Reduced-hours software development engineer position at Amazon
amazon.jobs
amazon.jobs
Disagree on the last part. Because everything still gets done.
I write code slower than I used to but I throw away a lot less of it. Turns out going slower is faster.
The "do enough to not get fired" plan also leads to fundamental career stagnation, whereas a reduced schedule can actually still let you advance in your career.
Amazon seems to be finally seeing their chickens come home to roost after well over a decade of burning people out and developing a toxic reputation that keeps all the great people away.
And now that their stock is stagnant and out of hyper growth, the bleeding is likely accelerating.
It seems like programs like this are an attempt to try to incentivize (or, cynically, bait and switch) good engineers back in.
Having said that, it's a step in the right direction and I hope to see more companies embrace part time SW roles.
I've also heard that people on those teams can generally be happy in their roles as long as they feel secure they aren't on the chopping block.
But staying for less than 12 months may look suspicious.
MSFT and Meta have bad and good depending on the team.
Uber and Amazon have the most surprising incompetence. I interviewed a Staff eng from Uber that couldn't figure out a junior engineer interview.
But the Amazon thing is surprising a little. Some of the guys I've spoken to from there were fantastic!
I guess I could be a terrible judge. Or I could be over-indexing on the guys I've encountered. Or there's some team effect here that I'm missing.
Well, thanks for sharing! It's useful.
I had a junior system admin working for me in ~2012. He wasn't bad, in general, but he was extremely dishonest. We had a failure in a raid volume and volunteered to do the work, got trashed at a trivia night and then completely destroyed the system before passing out. This was one of many, many issues with him that were all documented.
I have another friend, a woman, who had five years experience before working at Uber and several years there. She applied for a senior position but was denied. However, they did put her on the hiring committee for it.
My friend knew what happened with my junior system admin (and new him personally). The first thing she noticed was that his resume was completely made up- he gave himself a senior devops title, lied about his previous internship being a job, and otherwise grossly overstated his skillset. My friend on the hiring committee pointed all of this out, and said a simple reference check would resolve this.
He was hired for the senior position, she was treated like crap. He was later fired for stalking and sexually harassing a coworker. The hiring process at that company is just ridiculous.
In my observation, the really good people either climb through the ranks or they leave for non-unicorns (either for some technically interesting / otherwise fulfilling niche like edtech etc, or to create a startup/company of their own)
Engineers leave a company for three reasons:
Lack of career development opportunities -- Not being able to move up or grow in the way you want to. This is a sign of bad management.
Failure to perform -- Management and said engineer couldn't see eye to eye for whatever reason. Incompetent engineer or (worse) incompetent management.
Boredom -- Work has become stagnant, stale, or otherwise boring and management can't find a better place, or there's limited opportunities internally for someone to find new interesting things to do.
Only one of those reasons is truly something that should raise concern. Bad management makes good engineers leave.
Amazon's core problem isn't the engineering. The engineers there are sharp as tacks, in my experience. I am frequently in awe of the people I work with for their technical acumen in so many different fields.
But management training at Amazon is lacking. Managers are often ICs that have been drafted into management with little to no formal training and the amount of training that they get is often from their subordinates who were previously their peers. What little training outside "Just figure it out" seems to be mandatory HR-related content on how to handle the HR systems. That's it.
$400k+ cash and no junior engineers can’t hurt.
how is productivity measured?
does impact matter? some may say the PM and accounts folks may be in the hook there as much as the swe is.
apples to apples comparisons even for swes is nuanced
Everything else equal, I would prefer to explicitly have the days off and not have to deal with that.
To whatever extent I'm highly skilled, I'd prefer that it be reflected in my responsibilities and compensation, rather than leverage to blow off meetings.
Although, I think butt-in-seat mentality was always broken if an employee could broadcast or interact from anywhere. There are certain kinds of pair programming, whiteboarding, co-design, collab, and conversations that lead to higher signal in-person vs. remote.
FYI, in case anyone else has a hard time finding what exactly the hours reduction is.
Amazon compensation packages assume 15% increase in RSU value year over year, so when you get a 4 year grant as a new hire, your target compensation will be projected based off 15% year over year growth, which typically means less stock granted in year 4 compared to year 3.
With a stagnant stock price, many Amazon employees are potentially at risk of not hitting their year 3 target compensation.
* Amazon pay a signing bonus for the first two years in lieu of RSUs. The idea is that you could sell your RSUs to make up the difference. The problem is that, for anyone who started in the last two years, your RSUs won’t make up the difference between your base salary and what you were getting as a bonus.
From levels.fyi, FAANG and the unicorns are almost all in the $300k-$400k range. Have offers gone up $200k in the last few months? Or are you assuming people are moving up a level?
If you filter by "New Offers Only", you'll see a pretty sharp shift in the trend starting around October 2021.
Same with Uber, a notable uptick starting late last year: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
The top of the band has probably gone up more than the median offer, and most companies didn't increase their bands by that much (yet). This is definitely a case of "the future is here - just not evenly distributed yet".
