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Comment by yolovoe | Hacker News Reader

I work at AWS on EC2. It's really not bad. Very competent coworkers, technical leadership, plenty of principal engineers willing to help... Oncall's tough, and we definitely need more engineers but otherwise, you learn a lot

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Lol, ex-Amazonian here, please cut the crap. EC2 is infamous for being one of the worst orgs in all AWS. Nasty stack ranking, abusing SDEs on visas, hiring L4s to fire them later, I personally known at least 3 folks that were let go from EC2 (Vpc) and then got into Google and Apple. Give me a break, there is a reason why recruiters have a hard time filling the headcount over there. And on top of that, ton of legacy code.

EDIT: Added last sentence.

Sad to hear. I agree with legacy code, tho it's not that bad on my team.

When was this? Just to confirm, you're referring to a data plane team and not a control plane team?

Not parent but can confirm vpc dataplane team is pretty good. Wouldn't want to work on control plane stuff though.

Maybe things changed in the last 3-6 months? But from what I have gathered, from people just talking in slack channels, Blind, and friends who work there, is not good at all. People have received emails from L4s having nervous breakdowns after being bullied by managers and peers. If you want , you can search your mailbox.

Again not sure if you are talking about dataplane. I met many people there (even many new grad L4s in fact), who are very enthusiastic and passionate about what they do in that team.

I haven't seen any such email. It definitely can be a lot of work at times, esp around re:invent, and I'm sure there are those with bad experience.

I'm just saying, it's worth giving a shot. You might like it. If you don't, switch orgs/teams. You can switch just a couple months after joining if it doesn't work out for you. I switched from my last org quite quickly cause while I had good work life balance, the work was just so boring.

The thing is , if you are on a visa the "you might as well give it a chance" doesn't work, does it? Because those people are usually the ones exploited by their managers, as they have leverage over them (when you are on a visa and get laid off , you only have 60 days to find another company that is willing to sponsor your visa). You are ignoring the pressure and mental burden that L4s on visas go through with unfair pivot processes, etc. I'm glad you liked your time there, but if you dive deeper, and ask around, you will see how many of these people are having a hard time.

I also work at AWS on EC2 and agree with this assessment. Amazon is large and the culture varies across organizations. I’ve worked at multiple big tech companies and AWS EC2, while not perfect, is the best place I’ve been part of.

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