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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

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Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#61

Post by bambataa »

teej wrote: post #53
bambataa wrote: post #41

Anyone working over their contracted hours needs to realise they're being exploited by their employer. Sometimes this is justified: we pay more than the going rate because we expect you to step up occasionally. Maybe it's kind of expected with Amazon in particular. But when it descends into perma death march and your manager flings you "a few" days holiday in recompense... does that make up for it? If it doesn't, to…

These employees do not have employment contracts and do not have hours that are set by a contract.

Wait, you're saying Amazon SDEs don't have a contract?

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#62

Post by qeternity »

> I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors

Uh, not even close. I used to get up at 4am EST to trade European markets for a hedge fund. I was on call 24/7/365. I had my laptop and Bloomberg fingerprint scanner with me on any trip I took.

And this is just my experience. I have had many friends in engineering, management consulting, fin tech, etc who have similar demands made of them.

I’m not saying it’s right, but it is part of the rules of the game that we all sign up to. There’s a reason all of the aforementioned jobs pay so well.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#63

Post by DethNinja »

Kinda unrelated to topic at hand but I always wanted to ask this to other programmers:

Author mentions that he traded sleep for code, and I hear this from so many people but I really cannot understand how well they manage to pull this off. I simply cannot code productively if I get less than 7 hours of sleep or code for more than 8 hours straight, and caffeine doesn’t help me. So how do you people manage to pull this off? I’m really envious that people can code all day long but does it really provide good code? Doesn’t that increase the bug count of the code?

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#64

Post by myalphabet »

majormajor wrote: post #28

> Remember when I mentioned Amazon's moving and signing bonus? Little caveat on that, if you leave or are fired within 2 years, you have to pay it back. Paying back a signing bonus if they fire you seems super rough. Is this common elsewhere? 2 years also seems high - the time I got a signing bonus, it was "pay back if you leave voluntarily in 1 year" which was much nicer than the described. Unfortunately, much of th…

I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to have caused him undue stress.

I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation. I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you get to keep the other $10k.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#65

Post by lowiqengineer »

A 5 year old gist from 1 employee (out of the current ~70k SWE's employed at the company + all that have come and gone in the last 5 years) just to shit on the quality of Amazon engineering? And folks wonder why I have depression -it's not because i'm burnt out, it's because the HN crowd thinks I'm some sort of cognitive defective for working at Amazon.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#66

Post by kmonsen »

hooloovoo_zoo wrote: post #29
redredrobot wrote: post #15

I appreciate this being shared, but I have some qualms. I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto' is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other companies I've seen. They don't include things they don't actually care about, like most corporate mottos do (you'll notice the lack of 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs). At least in my experi…

I think it depends on the size of the signing bonus. Smaller ones are paid upfront as a lump sum, larger ones are paid out over time. The latter of course is just an abuse of language by Amazon to disguise the fact that they're cutting your salary in year 3/4 in exchange for stock.

I don't think that is a fair way up putting it when they are very upfront about it and don't call it salary.

On the other hand at the end of year 2 when you have gotten used to the monthly payments I guess the we told you so is it bit harder to agree with.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#67

Post by fourmyle »

dlp211 wrote: post #25
AnHonestComment wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy. This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable. “Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seatt…

> to keep people from noticing how damaging their out of control spending is. That's a bold assertion without any citation.

The numbers were listed in the next sentence.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#68

Post by whoisjuan »

kick wrote: post #10
samirillian wrote: post #4

This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they w…

This guy didn't work in/for/on AWS: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/4eu909/i... The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read. This was also four years ago; the gist is a copy of a post from 2015, by the above reddit poster.

> The divide between AWS employees and everyone else employed at Amazon seems to be "2007 Google employee" against "sweatshop"; they're run mostly-separately, from what I've read.

This is not true. Amazon and AWS are exactly the same organizationally speaking. You could hardly tell who works in an Amazon team and who works in an AWS team. Maybe if they tell you their building.

The cultural drift happens in the teams and orgs, not the parent "company". Everyone at Amazon knows this and that’s why many people know changing teams is a gamble and prefer staying at the same team doing the same menial tasks, than venturing into finding another team.

Amazon and AWS have both great teams and shitty teams. There’s just not an easy way to tell, except for one internal tool that allows you to see how people are rating their managers but this is all bs because some teams don’t have enough data or any data at all. Also the data itself is probably skewed, since people are afraid of giving poor rates to their managers (this is a general problem in the modern workplace dynamics, not at an Amazon problem)

The other way is asking a friend but I don’t know how people do that since I only knew people from my team and teams that sat nearby. Maybe I’m too socially incompetent.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#69

Post by jakebellacera »

Barrin92 wrote: post #18

The on call stuff sounds outright dystopian to me, it's not even legal in my country. More places should think about adopting something akin to France's El Khomri law's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect ) and ensure that every citizen has enough time to recuperate from work and isn't pestered by their employer 24/7.

What was stated seems pretty typical on small teams who manage critical systems. How are critical systems managed otherwise without having to 3x your team (assuming you want 24hr coverage with a 8hr workday)?

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#70

Post by grecy »

throwaway24857 wrote: post #30

> After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call rotation I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call can be brutal, even if there are no incidents during your week (which is rare.) Just the fact that you have to be 24/7 _ready_ during a whole week sucks, especially when you have a family. During my on-call week, I can't go get groceries, I can't take my kid t…

At my last position they tried to offer me a "promotion". More responsibility, more accountability, mentoring juniors AND on call, all for the grand pay raise of $0.

"on call" was super, super vague and I pushed back hard on it. If they require me to work outside something reasonable like 6am-6pm, they will pay me at least double for it. No exceptions.

I wish everyone would push back that hard, and that on-call was an official opt-in "extra pay" scenario.

Needless to say I turned down their "promotion" even after months of them trying to make me take it.

Note: I am NOT saying I'll work 12 hour days. I'm just saying if I have to come in early for a meeting for 6am, or stay until 6pm sometimes, that's fine. If I'm expected to come in or be on call at 2am, that's a different story.

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