I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months
benadam.me
benadam.me
"Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work"
Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work. Truly, he recapped it for me, the expectations were absolutely incredible and I'd consider him a hard worker who has found a ton of success in his current role.
I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). But living in Seattle, a notable chunk of my social circle works there. I'd say a few enjoy the scale of things they get to work on or perhaps the brand name, but overall none of them ever talk about liking the work environment/balance/culture.
One friend, at a director level, just quit on a whim because he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out. He told his VP to fuck off, left, and is now on sabbatical. I've never seen him so happy.
Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."
Personal grievances aside, I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.
I told google that this style of interviewing is discriminatory, especially towards people with families, or other commitments. Never got another call for an interview since ^_^
When I interview people I try really hard not to do stuff like laughing at a serious question or suggestion from a candidate unless they're obviously trying to be funny.
Finding people who are willing to spend months in order to get the job is one of the biggest reasons companies use leetcode.
For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university.
The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spend ages learning things you would never do during your day job and if you did do them during your day job you would be considered a cowboy because there are predefined libraries that are optimised to do those things.
For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours and that the hardest thing at the companies is the interview process.
As you get to more senior levels it seems like companies still expect you to do passably well on those questions - but make their decision based on other data-points such as impact/past projects etc.
OK, not professional, and fair grounds for deciding you don't want to work there (interviews are as much for you to evaluate the employer as they are for the employer to evaluate you) but.... have a bit of a thicker skin. Carrying something like that for 15 years instead of immediately dismissing it as the commentary of an asshole is just no way to go through life.
And I replied, “Is it even remotely possible I came up with the correct answer by chance?” They agreed not. “Then why should it be my problem that you can’t understand my method?”
In retrospect I was an ass, but I got credit and passed the class, so…
Very good point. I didn't really think about it much before. It is even difficult for candidates who are in IT field but not in FAANG type companies.
I'm 48 and I've been a software developer a long time. The technical interview at many companies has been an ego-driven hazing ritual my entire career, well before Leetcode even existed.
This was in 2004 though so maybe that has changed but it certainly stuck with me.
Google India (c. late 2000s / early 2010s) used to be notorious for this, so much so that Googlers I knew would rather have their referrals give interviews at Google HQ (MTV), instead (not that it was any better, but rather it wasn't as worse).
One piece of advice I received early on was, interviews aren't meant to be a pissing contest but often are. As an interviewee, accept that and try not to take rejections personally (easier said than done). As an interviewer, know that you're in a position of power, and try not to abuse it (easily done but never said).
Wouldn’t this be true of almost any other selective interview process?
More realistic is to talk through a process that can be sporadically described in various 1-3 line code samples that will eventually be put together to form a program for something boring. A good boring example is something like transmit a file from a file system across a network and perform an integrity check. Boring but enough steps to talk through and demonstrate with a couple instructions. Nobody does this. I would hear a discussion on proper use of APIs and step by step walk towards success than see somebody lost writing for loops and conditions.
I agree to some extent but moreso, I think it heavily favours those with a theoretical CS background, which means effectively you are favouring candidates from top colleges in a round about way.
Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.
Don't hold it against your colleagues. A lot of this knowledge isn't obvious to anyone and people chiding people for not knowing would be the last to come up with solutions themselves. This is just insecurity and bickering.
Google has been a publicly traded company with a massive scale. If the technical problems aren't interesting to you, I doubt it is worth it to work there. The culture of such companies are always the same. Detached to minimize problems, don't make personal problem a problem of the company. Good colleagues can make you forget this for a while of course.
It’s fine. I’ve seen code from FAANGs that evoked the same reaction from me.
Is it possible you had a better solution that the interviewer simply didn't recognize?
I've shared about how I was forced into early retirement, in 2017. I had tried getting another job, after leaving my company, but no one would even talk to me (I won't go into why).
It absolutely infuriated me. It was humiliating and scary. I decided that I didn't really need to be patronized and insulted anymore, and just gave up.
But I was quite able to stand on my own. I didn't need the money; just the work.
After over four years of working (harder than I ever did, as a corporate shill) for a nonprofit (and learning new stuff), I can't see myself ever going back to the rat race.
... as fast as possible, whether it actually works in all cases or not. As Dilbert says "our boss can't judge the quality of our work, but he knows when it's late".
Wow. It’s really difficult to imagine a likely scenario where that’s justified.
Not that that is a justification, but it's almost certainly the reason.
