Hacker News Reader

Comment by shostack | Hacker News Reader

If you're looking for a serious answer, not everyone has the extreme privilege of being as in demand and finding another job quickly, particularly in this economy. People may also have financial situations where they need to hold on to whatever hope they can of a job because it is less scary than taking the money and then taking the leap.

I generally agree a company who has pipped you is effectively saying they want you gone outside of rare companies and circumstances. But don't presume that everyone's circumstances are your own.

View on HN

I worked as an average CRUD developer in Atlanta and first landed at AWS (ProServe) at 46 years old. I never did a coding interview in my entire life and didn’t do one for that job. That was my first job at any company of note.

I had only opened the AWS console two years prior.

When you get a PIP at Amazon you might as well give up. Would you rather give up $40K+ or $20k 6 weeks later or $7K when your appeal fails. I was making less than the average software developer at Amazon 5 years out of school or one working for any major tech company. Why weren’t they saving money? I knew what Amazon was about why didn’t they?

How did you get in without a coding interview? How long was your tenure there, and why were you paid so little compared to new grads? I have a lot of questions sorry.

The position wasn’t a “software development” position. It was for someone who specialized in “application modernization” which means a combination of cloud architecture, enterprise development and building enterprise apps using AWS services and someone with customer facing experience who could lead implementations.

My specialty is I don’t have a specialty. I can talk to and work with developers and teach them just as easily as I can work with the database folks, operations, etc

They assume you can program at the simple level required by enterprise apps. The questions they have are have you demonstrated being able to do at scale and know how to think on a systems level - security, availability, disaster recover, throughput, etc. I had to walk through my previous system design work.

They also want to know whether you can navigate the complexities of large organizations and you should be just as comfortable talking to CxOs or “the business” as developers.

My interview was all behavioral.

I didn’t say I was paid little compared to new grads. I said new grads five years out of school, I was a mid level consultant. Which was fair. I had only opened the AWS console two years prior and the startups and small IT companies I had been an architect with before had about the overall revenue of one “work stream” in a large enterprise implementation.

I was still making 10% less than an equivalent SDE. I was also working remotely.

Now, after leaving, I’m doing what would be considered L6 level work at my current job (without the L6 level compensation).

There is also a clear road for me to get back to Amazon level pay either at my current company, by changing jobs or if I really wanted to deal with the hassle, going out on my own.

Because ProServe is its own job family that has a very different technical bar (and pay band) compared to the software development engineer job family.

What year did you leave? Was it when tech companies were hiring as many employees as possible, or after the industry-wide layoffs that that hundreds of thousands of tech workers unemployed and fighting for scarce jobs? Were you in the country on a work visa tied to your employer, or were you a U.S. citizen? I agree with your overall sentiment but some people will be in different circumstances.

It was two months ago. The tech industry definitely was not hiring like crazy. But I started laying the ground work for leaving Amazon the day I got hired. It was AWS ProServe - the consulting division.

Companies are always hiring. They were hiring in 2000 (I looked for a job then. But I accepted a counter offer). It was hiring in 2008. I found a job in two months and it was hiring two months ago.

Focus on creating an “unfair advantage”.

1. I got on to a high profile open source project and stayed on it until it became a more official “AWS Solution”. In still high on the list of contributors for both code and the documentation. This actually led directly to my current job. The company I was hired for uses the solution.

2. I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts. I had an open source portfolio that I could say was being used by real customers. I’ve used two of those projects at my current job (legally - MIT licensed by AWS)

I still have one of the two only public solutions to automate deploying one complicated AWS service. I volunteered to design the solution for the service team when they had the APIs it for it in beta and I worked with the guy that created Terraform support for it.

3. I responded to every recruiter over the last three years and kept in touch with former managers and coworkers. This led to an offer of a full time job that I didn’t accept and a side contract I did accept.

4. I constantly kept my resume up to date and I used the leveling guidelines to word it. I also have a career document.

5. I used the extra money I was making to pay off debt, save and “decontent” my life so if necessary, I could go back to enterprise CRUD compensation without having to hold out for BigTech level compensation. I actually turned down a chance at a job that would have paid more than I was making. I didn’t want the stress.

