hopefully you can see my point).

> you certainly bring value into the world

Just because someone is willing to pay for it, doesn’t mean it’s good for society or the world.

Do you buy something, that harms the society or the world, why?

really ?

have you looked at how most of the smartphones, clothes or even food are made ?

I can't even say if your comment is supposed to be satire

Besides what on_and_off said (and you can add many more to that list, for example diamonds, oil, construction using migrant workers in bad conditions, etc) there are also people who only care about money, regardless of the harm that it causes (deforestation of the amazon? Tobacco products? Financial products that lead people to ruin? Drug industries? Human trafficking?)

Some people will pay for all kinds of things that are extremely harmful. Your comment seems rather disingenuous. Why are you trying to twist my words to reflect badly on me? Guilt about the products you buy? (See what I did there? Same thing you were doing :D)

You started to talk about society and their good or bad decisions in their life, when they buy things. I thought it was interesting then to ask you as an example of society. There was no judgement from my side. And I certainly have no guilt, when i buy a product, that improves my life.

I am not ignorant. Of course i see, that with my buying decisions, i kind of maintain all these side effects, that come from working off this planet. I want the best product that can be created with as little resources as possible. That would be of big value for me.

But who am i to judge someone else's decision to buy something, that they value. I might not like it. It might not a good decision in the long term. I would prefer that certain decisions were not made. Personally i can only try to make things better. I will not become a dealer, who has to provide a good product to my clients.

In any way, i was just curious. No bad intentions.

(and to the other commenter, i dont know what to answer.)

Cheers!

> In any way, i was just curious. No bad intentions.

My apologies, then!

> my goal is to make ~$250k a year as fast as possible. To do so at my current company would take at least 3 years and 2 promotions

Hi,

I don't want to dunk on you, but I would truly encourage you to gain some perspective on just how myopic a view this is.

(I couldn't reply to your comment below where you said this)

Are you familiar with their circumstances? Maybe they have a limited window before retirement age. Maybe they have medical bills. Maybe they need to support a parent or grandparent. Maybe they need to send remittances to support a family "back home".

There's any number of reasons why that number might not be myopic.

I don't think it's myopic if everyone I follow on twitter and see on instagram is getting Hawaiian offsites and European work trips at Google and Hudson River Trading while I can't even go to Seattle for our internal ML conference because it got filled up too quickly for the last 3 years or whatever.

I enjoy what I work on..I just wish I was treated more like all of my friends and former coworkers.

Eh... If you follow YouTubers you would think all of them achieved financial freedoms, have a uber house in Bali, and do nothing all day long.

You're not myopic but you just follow a niche group of people.

There will always be people who seem to have it better than you do. Maybe really analyze what you want to get out of your time on this earth?

Honestly, interview around with no expectations if you haven't. You may be surprised at what else is going to be offered. I'm not going to tell you it's necessarily 400k or anything, but the variance is quite high if you're willing to relocate to, say, Seattle. An amazon resume is worth a certain amount of money, and there are other companies that will offer you things you enjoy working on too.

I’ve tried, but haven’t gotten interviews from the companies I’m interested in. I did get a offer from a hedge fund, but it was a severe lowball (50-70% of typical offers) probably due to my interview performance.

If it was a good hedge fund, they won't offer anyone they don't rate. If they offered you because they think you're mediocre and can get you cheap - do not work for them, they're charlatans.

It was Citadel. I think Two Sigma is considered more impressive.

Citadel are certainly not charlatans. Are you sure you're not just good at what you do but have crippling imposter syndrome?

Get off of Instagram, then. Should be healthy in other ways, too. If you're only in it for the perceived status maybe you should to change that.

Spend less time trying to mimic fake-perfect lives on social media. It’s not healthy. Instead, find out what’s important to your happiness and work on that. Money should be a means to that end, not the end in itself.

Hell, you don’t even need to be rich to go to nice places. My uncle is a great example of someone who optimises for happiness: he earns very little but does a job he loves, he brutally cuts out expenses from his life for things he doesn’t care about and loves quite cheap, but instead he spends the money he does have to go on an island holiday once a year and to visit his family (especially his grandchildren) multiple times a year. It’s all about perspective on what’s important to you. Money shouldn’t be it outside of enabling you. (Obviously you need enough to pay your bills, take care of your health etc)

You do now that you have Amazon on your resume.

My resume was mostly fine even before joining fulltime.

Keep hitting leetcode, try again, and pray harder... that's what everybody else is doing.

I had a co-op who used to be chill, laid back, and wasn't strong from engineering perspective (a wee bit lack of passion too). All he did was leetcode and he got MSFT -> Google.

> that's what everybody else is doing

Bit scary to know that yet say it. There's many ways to scale the same mountain, perhaps going the packed out tourist route isn't the best for most? Might take a bit longer.