Actually, writing this down made me think that big companies (like the FAANG mostly are) are quite anti-capitalistic. I'm not sure how to call them, because sure as hell they're not socialist or anything of the sorts, but it's reasonably clear that many of the theoretical capitalistic principles that many of us know in one way or another do not apply to these economic entities.
---
"I'm sure I'll take you with pleasure!" the Queen said. "Two pence a week, and jam every other day."
Alice couldn't help laughing, as she said, "I don't want you to hire me – and I don't care for jam."
"It's very good jam," said the Queen.
"Well, I don't want any to-day, at any rate."
"You couldn't have it if you did want it," the Queen said. "The rule is, jam to-morrow and jam yesterday – but never jam to-day."
"It must come sometimes to 'jam to-day'," Alice objected.
"No, it can't," said the Queen. "It's jam every other day: to-day isn't any other day, you know."
"I don't understand you," said Alice. "It's dreadfully confusing!"
Ya, and the recruiters always try to get you into what sound like would be the worst orgs (I would guess positions in good orgs are "known" about outside of what the recruiters are trying to fill).
I am not certain what they were going for, though I can tell you I left knowing that even if I had gotten an offer, there was no way in hell I'd be accepting. It's obvious there are some very successful (happy?) amazon people (amazonians?) but no thank you, I enjoy living.
I have another friend who was offered a job there and turned them down, then the hiring manager fired back with "Oh c'mon, you just have to last a year here and then you can put Amazon on your resume" which is hilarious and totally fucked up.
"We aren't going to pretend that you will actually like working here but if you suffer for about a year, it's gonna do wonders for attracting future employers"
I often wonder if Amazon wouldn't actually be more successful if they treated their people better. I think there's a strong sentiment of Emperor Bezos' New Clothes and survivorship bias that has Amazon leadership convinced that being evil bastards is the only reason/way the company can be successful.
Facebook and Google basically have one product that is a money machine which funds everything else. The rest is mostly window dressing.
Amazon does not have the luxury of being able to rest.
I think you will find a similar culture at Netflix, which is also in a competitive market.
It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on the PIP and how I can improve AND I would start looking immediately for a new job.
Best advice I can give someone who gets on a PIP is don't wait or work the process, just make an exit plan and act on it (interview quickly) and own your destiny. Also if you've been a stellar performer and you move to a team where things aren't working out within the first 3 months, transfer quickly (go to HR and claim mental and emotional wellbeing) before your performance reviews get trashed and then it's impossible to transfer.
I've read articles claiming that Bezos had certain opinions about people being lazy, and that he intentionally structured Amazon to make it almost impossible to get promoted. Basically, people are hired to do a specific job, and they will never be allowed to do any other job or be promoted until they quit from overwork. The exceptionally few people that both deliver the impossible and don't quit over the workload are treated as valuable, but only at the specific job they are currently doing.
From what I've been able to piece together, this was always at least somewhat true, but has gotten much worse the last few years. I think Amazon is likely going to start running dry on willing candidates in their engineering and management teams within a couple of years and we'll see them start to lose market share as a result.
Its crazy how these FANGs promise the moon, the serious RSU vesting starts only after 1 - 2 years and the average tenure is like 1.5 years.
>>he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out
I've heard this quite a bit at many places, when you go on a longish leave of any kind basically people kind of replace you. When you come back you discover your job is gone, for this reason alone I don't know many people who take these long leaves/vacations.
I've heard that, because of the stack ranking, if managers want to keep their current team unchanged, they sometimes hire someone new just so that they can turn around and fire them.
EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird.
EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben's. Wow. We'll... get on that. Sorry.
FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868
I've been thinking of writing a Firefox extension to auto-detect the page background color and set the text color to the polar opposite of that. Haven't done it yet, but I'm getting close.
It also has <p> styled with a zero margin, which makes things hard to read as well.
I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he's wrong about a few things too), but overall it's less of a "Amazon == bad" piece and more of a "this is why it wasn't to my taste" reflection.
Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team/org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that's obviously a bad thing, but that's not his problem either.
Note: in case it wasn't clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah
I agree that it definitely doesn't read like a straight tale of horror and abuse. But I don't see how can you sum it up it by saying "he found some good practices" when he takes care to point out, for example:
Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)
Sounds like a grind, day-in, day-out, with lots of made up stress.
Unfortunately, the majority of my time is spent doing “program” style work which leaves about 10% of my time for technical work. Ultimately this is not what I want to be doing with my career.
So the work sucked basically. And definitely wasn't what he was expecting.
One of the projects I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript) was tasked with doing the front end system design for a React application (and the API that would power the UI).
Standard sweatshop practices, sounds like.
