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Comment by foobiekr | Hacker News Reader

Every single engineer I know who went to Amazon except one lasted under 3 years and to this day, often ten+ years later, they all will mention how much they hated it.

The one exception is an engineer who stopped engineering, switched into product, and transferred to China to hit on the women there.

Some Amazon practices actually sound great to me (short documents, read before the meeting) but so many things just sound needlessly, relentlessly cheap.

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I was on one of the core AWS teams. I lasted 3 years and 1 month, to your point hah. I left about a year ago. My stress levels were through the roof during the time I was there. It truly was one of the most toxic stressful places I've ever worked, second only to Intel.

The largest contributor of stress being on-call rotations where getting paged between 12am-6am each night was basically a guarantee. God help you if it was a holiday and you got a high sev page, where the people that you really need are all out of pocket. The many many many instances of their security "regime" relentlessly paging us in the middle of the night for things like having an S3 bucket for static website assets; despite numerous exceptions given by L7+ leadership.

I disagree with the notion around "short documents", not only were they quite lengthy at times, but they actually made the process of "busywork" worse by adding more overhead to trivial matters.

Add on the layoffs and "return to office" horse-shit excuses and it's no wonder nobody wants to go back.

I know of 1 tech person at Amazon that claims to have liked it there; the husband of a co-worker (albeit 6 years ago). He was some in-house consultant type role though and few all over the world to help the internal teams straighten out whatever AWS mess they'd gotten into, so that's not quite the role that people think about when talking in a FAANG context.

I got a job at AWS/EFS from a post here on hacker news. Stayed there almost 2 years until RTO took its toll (left early 2024). If not for that, I'd still be there... and I went in with full knowledge of all the horror stories. Perhaps the EFS org was just a diamond in the rough, but it was honestly one of the best jobs I've had. Even the on call wasn't so bad, with management taking an extremely hands-on and proactive approach to reducing operational burden. Extremely high technical bar which taught me a ton about building and operating large distributed systems. I do wonder if EFS is still run so well.

I've since been at Oracle/OCI (absolute dog shit with the worst on call I've ever seen, and I've been in the military lol), and now at Microsoft/Azure, which so far seems like a decent workplace.

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