20% coding is very sad. I hate to think how many great minds are being wasted this way. After starting work at a startup, I feel more fulfilled in my daily life. I can easily say I spend around 80-90% of my time coding and feel I contribute much more than I ever did at any of these jobs.
Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
31–40 of 149 posts
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#32The author sounds super naive. I'm not sure what exactly he was expecting, I believe this is how life is at all these big companies. Any of the FANGs will have the same level of bureaucracy. If you want a different lifestyle, you can join a startup or a smaller company, but this has been the way it has always been. Amazon is one of the largest tech companies in the world, I'm not sure why he would think it's somehow…
Agree - I was very naive. I worked for Intel for 6 years, but hoped that one of FANGs is different. Seems like no :)
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#33 My manager told me it is trust that I yet to earn — people don’t trust my judgement and I need to build good relationships
with decision makers. I agreed. But that what is called “politics”.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most of your points are good but SDE1 may be all the sycophant recruiters would let him in the door at for a variety of reasons that are a dystopian caricature of "values" and misaligned incentives. If his intentions were to quickly try his luck at a tech giant like Amazon, he probably did so the only way possible.
Not sure what you mean by "sycophant recruiters". Most recruiters I've worked with were strongly motivated to bring good people on board at their company. If you are an attractive candidate but you let them know you're only interested in pursuing roles at a certain (non-entry) level, they'll either make adjustments to slot you into interviews for that other higher role or the process doesn't move forward and everyone…
There are good recruiters, who do tend to act this way.
But then there are also bad recruiters, who seem to think that blindly generating as many candidates as possible and throwing against the wall as many resumes as possible, is a good way to do business.
I’ve learned enough in this business that I have been able to avoid bad recruiters for a long time, but not everyone has that kind of luxury — or luck.
Of course, even if you do get a good recruiter who has contacted you about a position, it’s entirely possible that it might be for a shitty company, or maybe just not a company or position you are well suited to.
There’s lots of things that can go wrong in this process.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#35I think this is getting upvoted because everybody likes to dogpile on Amazon. But nothing this guy says seems to reflect especially poorly on Amazon. If the author is going through another job search now I might recommend taking the piece down; it's not doing you a ton of favors. The summary: guy interviews and accepts an SDE1 role at Amazon, guy resists building alliances with those holding power in the org, guy is…
In my organization we often have newbies come in and want to re-architect the system from the ground up, then get angry when the leads don't agree.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#36This was the least convincing blog post on this sort of topic that I've read. I didn't see anything that actually painted Amazon in a very bad light. I think anyone should expect bureaucracy to be a major problem at a large company. Complaining about promotions seems a bit unfair since he was only there for 5 months. Moreover, I saw quite a few senior engineers and discovered that I do not want to be alike… This is o…
Agreed. This reads like a fish out of water experience for someone expecting a company with hundreds of thousands of employees to act not like any other huge corporation. Of course there’s going to be politics, culture as religion, infighting, boredom etc.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#37To be truthful, it aint a fair world out there, everything tends to deviate to playing some sort of game. Seems like OP just didn't want to play that game.
Although I do feel this is a norm in all big modern companies not just tech. Realistically there isn't a big life goal or changing-the-world impact for any one employee inside the company. I would say once you enter the company, just get used to playing the game and keep advancing, its easier that way.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#38One thing that I would keep in mind when evaluating the post is how Amazon is organized. I've been with AWS for about 1.5 years and I've found that experiences are different from team to team. There are even larger differences between internal orgs. I would describe Amazon internally as a collection of startups. Each one is run a bit differently than the others.
For me, one of the teams I was on was pretty awful, and the other team was great. Each team is pretty unique.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone with 10 years of experience getting offered an SDE1 role is a huge red flag for me and makes me wonder what this person's skill set actually is.
I'm willing to bet if I interviewed at Amazon (or Google/MS/FB/Uber) I would probably be put in a similar role, despite having been programming since I was 8 with 14 years of commercial experience. I never went to Uni and have no degree.
I know engineers in your situation. I've interviewed a few. It is unusual for someone with 10+ years of experience to be considered for an entry-level job, no matter what kind of education they have.
Re: Quitting Amazon 5 months after I started
#40I think this is getting upvoted because everybody likes to dogpile on Amazon. But nothing this guy says seems to reflect especially poorly on Amazon. If the author is going through another job search now I might recommend taking the piece down; it's not doing you a ton of favors. The summary: guy interviews and accepts an SDE1 role at Amazon, guy resists building alliances with those holding power in the org, guy is…
Someone with 10 years of experience getting offered an SDE1 role is a huge red flag for me and makes me wonder what this person's skill set actually is.
This seems like an exceptionally harsh thing to say, especially without knowing any of the relevant details.