Oh and did we mention on-call? About which he says:
To be blunt: it sucks.
Which (among other reasons) is why he quit after 10 months. Which is definitely not a step to be taken lightly, because (aside from losing on the compensation) it basically amounts to a resume stain.
Now of course he said positive things as well, and it wasn't a simple condemnation of Amazon, by any stretch. But still -- it strikes me as rather strange that you are somehow able sum it up as "he had good things happen to him there" and it was a "succesful outcome".
To my ears, his experience there read like a very mixed bag.
My paraphrase of his report would be: "You learn a lot there, but it's a grind that will suck you dry before you know it."
Your paraphrase isn't wrong either, but I would suggest a modification to it: "it will suck you dry, if either (1) you don't fit in with the company culture, or (2) you are placed in a bad situation on a team with poor leadership and high attrition".
Perhaps shockingly, not every team at Amazon is constantly quitting (e.g. my direct team in the last two years has had 1 person voluntarily leave for a better opportunity - and we wished them well, and 0 attrition otherwise), and also some people actually appreciate and gravitate towards some things like, what the author calls "team are fragile" culture (because it is in fact a kind of durability/resiliency that there is less reliance on special rockstars, irreplaceable dependencies, and that teams can be fluid but the product mostly works/lives-on).
Isn't the only difference between the Amazon-bashing and OP's take just a matter of delivery, tact and perspective? I personally prefer a communication style that doesn't involve bashing, and I would probably choose to write a post much like the OP, but I think it's also very charitable to Amazon, almost to a fault.
For example, section 3: "Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)" resonates with me deeply, because many of the issues described are similar to the issues I face at a different platform company. These issues weren't always present (I've been here long enough to see the growing pains evolve), and my conclusion isn't "this just isn't the right place for me", but rather "the company is trying to continue operating in a manner that only works in small orgs, and must make deep fundamental changes going forward". Now, to be fair, if that change doesn't happen, then it does become a place that "isn't for me".
But "This isn't for me" implies it's a matter of personal preference, and perfectly fine for some folks, but some of these issues are deep, fundamental problems that must be solved and likely require changes in the org or every person who takes that role going forward will reach the same conclusion (or someone who's too desperate to care will just deal with it). That doesn't make the underlying problem go away.
Realizing that a place isn't for you and thinking about it that way is arguably healthier than getting angry about it and staying in that environment. But the reason that place isn't for you might still stem from organizational issues that make Amazon (or any company with similar problems) arguably "not the right place" for just about anyone.
As for whether this indicates deep flaws that it might not be the right place for just about anyone... well I think there is the existence proof that Amazon employs 10k's/100k's of people, and while it may have higher attrition than peers (does it? I don't actually know, but I'm willing to take that on faith), still at least a sizeable majority is relatively satisfied with their careers here (based on internal tech survey results). So, "not right for anyone" is definitely an over-exaggeration.
Not right for you, if you are the type of person who shares personality traits and career goals/preferences as the author? Sure, quite possibly.
In terms of OP's public persona, absolutely. And as I said, he writes the kind of post I'd probably write in that situation.
I was referring to how the HN community often discusses Amazon, which generally happens anonymously. In this setting, someone ranting and raving about issues at Amazon and someone politely spelling out those issues at Amazon don't result in very different outcomes (I say this while appreciating a well reasoned response over a fiery/impassioned response).
Employing 10k's/100k's of people does not imply that problems don't exist, or should not be addressed. The restaurant industry employees millions, and yet it's fairly well known that the industry is rife with problems, and the Anti Work movement is a manifestation of that. I don't think it's useful to conclude "well, only work in a restaurant if you are compatible with those conditions". The industry needs to change.
> Not right for you, if you are the type of person who shares personality traits and career goals/preferences as the author? Sure, quite possibly.
Many of the problems the author describes are not a matter of personal preference. They are an indication of organizational dysfunction.
Are some people better suited to work in a dysfunctional org? Sure. Does that mean the org should focus on hiring compatible people over fixing that dysfunction? That's certainly one possible approach. An approach that leads to a continuation of those problems, exacerbating them until only people who fit those "preferences" can possibly succeed.
I'm personally predisposed to stay in bad situations and deal with shitty leadership/environments thanks to years of conditioning via a very traumatic childhood. It's what I know, and so I can do it well. My ability to operate in such conditions doesn't mean the conditions are acceptable.
Nobody is dumb enough to write a blog post trashing Amazon under their own name. He wants to be able to get another job.
Are you absolutely sure that there are no legitimate problems with Amazon, or that maybe we're a little itchy with Amazon for a reason?
