201–210 of 281 posts
on-call is standard industry practice, there's nothing especially egregious about this. the difference is that some places like google pay extra for it.
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The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after 10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page happens during the 45 minutes where you…
Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents. This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare, but has happened), etc. I’ve found that just having someone else to commiserate with at midnight, if needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.
Based on my experience with the various AWS SDK libraries, I don't think Amazon has very good developers, or perhaps they have good developers but a poor development culture. The architecture is convoluted, heavily OOP and just generally reminds me of Java in the early 2000s.
Dude, have you fucking seen the Android libraries? They're awful! At least the AWS SDK libraries are like that because they're all autogenerated from a spec.
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> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…
Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "…
If the company thinks its applications are important enough that it needs people around 24/7 to work on them then the company should hire enough people to have 3 shifts a day.
> 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…
There are two big issues with a lot of employees at AWS, not knowing their worth and not having backbone.
It is not a privilege to work for Amazon. It is a privilege for Amazon that you work for them. In this particular case, this person says that he was an SDE II. That's great. You should be able to pretty easily go get a job at any of the other large tech companies. You're not locked into Amazon. You likely have a CS degree. You've got a couple years of industry experience in a field where most companies can't hire fast enough.
That said, don't leave Amazon. Leave your team. Internal transfers are easy and no longer gated on you being on a team for a certain amount of time. Start talking to other people from other teams and find a good fit. Most internal transfers are about culture fit and you likely won't be asked any coding questions.
You are not obligated by anything to stay on your team. End of. Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world. Don't feel some sort of personal responsibility to stay on one team. That's just not reasonable. They'll find a way to make do without you and if they can't why do you really care? At some local mom and pop shop, sure you may not want to leaving the owner hanging but Amazon ain't that.
Yes, there are rare occurrences where an org may try to block you from leaving. In which case, again, you are a tech employee of Amazon. You should be able to transfer to another large tech company.
As far as the loaner situation goes, have backbone. I've been asked to help out another team before. I did some research and decided I didn't want to. I told my manager and that was that. If he really pressed, again, see the prior options.
Don't be afraid to escalate. Don't care about politics. Your manager may hate you for trying to escalate on them but what the effect of that in the long run? You only get a 1% pay increase on your 150K annual salary instead of a 5%? You have to go work for Microsoft for 150K instead of Amazon?
Rough oncall? Change teams.
Oncall but want to go places? Do it anyways. All teams should offer a hot spot. Yes, this probably means you can't go hiking but it doesn't mean you can't go other places. Being oncall doesn't really ever change my habits other than having to bring my laptop with me. Sure, if you're on a team getting paged regularly, that won't work but I'm not sure why you want to be on a team that gets paged regularly after hours.
Come on people. If you work for a FAANG company, you are a very highly paid employee in one of, if not the, hottest career field in the world. You are very likely in the top 10% of world wide salaries. (118K+ year according to numbers from US Social Security Admin)
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Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "…
"Pager duty" is an abusive practice anyway. If the company thinks its applications are important enough that it needs people around 24/7 to work on them then the company should hire enough people to have 3 shifts a day.
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Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "…
> never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5. Yes, these expectations should be made clear from the beginning. I suspect they don't as they would be even more desperate to hire.
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> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…
this is very informative. I wouldn't have believed it, without the first person perspective. Before i read this, it was simply unbelievable to me that people could be that bored without any life outside work. Speaking as someone who really values free time and has tons of hobbies and things to do outside of work, it's just unbelievable.
My friends and I spent most of our lives since grade 9 doing school stuff or stuff to get into school stuff. In my case, couple that with introversion and an aversion to most normal activities and the easiest thing to do is be good at the get into school stuff.
In university, most of my social activities revolved around the startup world, hackathons, or other competition-oriented activities as that is what I was good at. I went to one hackathon a weekend in my final academic year.
So I became good at a lot of these types of things which all revolved around the academic world.
I am not in university anymore, but I can still fill my time with the kinds of competitions and challenges in that world. If I couldn't, I doubt that I would know how to use my time. Even with those, I spend a ton of time commenting online.
Most of the people I know are in the same kind of boat. They were good at one or two things (might be science fair, research, conference organizing, etc) back in university which consumed their time. Then they left and are now left wondering, "now what?"
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In this context, we are talking about the Seattle Head tax, which is NOT applied equally. In the larger discussion of payroll taxes, to disprove that workers bear the entire burden of payroll taxes, just go through the thought experiment where we eliminate the employer side of the SS tax and whether wages would rise 6.2%. They wouldn't. Workers were willing to work for $N previously, there is no reason that they woul…
Of course salaries wouldn't go up. Because you removed the cost from the equation. But now do the thought experiment where the employee must explicitly pay the extra 6.2%. Now of course you have to give them a 6.2% raise, because they would demand it to cover their increased costs.