Alternatives:

build a startup and pray to get acquired

join a startup and pray to get acquired (there's still a post acquisition interview though)

contribute to OSS and pray G/F noticed and maybe ask to hire you (still have to go through some interview)

This ain't the old Silicon Valley anymore. Majority of the companies in SF applies Leetcode as filters.

The HN salary dick swinging contest is absurd and not something you should factor into your overall happiness.

Like the $500k engineer has time to tell you how to be happy. Ever since he started making $600k a year, he's been enjoying himself at his $700k/year job. The fact that you're not even making $800k/year like him means you're probably not worth talking to. You'd have to be at least a $900k/year engineer like him to be worthy of time.

HN is still tame. Blind is cancer about comp related dick swinging.

> Personally speaking, I've had Amazon try to pull me a few times and I just stopped responding to their emails.

Good for you, but some people have to take whatever opportunity they can get.

Tech interviewing is so fickle that just because you pass an Amazon interview doesn’t necessarily mean anywhere else would take you.

We shouldn’t criticise anyone for taking a job to support themselves and put food on their family table.

Nobody but yourself has to give you permission for this. It's an honest living. Lots of people who would give you shit about this are in the VC-funded "Uber eats for dog treats" world and may have an over-inflated sense of the social value their jobs are supposedly creating.

That's fair. I think what I work on is infinitely more important even though it's a piece of a larger puzzle given how rapidly we're adding to the bottom line (just look at the last earnings call - ). But those are the people that are still negotiating compensation packages of hundreds of thousands more than me, and seem to get everything through life, from Harker to Stanford to Google/Stripe to YC W20, etc.

I'd rather be like them than be considered a "blue collar engineer" as I currently am considered by my peers.

> than be considered a "blue collar engineer" as I currently am considered by my peers.

I might be completely wrong about this, but I feel you have low-self esteem and you are tying your sense of self-worth to where you work.

Whenever I have heard something negative about Amazon is that they overwork people and there is no work life balance. But almost all of them have said it was worth it in terms of growing and learning.

If you feel that what you are working on has enough impact, and you are learning a lot. Put your head down, fuck what others think of Amazon, and grow as an engineer. After that a lot more opportunities might open for you.

I encourage you to speak with a therapist about how you feel.

Money is not going to make you happy or proud, comparing yourself to others is a zero-sum game, and living to work comes at a cost.

Seriously, find and talk with a professional. How you are feeling now is probably not going to change even if you achieved everything you want.

I don’t understand why anybody, anywhere, would be proud of where they work. Being proud of your work (what you do/accomplish or the products you put out) sure, but why would I ever be proud of working for any particular company (certainly a for profit. Using amazon as an example, you can be proud of the work you do but why would you be proud that you’re helping make bezos richer?)

You find one that aligns with your own personal goals and ethics. I found one, and working with other people there feels like a multiplier on the change I want to see in the world.

Generally they'll be quite small and niche but they do exist.

There is almost no level of comp that being on call 24/7 for months on end is worth. That essentially means that they control you at all times, you cannot go hiking or camping, you probably can't go skiing or surfing. Any activity away from a phone or out of the coverage area is difficult if not impossible. I'm glad that you were able to get out of that routine because it's mentally taxing.

> I was oncall 24/7 for months in the worst times and received no extra comp

How is that even legally possible?

presumably by being a salaried exempt employee

If you're paid a significantly large salary then you are 'exempt' overtime and they can ask you to be available at any time. The expectation is that you're being paid as a professional to achieve something, not to clock-in and clock-out. If you want to work hours only with formal overtime you can get a job that's paid less and paid hourly so that you are eligible for overtime, or you can ask for extra compensation and negotiate those terms yourself, but they may say no in which case you should look for a different job if it matters to you.

But what would they actually do if you’d say that you’ve been on call enough already, not going to continue for a week or two? sure they wouldn’t terminate you, that’d be too expensive for a skilled employee of which there is rumored to be a great shortage.

American work culture seems very strange.

> But what would they actually do if you’d say that you’ve been on call enough already, not going to continue for a week or two?

You have a conversation about it, adult to adult. Why’s that so hard to do?

> sure they wouldn’t terminate you, that’d be too expensive for a skilled employee of which there is rumored to be a great shortage

Yes that’s your leverage in a deal.

> American work culture seems very strange.

Individuals being able to work out what balance of work and compensation works for them by talking to their employer is strange?

The question was how is it legal - it’s legal because the government lets highly paid professionals with leverage manage their life themselves.

It would be expensive to let you go, compared to the costs of fixing it, but if they give in, then everyone else will push back on this, too. Which will be more expensive for them in the long run.

So, the smart thing to do is to make an example out of anyone who pushes back.

Tech workers have no solidarity, so management is very successful at divide and conquer tactics.