Question about this specifically. Was it ever revealed if that order was to get people indoors to a reinforced building that happened to collapse? I remember SMS screenshots of a delivery driver who was killed, and to have sent him on the road would have been a death sentence.
* New manager who was a nice guy but didn't help me or other folks onboard
* A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire.
* SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, and he said he "didn't know" what we owned. I asked him for help configuring a monitor for a service, and he said he couldn't figure it out while literally backing away from my desk slowly.
* A culture within our team in which no one was willing or able to help others out. It was very much every man for himself.
I GTFO of there and have been happy across the lake since. Paying back my signing bonus was well worth the significant reduction in stress and quality of life.
One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy.
Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics.
Of course every org/VP has some latitude, but this is a common principle adopted by many VPs to appease the "bar raiser" standards as well as giving enough motivation to axe employees with considerable equity despite how good they may be on an absolute scale.
This was the policy at a number of orgs when I was there 5 years ago, and I have heard similar stories as recently as 2019 pre-covid.
I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy.
Which is another reason I'd never touch Amazon with a ten-foot pole: it's not worth the risk of getting used and abused like that (on top of all the other issues).
I agree, but the managers are gaming the system so there's no way they could be transparent about it. As a new hire, it would be a huge punch in the gut to be setup for failure like this and not be in on it from the start.
Every single team I've managed, I've given the lowest performers a huge benefit of the doubt, and a long timeline for improvement. In some cases, it wound up being a PIP->firing. But more often than not, I wind up trying one thing after another with the lowest performers, because I so much want to believe in them. They're always nice people, but they don't deliver. They say "I'm working on X... I'm still working on X... Will have something ready in 2 weeks... I hit a blocker, it'll be another 2 weeks." And I try to help them, unblock them, mentor them, reassign them to some other task that might be better suited. But the harsh reality is that many many people are just not good developers, no matter how much you both want them to be.
So on every team I've ever managed, if I'd been forced to put the lowest performer on a PIP, it would have been good for the whole team. And I think I'm probably not alone in this.
(Of course, this applies only to a limit. At some point, you've eliminated the actual low-performers, and shouldn't ever manufacture a PIP just to meet a numbrs threshold.)
That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.
I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad.
It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists.
It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly.
Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.
Having a team where everyone is excelling is a GOOD thing in most orgs, right?
There are only two instances when you're happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren't worth it.
Avoid at all costs. You've been warned.
Most importantly, Amazon's culture is toxic. Poor leadership (shouting and swearing during meetings) leading to bad hires. It's a cut-throat working environment with high staff rotation. I struggled to cope with the fact how people were treated (planned attrition and PIPs). I was working under 5 different managers during this time, being bullied by the last one. HR did nothing, so I voted with my feet. When this occurred, I was close to reaching a 2yr tenure, so it was easy money for me on the table.
- RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...)
- Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful.
- Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why?
- Make it easier to switch teams
This is done on purpose because a vast majority of employees leave Amazon within 18 months or so. And those who can withstand that environment for 24 months and beyond develop thick enough skin and make enough internal connections to survive till 5+ years.
(bit of a tangent)
> in case HR is reading this
HR's primary (perhaps only) job is to protect the upper management (execs and above) from the nuisance caused by workers down below. It took me a while to sink in but when it did it brought in lot of clarity to the way I deal with HR.
IMO this could be generalised to a reasonable degree. For instance, police force's primary job is to protect the government from the internal threat which is the population at large. Catching thieves happens to be a small by-product of it.
Employees' allegiance is, first and foremost, to their pay master.
They don’t want to fix that. I’m sure they save a ton of money by backloading vesting like that. With their turnover rate, they probably pay out a pretty small portion of their awarded grants.
As I understand it (having never worked there), they are also stingy with granting new stock, and consider unvested grants in determining what to award each year. e.g. “You had an amazing year, but you’re sitting on a bunch of stock already, so take this tiny new grant and fuck off.” I’ve heard this from multiple former employees so have no particular reason to doubt it.
That's true, but it can go the other way too. One person I know got a needs improvement rating and no stock at all, but turned around and did rockstar work the next year. Because AMZN happened to have crashed about 50% in that time, getting the person back to target total compensation for the exceeds rating required granting considerably more RSUs than they would have received had they also gotten an exceeds in the prior year.
probably too focused on frugality to consider retention
https://www.essence.com/news/amazon-burning-through-workers/
I find the attitude in a company starts from the top - so I'd Blame Bezos for the culture that does this, look at how they treat their non software dev workers.