If stock goes down, you end up getting more shares and vice versa but the $ stays the same
It's basically just regular bonuses tied to tenure
I for one get serious heart symptoms if I don't have adequate sleep.
Here are some of the many possibilities:
The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend.
Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release".
The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.
I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations.
Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.
I find it reallllly hard to trust Amazon when it comes to working less. This really just sounds like a way to get someone to work the same amount for less pay (I assume the position has a paycut).
In other words, when the janky build tools someone wrote >10 years ago break down, you're going to be on-call so much that you'll just run a landline into the back of your head, Matrix style.
IIRC it was in a trial period pre-pandemic. The impression I got was that they wanted to test a 4-day week, but worried it would be disruptive if only one or two team members were out on Fridays. Hence, 4-day teams.
Amazon gets a bad rap, but it can be a nice place to work as a developer. The overtime and pressure varies wildly from team to team, and you'd have to figure that people who choose to join a 4/3 team aren't the sort to press deadlines.
This listing looks like it is for a position which supports their internal developers and/or retail site. Those systems are probably fairly mature, so maybe it's a good business move to hire people to keep them running on a slow burn with better work/life balance.
It may be that 3 day is pushing it too far, even at 50% instead of 60% of salary (or that may be too confusing to not have the salary be proportional).
I am pretty confident that I am 95% as productive at 4 days as I am at 5 days (and I'm a fairly productive engineer). But I take 80% of salary anyway, cause it's worth it.
(I also don't, even at 100%, make the 99th percentile incomes that many on HN seem to).
Here are some of my big takeaways after just a few months:
- Hardwood is expensive. Very expensive. I get most my wood out of the scrap box and use that to practice techniques (bow tie inlays, dovetails, veneer making, epoxy, live edges).
- Quality tools are expensive. Very expensive. Even hand tools can easily be over $100 for a single chisel or rasp. Hand planes and hand saws will start at over $200 often times.
- The work is very rewarding.
- The people are very helpful. I reached out to a furniture maker on YouTube I've been enjoying and asked if I could come work and learn with him for a couple weekends and they were onboard.
- There are co-working spaces with full wood and metal shops. I belong to one and I'm there most weekdays for a few hours, but most of the others are running 1-3 person companies making quality furniture and art. It's great to be around. $200 a month for table saws, drill presses, band saws, planers, jointers, spindle/edge/disc/widebelt sanders, 10'x5' CNC.
- Community colleges and local woodworking associations offer lots of classes on a variety of topics and techniques. I took an initial five day course where I made a cutting board and stool. Since then I've taken a lathe classes and I have a measuring and marking class and a shaker tray class next week.
- Buy the SawStop.
Ugh. I hate that everything has to be delightful now.
I want... the development experience to be delightful
So I can... be delighted
So I guess I like some of that stuff now that I've listed it all but I was never really delighted, maybe just happy I could get a coke with my burger.
I guess to delight me I need magic doorways and 1920s era Santa Claus (none of this post modern stuff where Santa is a trained killer who enslaves elves or stuff, I don't like it)
Too many places have horizontal silos, elaborate bureaucratic policies, throw it over the wall mentality
It's surprising some places pay engineers so much to fill out e-paperwork all day
While looking you dead in the face and saying "we've broken down all of our silos". Current job is this way.
"We are all DevOps"
Yet only one person is allowed to deploy, build pipelines, and provision resources.
No one's broken down any silos, they just changed the name on the land deed and kept the silos where they are.
- Charles Crumb
There's too much content now, and it's a race to the bottom as every piece tries to gain attention.
[0] (Paywalled, but to cite the source) https://www.ft.com/content/f4006248-eb05-49d2-a938-d70118c4c...
If you aren't the sort of person to feel any sort of "delight" about good tools, then the job probably isn't a good fit for you because the responsibility of the job is to build tools.
A professional can be perfectionist (in a good, not procrastinating way) and hold high standards to their work about creating good tools. Perhaps this is captured by 'delight,' but the language seems phrased in a way that 'delight' means showing positivity, bright energy, and explicit enthusiasm for work.
I think it's better for both the individual and the organization when there's a certain level of detachment with the work (so there's commitment to perfectionism but not super high enthusiasm that can be lead to burnout and health problems), but still high standards to ship a good product.
Every decision was made according to some arbitrary dogma about consistency or some other abstract CS principle. The manager was explicitly against sourcing any feedback from the teams we served when determining our priorities and roadmap. The result was tools that were essentially unusable, and endless refactoring from one tech stack configuration to another without actually solving any real-world problems.
For me, burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work. I agree with the general consensus that delight is an awkward word to use here, but it does at least signal that the team is run with a user-first mentality.
> burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work
This is a lesson I was grateful to have picked up from HN about a year ago. The thread is at [0], and the quote from the submitted article was:
“Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.”
This helped motivate a personal decision to leave a job where initiative and extra effort wasn’t noticed or rewarded (despite planning to stay a while due to inertia), and only seek work where I’m empowered to do the best work I can. I plan to avoid mistaking my identity for my job position at a company, but I would like to similarly aspire to be a professional who cares about doing good work for the user (versus just clocking in).