While they might not terminate you, they have other means of retaliation - reducing scope of work, assigning "good" projects to other employees, generally making work life miserable, with he goal of driving you out (and making an example of you - better be a good little wage slave - the executive team and major stockholders need to buy another yacht).

If you're paid a significantly large salary then you are 'exempt'

Exempt status has little to do with salary (minimum salary for an exempt employee is $35,568). In general, the only requirements are... salaried (vs hourly), and perform any of executive, administrative, or professional duties. So, darn near everybody on a salary gets lumped into the exempt category.

More details here... https://www.thebalancecareers.com/exempt-and-a-non-exempt-em...

Some employees are exempt from the FLSA.

https://www.deputy.com/us/glossary/what-does-it-mean-to-be-e...

I agree with this.

Man I'm glad these threads pop up. Every so often Amazon starts to look tempting as a place to work, and I need threads like this to remind me that it sucks and isn't worth it.

I read the parent comment as mostly positive. The average tenure of the s team sits at 16 years. That's a long time to be working in one place. So the negative press about working there is maybe a bit sensationalist

I think I still feel mostly positive about working at AWS. I'm glad I did it for six years, but I'm in a different place in my life. I value different things now. I'm not the young, work driven person I used to be. (Or at least not as much.)

Edit: That said, I don't think the negative media is sensationalist. I would absolutely believe that some people cried at their (door) desks. I would believe that people were verbally or emotionally abusive. Amazon operates in little pods, and if there's a bad leader organizing a set of pods, they can really turn the culture there toxic. I was lucky to have a fantastic set of leaders (shout outs to Builder Tools) who really supported their people. I've heard some first person accounts of orgs that were... not out of line with media accounts.

Yeah... BT is still pretty great. Good leaders for the most part, and the opportunity to have huge positive effects on many fronts.

Let’s also not forget that Amazon are war profiteers:

https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/defense/

Another way of looking at it is that they are using their technology to help defend the country where the company was created.

US national defense hasn't really been about, you know, defense in a long time. Politically-motivated proxy wars don't count.

Everything after your first two sentences is off-topic. If the comments on all articles about Amazon devolve into general complaints about Amazon, there will never be quality discussion.

Umm I guess you could ignore the comment then. Part of what I like about HN is the tangential discussion and the personal experience that commenters share.

If "you should ignore it"/"just downvote it" was sufficient, we wouldn't need site guidelines or moderators. Off-topic Amazon hate will always win the upvote wars unless people are principled.

Did I come off as hating Amazon? I'm thankful for my time there. I learned buckets. I specifically called out several things about Amazon I really liked.

I'm at a different place in my life and the things I commented on are fair criticisms. (Critiquing something is not the same as hating something. I have plenty of media I critique that I also enjoy.)

Your net judgement came off as mildly negative, but the structure of merely listing complaints about the place, many of which have been discussed here ad nauseam, with no substantive connection to the article, is hater catnip.

We have site guidelines and moderators, neither of which seem to have taken exception to somebody posting honestly about their experience relating to the article topic. Maybe you don't need to be sheriff of HN for this?

I thought it was a useful and interesting comment. If you've had your fill of some subtopic, do what I do: keep scrolling.

There are moderators for egregious indisputable violations, just like there are police for lawbreaking. But there are also murky or less clear-cut cases that nevertheless clearly degrade the quality of the discussion over time, just like there are lots of mean things people do to each other in the real world that appropriately are not punished by the police. The way these are dealt with is by telling the person they shouldn't do what they've done, and by arguing to others that it shouldn't be supported.

Or another way we signal it is by downvoting things. So maybe check out the color of your posts in this thread and consider that you have confused "thing I don't like" with "degrades the discussion".

I disagree. S-teams set the culture. They drive their organizations in a way that is very, very active (especially relative to places I've worked elsewhere.) When there are cultural issues at Amazon, I believe that they can be at least partly traced to the s-team leaders.

What about that has to do with the contents of the article? You didn't make contact with anything besides the term "S-team" in the headline.

And even then, you say they drive all this culture, but you don't say anything substantive. How? What events?

The article itself discusses inferring Amazon's priorities from changes to their s-team, including doubling the number of AWS s-team members.

I'm not sure I'm allowed to disclose which events/meetings their s-team regularly attends. I will say that I did have several opportunities to interact with them directly in meetings, and indirectly via goals setting and annual planning exercises.

Peter Desantis is a long time AWS guy, and was present at many of those same meetings/exercises. Peter, and other s-team members, talk about what it means to be AWS. That they've chosen to make him an s-team leader says to me that they like the culture the s-team is cultivating, and want to continue to grow it.

But priorities is not the same as culture! This is such a broad and vague connection. The "priorities" in the article are all about different markets (fashion, Alexa, AWS, etc.).

I'm not going to litigate this further with you.

Probably for the best.. you're not really coming off very well here.

Did you ever meet Peter's dog Moose? That was the biggest dog I've ever seen in an office.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com