This is a crucial part of PIP culture. It took me awhile too realize how common a pattern it is for companies to offer promising RSUs as part of total comp and then drive employees out after 10 months.
That vesting schedule is just some slight of hand so that you think Amazon is paying you XX% more than they have ever planned on. In reality you're getting paid likely less than you would sticking at a smaller, saner company. If you knew that upfront you'd never join.
To be clear, not all companies that offer RSUs are like this (of course most of them have better vesting), but this is a pattern I've seen a bit too often.
It's 5%, 15%, 40%, 40%.
In lieu of RSU's in Year 1, you get a big signing bonus. Year 2, not quite as big signing bonus (hence the +10% RSU). Year 3 and 4, nothing but RSU.
It adds up to the same amount every year assuming no stock growth.
Are you saying you just want double your salary for year 1 and 2 and are planning to quit before year 3 when it drops to nil? Yeah, who wouldn't?
I wouldn't want to be a shareholder of any company dumb enough to offer this.
It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.
Surprised to read this. The tooling is what I miss most from Amazon, but I was in AWS the whole time, I've heard the retail situation is quite different.
If they cared, they would have done something about this long ago.
You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with.
On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with
This is put succinctly.
Seeing Amazon from within was an absolute shock. It is hard to be hyperbolic about the company's technical achievements: Prime, AWS, 2-hour Delivery, Alexa, Prime Video, Amazon Go ... absolutely incredible, world-changing stuff.
But the experience of working there felt like the place was on fire. People transferring teams in droves, joining in droves from outside, entire teams doing duplicate or triplicate work, managers of managers of managers of managers. And yet the speed at which they launch successful products at global scale is unrivaled.
I'm glad I got to be a part of it but there's almost nothing that could entice me to go back.
Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier, and every so often tells a child exactly how to electrocute themselves.
Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience.
And having moved to Seattle recently, I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.
> Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier
For the average person who isn't super-bothered about privacy, the voice-activated functionality is genuinely novel and delightful.
> Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience
"2nd best to Netflix" is no slouch at all.
> I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.
So - an intentionally-small-selection store has a small selection, your personal preferences don't line up with the (you must admit, extremely friction-free) checkout system, and you worried about a bug that (from the fact that you phrased it that way) didn't actually happen? Sounds like it's working extremely well for how it's designed!
(Disclaimer - I'm an Amazon employee, though I don't work on any of the discussed products, and frankly am pretty critical of them all both internally and externally too. But to claim that they're not successes _at the criteria that they are aiming for_ is mistaken)
I’ve literally never had that happen in my life. Most companies just immediately ghost me if I turn down an offer. This isn’t covert bragging about being some kind of superstar either, it just felt like they were desperate. I know all the horror stories about people getting PIPs, it kinda started feeling like some kind of trap lol
That's what it sounds like. I had a guy from my past (somebody I had worked for years ago, but didn't know that well) call me up out of the blue once, basically begging me to come work for him. I was flattered, and looking forward to (finally) being treated like a human being instead of a replaceable cog for once in my programming career, so I took the job. Good lord, what a mistake. The reason he was begging was because he was a totally abusive asshole and couldn't keep anybody for any amount of money. You would think that watching people come and go would make these people re-evaluate their approach, but in their minds, it's always the "peons" that are wrong.
Is it anything good of working at AWS?
I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents:
* Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason)
* Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since)
* TT (ticket tracker)
* SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don't know what it has become.
Although I _hate_ Jira so maybe I'm biased also.
+1 on Pipelines being amazing. A lot of people tell me Jira is better than SIM - haven't had a chance to use the former.
And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse.
At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working conditions through Unions. When will we finally realize that Amazon is equally over-working everyone and join that solidarity effort so that everyone's working environment becomes better? Quitting doesn't change anything, we can see they just rehire and perpetuate bad culture. Even the author of the article says just that; he was hired to replace someone.
If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.
> By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually?
Yes, but it usually takes an unacceptably long time for something like that to happen, and in the mean time a lot of people get hurt. As they say "in the long run, we're all dead": it doesn't do us much good if letting the problems work themselves out means we'll never live to see the solution.
????? it's super possible to simply not work there
- Internal tooling was poor and most teams DIY. Any centrally managed thing was horrible and either home-grown and poorly documented or some VP picked it and poorly documented
- The companies needs superseded your career goals to the point that very specific trainings were basically forced even if it had nothing to do with what you do (six sigma)
- To get anything done required 3-5 other teams to do anything and took forever. Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks.
One thing that was different was attrition. This was before remote working and when the nobody in town was hiring you really were stuck.
