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Comment by mynameisash | Hacker News Reader

When I left Amazon (as an SWE), with about 11mo of tenure, I was apparently at about median longevity. Yes, some of it is their growth, but a significant reason is also that they churn through people unnecessary. It's ridiculous to me that a big tech company treats people so terribly and continues to get away with it.

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I endured 13 months. In my mind, very little skill development happened during those 13 months. But here I am, years later, and that line item in my history still carries some sense of market validation - that, because I successfully navigated the recruitment funnel and was at one time an Amazonian, that I must have useful skills.

This was also my experience at one of the “prestigious” consulting firms I endured working at for a year. It took me three months just to proceed and navigate through all of their ridiculous hurdles during recruitment.

Out of all of the positions/firms on my CV, that one seems to carry the most weight to recruiters and other companies, despite it being the time where I did the least productive work in my life (So much so that when I was asked why I was leaving during my exit interview I straight up said “I’ve gotten dumber since working here.”)

Most of Amazon's employee base are in the warehouses, and there's a significant amount of churn there, especially seasonal. Being median at 11 months is really not that weird considering the sheer nature of warehouse employment there, and considering it's highly likely you were there through at least one Q4.

He mentioned he was a SWE though.

The tool in Amazon that shows how your tenure ranks is measured against _all_ Amazon employees. Warehouse, delivery, etc.

I was well past the 60% mark by the time I got through my first Q4 working for Amazon as an SE, and in to something like 90% by the time I got through my second. The figures the L7 engineers were bouncing around at that time were that developers averaged around 2 years.

Curious: Where do you feel the SWE people they churn through generally end up?

I'm a bit concerned about this one guy on one of my previous teams who moved from Europe to US to work on AWS. I don't think he was aware of the company culture.

they end up at other companies of similar size, its part of the circuit, colloquially called FAANGs.

a lot of them head to startups or smaller companies.

If one starts in Seattle, I'd expect them to end up at Microsoft, Expedia, other FANGs maybe, among other co's. Assuming they're not burned out.

Burned out at amazon is on point elsewhere.

The CEO of Cloudflare has said that he enjoys taking burned out SDEs from Amazon and giving them a happy life at his company. It's how, in his words, Cloudflare can compete at an engineering level with AWS.

Isn't that because 11 months of tenure prevents any RSUs from vesting and so they want you out then if they are going to want you out soon?

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