A former coworker is a director of a well known (non tech) company and he was willing to create a position for me overseeing the entire AWS architecture and their transition effort. I really didn’t need to stress.

I’m building out a much smaller “center of excellence” now and it’s rough enough.

6. I kept my LLC active all three years just in case I needed it to ramp up a solo consulting business. I used it for the side contract I mentioned that I started the day I was left (in addition to the full time job I got two weeks later)

> I found out the process to open source my own work and get it published to the AWS Samples GitHub repo. I went through the open source process for every piece of code I wrote after removing the proprietary customer specific parts.

I'm not a lawyer, so I'm under the belief that in general this is quite difficult. Once you're paid to create project X, it's ethically or legally difficult to simplify it into an X' for another purpose. It will depend on the company and the contracts you signed, right?

Yes, all AWS contracts in ProServe had a clause that any IP that the ProServe team created belong to both the company and AWS.

Of course we had to strip out any proprietary information and then put it through the approval process to get it open sourced.

It’s the same at my current company. Anything we create that doesn’t divulge proprietary company information belongs to us and the customer.

If you come to AWS’s own Professional Services division , what are you going to do? Say you’re going to another consulting division that’s better?

I worked on mostly frameworks around AWS that are reusable across implementations and then put any custom business logic as a layer on top of it.

Even if you're not in demand, taking a guaranteed higher payout vs risking losing money and time to gamble on a process that is not designed for you to succeed.

If you really want to drag privilege into this, if anything it speaks to your own to think that people in tough circumstances have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.

As a 49 year old Black guy who graduated from an unknown state school in the mid 90s, I can’t recall the term “privilege” ever being applied to me…

As a 29 year old Black guy who was born in a 3rd world country, I think people underestimate what counts as a privilege.

When you get stopped by the police going home to your own neighborhood in a city where only 4% of the people look like you, it doesn’t matter where you are from…

The world is vast: some people don't have the privilege of their next meal, a roof over their heads, their home even existing tomorrow. Getting stopped by cops in one of the many places where we're a minority doesn't really stack that high up on the scale of it all.

The reality is you probably are privileged, and so am I compared to my parents who grew up on mud floors and lost siblings to easily preventable conditions, and that's why it's pointless to go around Hacker News of all places and throw around the "you're privileged card"... like 99.9% of the people here aren't also just for having the time to be here.

Why are you trying to downplay his experience and tell him stupid platitudes that he already knows? Do you really think he doesn't know that someone somewhere has it worse than he does?

If you jump to "privilege" for someone saying "take the money instead of hoping to ride out a PIP at Amazon", you have in fact forgotten that people have it worse than you.

There's a difference between knowing something and remembering it.

When you get booted out of the country if you lose your job, it really doesn’t matter what neighborhood you lived in.

If you're reading this you're better off than half the world. If you're reading english on a computer and have food in your fridge, you're doing well.

> If you're reading this you're better off than half the world.

And you call that "privilege"?

Sadly, most people using "privilege" word see "being better than half of the world" as privilege, thus devaluing the word to almost nothing.

> to think that people ... have the luxury of turning down money now for vague promises of a possibly better payout later.

Just to point out, it seems to be fairly common for people in some South East Asian cultures to value job stability over pretty much everything else.

"It's your job as the breadwinner to provide stability for our family" type of thing.

For many of them, there is no way the wife would allow (!) their husband to quit their job when there is any other option on the table.

It’s my job to have a job not that job. My “stability” comes from always preparing for my job to be snatched from under me.

By preparation I mean always be networking, keep my reputation spotless, keep my resume updated, keep my skills current with the market and keep my “career document” updated.

My wife has seen how efficient I am with getting a job six times over the 12 years we have been married.

We were both laid off from the job we worked at when the company folded when we were still dating. I had a contract lined up the following Monday. When that contract was unexpectedly terminated, I had an offer four days later.

This time I had a contract lined up a week before my last day and a full time job three weeks later. The only thing special about me is my network

Sure. I'm just pointing out that different cultures have very different expectations / priorities. :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com