Every single one of them gave me a non-answer; most simply answered a different question I didnt ask.
If there isn't an expectation of a consistent 40 hour work week, then it is highly unlikely that there will be any bonus for working extra during this time period.
At that time, SDEs were paid on a salary basis with additional compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vested in the future based on how long you stayed with the company a.k.a "golden handcuffs".
SDEs worked about 50 to 60 hours during most of the year, 70 to 90 hours during an oncall / pager duty week, and 70 to 100 hours during Q4, the holiday season leading up to Christmas.
The pay was really good, the people I worked with were brilliant and amazing, and it was exciting to build awesome systems and see them make a difference in the company's operations and capabilities. At the same time, it starts to wear on you and your family after a few years. I am glad I did it, but it's not the type of job most people can do for more than a few years due to how much it requires and impacts your life.
I don't know anyone that works 60 hours regularly. 50, maybe - you know including lunch.
Oncall for the vast majority of teams isn't extra hours, just strange hours. But if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week? If you went through that I'm sorry, I suspected our Ops org is psychotic, but that is too much. Still, i really have to wonder if you are exaggerating since the other 2 numbers were dramatically. Or you got an Outlier team.
My org crunches for reinvent, sure, but what company wouldn't with a massive yearly conference where/when most of the products are launched.
It was common on the team I was on to work about 10 hours a day in office and then go home and have meetings with our sister team in India and some follow-up work with them. The sister team was working on standing up an automation service to reduce some of our "manual" work and help reduce the oncall burden, but it took nearly a year and a half for that to happen.
>> if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.
That would have been nice. We initially had to provide 24-7 coverage for a week during our oncall rotation. After the sister team in India stood up, it turned into 12 hours a day and a hand off to an oncall engineer in India who would cover the next 12 hours. Both "tag team" engineers would cover a week together for the oncall rotation.
>> I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week?
Our service directly supported order fulfillment. Therefore it HAD to stay up at all costs, especially during Q4.
Granted 100 hours did not happen often, it was usually closer to 70 and mainly consisted of getting everything ready for Q4 and load testing it all to make sure that it was solid for the tremendous holiday volume. Remember, this was BEFORE the retail website had fully transitioned to elastic scaling. All the supporting layers and configuration were pre-scaled manually based on the previous year's peaks plus the expected increase.
Overtime should be optional, so that people can decide if they're capable or willing to push themselves during this period.
What essentials? Toilet paper? Water? These can be bought from Amazon, no?
My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
Kind of unrelated, but:
> As the owner of a small company that has a hard time finding good help > My company doesn't wait for economic downturns to shed the staff that it didn't really need.
I hope that you're not saying you shed the good help when you don't need them.
> Amazon is looking to hire 100,000 new warehouse and delivery workers to meet increased demands for shipments as a result of the novel coronavirus pandemic, the company announced on Monday. It will also increase the hourly pay of workers employed in these positions by an additional $2 in the United States through April.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/3/16/21182411/amazon-hires-emp...
>This is, I think, good for humanity.
I think it's valuable to note it's good for the bits of humanity that live in the first-world parts of America, et al. Not so much the people who will get ground into dust getting Prime delivery times down while exposing themselves to disease all so I can get some book about teaching my kid in 2 days or less and then put it on a shelf.
Eh, this is the same as poor people eating fast food and rich people eating healthy organic foods. It is also the same as how rich people can afford to live close to work and poor people cannot so they spend more time commuting.
This theme isn't unique to Amazon or one facet of the world, its everywhere if you open your eyes. Financially affluent people have benefits that lower class people don't and that is how our world currently works.
I agree, I will and am gladly working overtime for which I will not get compensation in the hope of preventing layoffs at the company I work for. We all have to do our part to keep what economic activity we can going in the face of this crisis.