Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scarface_74 | Hacker News Reader

My perspective:

I was your everyday ordinary CRUD developer in 2020 with leading a few projects under my belt at mostly unknown companies who had two years of AWS experience and was 46 years old.

A recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me on LinkedIn about interviewing for a software engineering position.

At 46 years old there were a number of problems I saw with that “opportunity”:

- I hadn’t done a real coding interview ever and had no desire to spend a few months “grinding leetcode”

- I had no desire to have the thought of moving from my nice big house in the burbs of Atlanta that I just had built in 2016 to move to Seattle “after Covid lifted”

- I had no desire to uproot my life to work at Amazon knowing their reputation both from reading online and seeing what one of my best friends went through working in the finance department.

But we kept talking and she suggested I apply for a role at AWS Professional Services it would be fully remote and more inline with my experience.

I said sure why not? I got the job knowing from day one it wasn’t going to be a long term thing.

Long story short, I went in with a plan. It was my 8th job out of college and my sixth since 2008.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37969302

I made my money, got PIPed 3 years later, got a nice severance package and had a job in 3 weeks. Yes it pays about 20% less in total comp. But the lack of stress is well worth it.

If I had known things were going to turn out like they did:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963988

I still would have worked for Amazon. It was just my 8th job out of nine and another method to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter. Nothing more nothing less.

Yep, Assuming you will be fired eventually and will have to fall back to a normal CRUD job is the right play when taking these high pressure, high salary roles. Any idea why you were PIPed after 3 years?

I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better.

On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37963737

Honestly, I didn’t look at the reasons why I was put on PIP on the remedies to stay until after I had another job. I didn’t even realize it was part of the paperwork.

As soon as my manager starting discussing them, I interrupted them and asked how much was my severance. After they told me 40K+ and paid out vacation, I asked where do I sign?

I knew someone would hire me. By the time the conversation came up, I already had a side contract with a former manager/CTO waiting in the wings for $135/hour. I also knew the director of a major non tech company who was willing to create a position paying more in cash than I was making in all at Amazon to lead the cloud transition and architecture.

We had worked together at AWS and he was the one that suggested I wait for the PIP. I ended up not taking his offer because I didn’t want the stress of the job even though I would have loved working with him again.

My compensation now is somewhere on the high side between CRUD developer and BigTech software dev. I can easily go up after a couple of years if I care too.

I’m working full time at a consulting company because I really don’t want the hassle of going independent.

Were you close to vest your stock options?

My next vest would have been this month. My severance amount was more than my 6 month 20% vest.

I was still on my initial 5/15/40/40 initial offer.

For people who don’t know, Amazon’s offers are based on total compensation target with a schedule of:

- year 1 - base + large prorated signing bonus + 5% vest

- year 2 - base + smaller signing bonus + 15% base

- year 3 and 4 - 20% vest every six months + base.

I had two vesting periods left.

> I was peripherally involved in a project that was going sideways and I was an easy target. In hindsight, while the reason for me to put “on focus”, I honestly admit was maybe 70% my fault. I could have handled a horrible customer better.

Quite similar for me at Red Hat, as a Product Manager in what the company loves to tout as being an Engineering-led company.

Engineering had an idea for a smaller product that would be a part of our platform. They created some requirements docs, did a little planning and got approval from Engineering leadership to allocate some resources for a 3 month development of a prototype/POC. At this point, PM did not even know of the existence of this project.

At the end of the three months, it was decided to continue exploring it for another three months. That was when PM was introduced. I was told to do all the research and prep work, product/market fit, customers, even identify potential stakeholders the product could use (there had been none until then). I expressed concern about shoehorning things into what they'd already been building, versus actually doing objective research and planning. I was told that I needed to be a "passionate advocate" for my products.

So I went through the process as best I could, and I saw some potential for it starting to emerge. But not enough to continue beyond the six months. When that was agreed, I was then talked to about how I'd "wasted" six months of engineering resources on a product that "should never have been started". There were a lot of references to "I" over things and decisions that I'd never been a part of.