I like working in smaller organizations where you can have an impact. I only think one of the FAANG would be worthy of me putting up with working in a large bureaucracy again - the other A - and only because I haven't heard horror stories - if you have them, share them.
Not even the horror stories leak ...
My own experiences, the horror stories I've read, the broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession.
It didn't use to be like this. There was a time not long ago when individual personality and skills mattered. Workloads could be negotiated, interviews were conversational.
But now it seems that a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines, and thousands of other companies follow suit almost blindly.
I'd love to see a job aggregator for anti-FAANGs. Does such a thing exist?
If it is the norm I blame it on the over supply of software engineers. The salaries stay high but the churn is now higher because with that high of a salary they will burn through as many engineers as possible to get the perfect person.
If you don't like this idea, get of my lawn. ;)
> broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession.
> a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines...
I agree that these things are happening, but this is not happening everywhere. In particular, Microsoft is not true for any of the above over the last 5+ years since Satya came onboard. In my experience, every one of the above is not true at Microsoft, with one notable exception: the interview loop is indeed hard. But other than that, it's a much better situation at Microsoft. There are no difficult ethical positions (ethics and trust are first class core values there). Individuals matter, and allowances are made for different people's strengths and weaknesses. Workloads and deadlines can indeed be negotiated. It's far more "human" there than other places like Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and other places.
You joined a good org and that's awesome, but I believe you can just as easily join a bad one at Microsoft or a good one at Amazon.
Er, when? Old Microsoft was infamous for the ping pong ball interview questions and stack rankings. Is this not just a result of companies in the tech market being successful and turning from plucky underdog to bureaucratic behemoth?
I’ve done quite a few interviews for Amazon and the debrief was never ‘this person has strong opinions, not inclined’. If you’re not interested in getting the data to prove or disprove your opinions then that will count against you.
My recruiter strategy has just been to reply with a direct "Hi <name>, No thank you." that doesn't leave room for foot-in-the-door.
i took a job at AWS myself, and left after 8 months. partly it was pull factor to a more exciting offer, but i wont deny some push factors. Amazon hires generally very smart people, but the bureaucracy and legacy is just stifling for someone used to a faster pace in tech. After a while I identified the 4 things I felt that we had to ship in order to be a competitive product, and having determined that we'd take years to do it, left in good conscience hoping that whoever stayed would carry on the good fight. I didn't know it but my manager would leave 2 months after I did, lol.
good times, decent pay but it is clearly no longer Day 1 in many parts of AWS. If I were Adam Selipsky this would be job #1 IMO. AWS can only coast on past reputation so long.
After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a year, due to the COVID closures affecting my plans.
You embellish your CV as an individual and you overdo it = possible catastrophe.
Companies constantly embellishing job postings = just a regular Tuesday.
I'm having a really hard time remembering a job where the job descriptions really matched the day to day activities, and I've worked for ~10 companies, big and small, from Asia, Europe, America.
Why does Amazon do this? I've bailed out 3 times on interviews with them now because somehow the role they sold me on end up being completely different by the time you talk to the team members doing the actual job. It's a huge time waster for everyone involved.
From the business's point of view, they were trying to plug an urgent hole, from my career's point of view, I wanted to work on mobile Android apps. I moved back to an Android team in a month, which required VP-level approval.
It was for an awesome team and org, really up and coming.
I get the congrats message that I’ll be getting an offer. Then find out it’s only for SEA. This is after the recruiter insisted it would be SFO because I didn’t want to relocate for various reasons.
Ah so that’s why they flew me to Seattle.. lol.
Ended up being passed around a few orgs recruiters and took a role in sfo that I finally left after 20 months. Sigh.
But hey, you bet he knows topological sort and dynamic programming.
Really telling of an organization that your personal skills don't matter when they just need bodies.
Everyone I know says it is worth working there, but mostly as a grab and go for the resume.
I worked for a Japanese company, and they used Excel for everything. GANTT Charts were done in Excel (not Project), documentation was written in Excel (not Word), etc.
They had these monster 3,000-row excel punchlists for QC. If even one test failed, the whole shooting match was scrapped.
Slideshows were done in Excel (not PP).
Such bullshit.
> Strive to be Earth's Best Employer
> Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere.
"Lead with empathy", by creating conditions in which workers feel they have to urinate in bottles [1].
[1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
Onboarding was interesting at the general company level, but basically non existent at a team level. I gave it about three months trying to get to grips with the manual tasks underlying their Virtual IP assignment process (was on their networking team). Couldn't make head nor tail of it, had constant problems with the VM running on my laptop and basically started looking around for another job.
