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amzn_throw_away

22 karma · joined August 16, 2015

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amzn_throw_away··on Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
I can't speak to non-dev roles, but it's personally possible. As far as developer goes, it varies a lot by team I think, but overall it has been a pleasant experience for me - no one here wants me to fail, everyone around me wants me to succeed it seems like. One of the best jobs I've had, actually.
amzn_throw_away··on Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
Thanks! And sure, I appreciate other teams have different on-call situations, I had a friend in an AWS team that was decidedly more busy on weekends than I was...
amzn_throw_away··on Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
1) I do that regardless of where I work - that's part of my personality - I did that at less intense jobs - I've done that since college - my boss actually threatened to lock me out of my email if I didn't stop

2) I think 40-50 is acceptable, I would ask you to find anywhere salaried that 40 is the true upper limit - I'm telling you I can't remember a week I spent more than 50 - 40 is definitely the norm though.

3) I get paid for my time in the office, work outside of the office is highly unusual for my on-call rotation - it happens maybe once or twice a year as I noted.

Far less than ten - almost none outside business hours. Last time I was paged outside of business hours it was because someone messed up who they paged :)

amzn_throw_away··on Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace
I work for Amazon and this has not been my experience. I can't speak to what others have said, but in my org it would be extremely unusual, and considered alarming, for people to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The only times I've really worked over 40-50 hours would be while I was on-call, which occurs about once every two months for a week, and even then only during major issues (maybe once or twice a year?).

The culture, once again, at least in my org, is actually pretty chill - I had a doctor's appointment last week, I just sent an email the morning of saying "Hey everyone, I'll be in around 1:00, cya then, here's my status for standup" and it's cool. My boss actually chided me for checking my email too aggressively during my time off.

So yeah, I can't speak to everything mentioned in the article, I can only say that my experience has not matched up with this.