This was common at Red Hat, in my area. It even happened to me another time. During an Engineering reprioritization/resource allocation, it was decided by Engineering leadership that they had no resources to allocate to a feature a small team had previously been working on. I shopped around, tried to find a new home for it (the feature) but without success.

So I as the PM made an announcement that we were discontinuing our support of this feature. After all, an engineering product with no engineers is not a viable product. That at least got some people interested, and some fired up. "We didn't know this would be the result!" (How didn't you know? You decided to allocate zero resources to it).

And then I got told by PM leadership "You incorrectly decided to cancel this product, leading to the BU having to scramble to find resources to undo your decision."

Bet your ass PM leadership received a flurry of forwarded emails where it was made very clear that Eng had removed resources, and that that had caused the cancelation, not the other way around. And that they had not consulted Product prior to doing so. But still, these things also then lead to my PIP.

> On the other hand, the PIP itself was a setup. During the focus period, I met all of the criteria and had perfect CSAT scores on two customer projects I led (Professional Services) and the projects were both done on time, on budget and met requirements

My PIP, which was also a setup. Documented by me elsewhere here, but essentially, my manager actively lied to me and HR that he'd reviewed all my work products through the PIP process, when Maury voice GDocs access review determined that was a lie (most of them had a "Never viewed" next to his name).

I don't know if this feels like I'm diminishing your accomplishments, but it's nice to hear your advancement out of CRUD development in your 40s. I'm mid 30s now and have always struggled to get out of this web development rut and jobs that pay $100k despite having 8+ years experience (which is admittedly lackluster) and multiple senior titles.

No not insulted at all. I am very transparent about my career here and on Reddit (same username) about my career.

I’ve also talked about how I transitioned.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37446115

It was because of a manager who was “irrationally benevolent” who I’m still friends with now.

Thanks for link - it sounds like you had some good non-CRUD experience to be able to discuss that intelligently with him.

Honestly I wish I could find a place to work where I felt like I was friends with people there. I've never had a coworker that was a friend :( But I also work at pretty small companies and they've tended to not have great culture. I'd take a $100k coding job there

That startup I spoke about in the link had 60 people who officially were employed by the company.

I was the CTOs 2nd technical hire. Most of the technical work had been done by an outside firm.

I also just signed as soon as I knew what they were after. I just asked how much I was getting. No need to put yourself through this. I was a high performer and had been juggling up to 4 jobs by that time and was about to go on my first vacation after 14 months. They said "I looked a bit tired."

Obviously my vacation became an extended vacation instead.

I got a text a few months afterwards where they asked how I had made it look so easy. I'm still perplexed by the whole ordeal. But it was probably for the best anyways.

lol yeah, I'm not even willing to commute 30 mins to a local office let alone relocate. Maybe for a mid 7 figure pay day.

At this point in my life, I can honestly say there is no realistic amount of money I’m willing to give up for my lifestyle.

It’s not my dream to make a lot of money. It’s my dream to do exactly what my wife and I are doing right now:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36767599

Same. Anything over $200k really means very little to me. I'd rather live in a place I love, which fortunately is actually Seattle, haha.

Referencing the link above, I can meet all of our spending needs comfortable if we just sat at home making $140K.

We could live our current hybrid snowbirder/nomad lifestyle for $160K.

Anything over $160K goes straight to “increasing net worth goals”

So no leetcode if you join AWS Professional Services?

ProServe has different specialities - security, DevOps, mainframe migration, call centers (AWS Connect), ops, migrations etc.

Not all of the specialties require coding. Mine happens to be “application modernization”. Which really means that I had no specialty and that I could meld application development/architecture with cloud technology and jump into anything if needed on a high level and bring in specialists when needed.

There are some areas of AWS where I was really good and one specific niche where I’m objectively the best in the industry when it comes to automating a very complicated service - I worked with the service team to beta test the APIs and I did and open sourced the reference implementation around it.

My interview process was all behavioral. The “system design” portion was my walking through real world implementations I did and explaining choices and tradeoffs. Heck one of the interviews I spent the entire time discussing an earlier Hashicorp Nomad/Consul and Mongo based Master Data Model project that had nothing to do with AWS.

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