However, this little FAANG checkbox I now have ticked has opened lots of doors for me since then. I've seen most of my old team at a few tech events in the interim, and taking to them it seems like I got out in time. The team was "traded" to another senior director, and things got very bad, with loads of folks quitting.
My last day included an exit interview, which kind of stuck with me ever since. Talking to the HR rep, I said that the role probably wasn't a good fit for me, but maybe sometime in the future I'd wind up back at Amazon. You know, one of those throwaway comments you might say to be polite. The HR rep responded with "Well, you never know, maybe" while unconsciously shaking his head at the same time :)
That’s because they have no consistency in their hiring bar. I know multiple people who were contacted immediately by Amazon recruiters after failing an interview loop. “Hey, that other team says you suck but I bet you’re perfect for our team.” When you know other teams are happy to take your reject candidates, you can’t trust internal candidates any more than external ones.
In fairness, Microsoft has a bit of this. The further across the company you want to move, the more likely you’ll need to interview. But it seems within Amazon that there is no attempt at consistency.
Enterprise work summed up in one sentence. Impressive. While I agree with Andreessen’s “software is eating the world,” it might be more apt to say “Excel is eating the world.”
That being said, if it works, it works.
If it doesn't work, make a case for why and develop a _holistic_ understanding of the costs and benefits of changing the current process. Maybe you can change it, or maybe you learn why it doesn't change.
If it works, but it offends your sensibilities, perhaps this is an opportunity for self-growth.
I do occasionally blow things in to Postgres for my own sanity, but it usually isn't worth it, and even when it is, data goes back out to other people in CSV.
As just one example, if your secops department uses Qualys (and they probably do), that forces your secops department to use it, which means everyone who has to interact with them does.
Everything about internal budgeting is a pile of spreadsheets that gets thrown around.
Hell, when I moved one of our data centers recently, that process with the new DC was all all Excel sheets, despite the fact that we have DCIMs on both ends.
There is just no escape.
excel via email might (unfortunately) very well be the more robust and reliable way to go here
I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn't "Amazon proper," or maybe the lesson is "be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture."
OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there's probably something to the "avoid working in a cost-center" lesson.
Then again, there's so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being "unlucky" seems to happen more often than seems optimal.
I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can't say I'd recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.
Sounds like my first job out of college (it was early 1990s, big consulting shop).
There was a ton of pressure to arrive early, stay late, 55-60 hour weeks were normal, continually document progress on your tasks, but the project overall was well behind schedule and what had been completed didn't really work.
We got paid straight overtime after 40 hours, and I didn't have much else to do with my time, so it wasn't all bad. I only did it for about a year. It was a good reference for my next job.
Young people can afford a few years in the salt mines to get some perspective.
After a few days of this my manager pulled me aside saying that some of the higher ups had noticed I wasn't staying late with the rest of the team. Of course I wasn't. I didn't have any work to do. I started showing up to the team dinners, but it seems the damage was done. My next review went poorly and I immediately started looking for a new job because I didn't want to deal with that bullshit anymore.
Coincidentally, I believe that was the last review Microsoft did with their infamous stack ranking so maybe the next one would have gone better.
"Documentation is very important at Amazon" - helps alleviate the impact of constant turnover
"Teams are fragile" - um, because of turnover?
"Everything is urgent" - indirectly because of turnover, because if you don't nag people to enable your deliverables, you get fired.
"Everything is built in house" - helps make you harder to fire, gives you bully power over other new hires since you know it top to bottom, protects you from the organization that is trying to constantly turn over people
The whole Amplify/AppSync stack is another massive tire fire.
Also why do you want to work for Amazon and Google? There are many great people there, you will not be noticed. Work for a smaller company, they will pay you more, appreciate everything you do and you will be much happier!
"The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual the vast majority of processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases."
Amazon is the best and worst place I’ve worked.
It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible, that's the single reason those principles exist. To make specially young and clueless employees forget it's just a job, because hey, it must be an obsession!
If you are young, this may seem normal i guess but I would never ever touch amazon.
> It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible
This has not been my experience. The way I've looked at it as, these are more explicit ground rules for how decisions are made. At most other places I've worked, the mechanisms for making decisions was often quite arbitrary, and boiling down to whatever the most senior person in the room wants. When the Leadership Principles are done well, you'll see there are checks and balances built in. For example: yes, we have "customer obsession," and we try to work hard for customers, but if my boss told me to work unreasonable hours, he would fail in the "Earn Trust" area, and he would be in danger of losing his team.