On top of that, the vesting schedule sucks (5/15/40/40%) and the RSU value is overstated: it assumes growth in the stock (no other FAANG does this). Yes I know there's a sign on bonus. No I don't care.
So in such an environment, what would motivate someone that would get paid 20% less to ostensibly get a day off when you still need to be compared to your colleagues who are working the extra day? It seems like setting people up for failure and paying them less for the "privilege".
But why? The sign on bonus makes it almost 40%/40%/40%/40%.
It's funny how Netflix is given credit for their all cash offers and yet Amazon is dinged for giving the best of both worlds. They give huge signing bonuses which are tacked on to your paycheck for the first 2 years, which is cash money you can use however you want. After that, either the stock increased in value a sufficient amount and you are even more happy, or you move on to other opportunities that pay better. The up front cash mitigates the short term risk, and the long term back weighted grants give you the potential upside if it does pop.
That said, assuming the stock will increase 15% every year is certainly non-standard from a comp perspective, and Google and Facebook blow Amazon out of the water with their stacking refreshers and generous equity awards for high performance.
I don't know who does this. I don't. Personally I'd need an all-cash offer to be at least 30% higher than cash + equity. YMMV.
> yet Amazon is dinged for giving the best of both worlds.
Amazon is dinged, at least by me, by having significantly worse benefits including:
1. As noted the 5/15/40/40% vesting schedule. If nothing else, this creates a perverse incentive by the company to fire you before your 3rd year vest;
2. You have to vest your 401k match. Depending on what point in the year you join this will take 2-3 years (it's based on hours). Many in tech don't know what vesting 401k means. It means if you've failed to vest your 401k and you leave or get fired, they take it back;
3. Amazon's 401k match is 50%, which is pretty normal, but only up to 4% of your income, compared to Facebook (7%), Microsoft (6%) and Google (no cap);
4. Implied 15% growth in RSU valuation in offers;
5. From what I understand it, no annual refresh grants.
So what this means is that if you compare a Google offer to an Amazon offer, you'd probably have to discount the Amazon offer by a third.
All of that is actually fine but what really turns me off is the workplace toxicity, implied or actual stack ranking, firing quotas and the perverse incentives that creates (eg hiring ballast employees).
That said, in the nominally-40hr roles you won't get paid less, so YMMV on what's better
I had a different reply lined up, then I read the comment again and did a doubletake
Heck, in many companies I've been in, I've even been made to feel inferior/lazy for not working a bunch of (obviously free) overtime. And I've never even worked for a startup where there was a realistic possibility of stock-option riches, where I can understand why some would be willing to make personal sacrifices for a couple years in the hopes of life changing exits.
Same with the re:invent portal —- it’s outsourced and terrible.
"Disabling cookies is not recommended for the best experience. Don't disable do not track?" CANCEL/CONTINUE
You can have the best business model and product in the world, but if you abuse your employees, they will leave (or unionize) and it will all come tumbling down.
It seems to be a productivity tools team, so probably no sev 1 or sev 2 pages, and possibly no pages at all.
And most Amazon managers (like at most companies) will give you time off to compensate for after hours incidents.
FAANG companies represent 0.00000001% of all employers in tech. if you chase pay, expect to deal with cultural challanges that come with elites. If you chase work life balance, taking a paycut and moving to a company that will give your time back and reduce anxiety can work. In the long run, as you show value to that company u will likely start to get the benifits that come with tenure - even more freedom, responsibility, money, and ability to shape your work arrangement.
>As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams and be the key technical advocate with partner teams. You will work with senior leaders across Amazon, finding solutions to multi-dimensional problems and driving a consistent tooling experience across the different parts of the Amazon.com product portfolio.
and the requirement is just 2 years of experience! May be it is just a team which can get away with anything - like either a pet project of a high VP or/and just a project pretty irrelevant to anything serious, ie. it doesn't look to me like a typical AMZN dev sweatshop.
I mean one of these leadership principles is 'Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer', but at the same time they have attrition targets, that means there must be some zeroth law at amazon, that mandates some sort of catch... (a nagging suspicion is that all FAANGs are like that, maybe they drive themselves to be ruthless, in order to stay ahead of the pack)
references to attrition targets at amazon:
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
i think most of the answers here have some bad faith interpretation of the listing. i disagree. there's been small scale research about shorter work weeks not impacting productivity. there's a good chance that research is bs. they probably want to run an experiment in-house using their own dev productivity metrics.
I'll take 'problems no one else wants to go near' for $500
I have a bunch of friends that either work on dev tools, or used to. Relative to the rest of AMZN, thats the team you want to be for work-life balance and promotions :)
In the EU it's pretty clear the hours a full-time job takes so this - even in a US context - doesn't mean much without the specific detail.
I think the job title should just be SDE; work times and other logistics can easily be clarified in the job description or during a phone screen.
I also don't share the notion that "cutting edge innovation" is a type of work which would require more hours per week. Quite the opposite, actually.
Can't resist puns related to marketing "reduced hours" even for those who've done serious time. /s