I've found my work-life balance at Amazon to be pretty reasonable, and much better than pretty much any where else I've worked.
Counterexample: amazon
if every team is reinventing square wheels, they are adding a lot of inefficiencies which worsens the situation at macro level.
Startups are also duplicating the work of each other, and succeed against big companies because this makes them more agile. I always thought that seeing internal orgs as startups was the master stroke of Amazon and the reason for its many product successes -- but it has the downsides described in the article.
Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn't swept away from under your feet one day.
That's incredible. How are job tenures in Norway? Where I am, lots of people stay 14 + or - 4 months typically.
(I had thought it translated to "Son of man" which is kind of a beautiful way to say human being)
This includes all staff yes, but still shocking. If true.
I've been with amazon for 8 years (still an employee) as a software engineer. I've concluded that your experience at amazon - both work life balance and technical - is entirely dependent on your skip manager and your org.
I started with Amazon in the bay area. When I joined we were still in the very early days of our project. The work was awesome, and it felt like we were creating great things. Unfortunately, the ops burden (oncall) became way too much for our team to handle and the quality of life plummeted. My existence during those days was pure pain. From there I relocated (through Amazon) to Seattle to work on something else. I did the move with the promise that I'd immediately get to work on a cool project, but I ended up sitting around doing nothing for months. I didn't even have a desk. Once the project finally started though, things become great. Both of these teams had different VPs, and the cultures of each org were very different as well. My experience in the bay area started off very positively, and then become extremely shitty. My experience in Seattle started off extremely shitty, but then it turned into the most fun 2 years of coding I've done.
Additionally, different orgs do things differently. AWS does things different from how Alexa/Retail/Music/Movies/etc do things. A good example of this: Twitch isn't fully integrated with all of Amazon's internal systems (see recent news for reference). Some teams don't have oncall rotations, other teams have brutal ones. One of my previous directors used to do bi-weekly (once every two weeks) fireside chats. I haven't even met my current director, and I've been under him for a year and a half.
If you're entering the company from the outside, you might very well be walking into a dumpster fire of a team. If you're inside the company, it's really easy to spot which teams are garbage and which ones are not. Below is my guide:
Red Flags: - No nearby principals (no tech guidance at the director level) - Too many principals (bureaucratic arm chair engineering hell) - Average tenure of engineers on the team is SDE1 (trash code) - No PRFAQ/BRDs (projects have no north star, scope is all over the place, dumpster fire product team) - Ops burden is too high (you can check a teams ticket queue on SIM, high ticket count = bad oncall) .... and many more ....
Doing team switches are pretty straight forward as well (ymmv). Once you're in the door at amazon, do your research and determine whether you need to switch teams ASAP. You can search any engineer's username and look at what code they're contributing. It's pretty easy to investigate the code base you'll be working on in advance of joining the team to determine its health.
Regarding tooling, amazon does and doesn't have great tooling. There are things like Pipelines, CR/Crux, Sim/TT, Apollo, iGraph, etc that are actually world class tools and don't really have any rivals out there (yet!). Then there are other things like people wanting to fork bootstrap and react so that they can rebrand it as an amazon version.... In one of my early teams, I saw the SDETs (test engineers) metaphorically go to war with each other to write the best end-to-end integration test framework. There were four frameworks in the end.
Regarding the leadership principles. Those are predominately tools to be used during the decision making process. There is this concept called "one way door decisions" which would be any decision that is made such that the amount of effort needed to undo that decision is not feasible. Basically if you take that door, you can't come back out. When faced with a one way door decision, you use the leadership principles to decide.
Are you on a fixed timeline because your deliverable is tied to AWS Re:Invent? Then you need to optimize for Bias for Action and Deliver Results. Are you about to create a core platform service that many many teams will build on? Obviously you need to optimize for Insist on the Highest Standards, if not you screw over your org for years.
The leadership principles contradict each other, but that generally gives you an idea of what's being gained and lost in the decision making process.
For software engineers, I would not exclude amazon as an employer just because you read some stuff online. If you can get in, do it and stick around for a year or two at least. The amount that you learn in such a short amount of time is significant, and you can take that experience with you anywhere. If you're having a bad experience at Amazon, remember that the company is massive. You can switch orgs and it'll feel like you just changed companies (only the tooling is the same).
Final thoughts: don't ignore your mental health! I have never had a manager actually ask about my mental well being before. I don't think that culture is actually fostered at all at Amazon. Use your vacation time if you have it, switch teams if you need too, or just straight up quit.
Given today's turnover rates, this isn't even a sensation.
hmm are Amazon in the CRM space?