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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

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Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#221

Post by aaomidi »

starpilot wrote: post #213
aaomidi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does your uncle live? Does he have to pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom rent?

Seriously, my dad made $150k as a physician... in suburban, central Virginia (not NoVA). This would be what, $400k in the Bay Area? We lived on 6 acres with a barn in a 3 story house with a pool, surrounded by forest.

Yep, it's crazy when doctors like this look at tech and they even complain that we're overpaid.

You can make a ton of money as a doctor nearly anywhere in the United States. Software engineers don't get that freedom. Maybe now with more WFH being common place.

However, now to get to the point of being a physical you need to go under a ton of debt. That wasn't the case for our parents and grandparents.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#222

Post by devdas »

Barrin92 wrote: post #98
filoleg wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? If a big selling point of your system is the ability to be on 24/7, on-call is inevitable. But it definitely can be way less gruesome than it currently is at Amazon for a lot of teams right now. For example, my on-call schedule is extremely relaxed and low-stress, it is…

>How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? hire more people?

On-call will still rotate amongst the developers. They wrote the system, they know how it breaks and can fix it.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#223

Post by hckr_news »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #65

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.

I will add to that, I have a friend at Amazon. I visited him in Seattle this previous winter and he had to work on Christmas Eve while most other top companies do Two-day holidays over Christmas.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#224

Post by jedberg »

dlp211 wrote: post #210
jedberg wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

In your thought experiment the cost isn't being borne by the worker, it's being borne by the business.

No it isn't.

Numbers: I pay the worker $10000 a month. Let's say my tax cost is $500 a month, and their tax cost is $500/mo. So they get a check for $9500, they see a $500 tax deduction, and they net $9000.

My all in cost is $10000.

Now the city says "you don't have to pay your part of the tax anymore, the worker does!"

So now I pay them $10000, they see a deduction of $1000 on their paycheck, and net $9000. My all in cost is still $10000, their net is still $9000. Nothing has changed.

I'm still paying $10000 to have that worker. And if my budget is 100000, I can still only afford 10 workers.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#225

Post by devdas »

jobhunt94110 wrote: post #174
dudul wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make sense financially. You're gonna triple the size of your team, just to make sure that this one time of the week someone will restart the DB? I would much rather bite the bullet, be on call a week a month or so and use the budget for something else.

You don't need to keep the primary development team as primary oncall 24/7. "Hire people to keep an eye on things off-hours, follow playbooks when necessary, and escalate to the right people if they can't resolve" is a reasonable pattern that folks have done for decades the world over. You get less incentive alignment perhaps, but it really isn't hard to come up with ways to make creating work for another team unappe…

That is an anti-pattern and leads to burnout for ops teams.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#226

Post by ikRwS3Nb6Y »

supersimp wrote: post #176
sikim wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be helpful to you http://perks.guide/

Is this accurate? I definitely do a mega backdoor roth and I'm at Amazon.

It was accurate until this year - Amazon switched 401k providers from Vanguard to Fidelity. I don't remember all the details but after tax contributions (which are required for doing a mega backdoor) are possible now, but weren't before.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#227

Post by myalphabet »

o10449366 wrote: post #87
myalphabet wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

I'm surprised at how many people in this thread are misunderstanding this. Every tech company I've seen has had a stipulation saying you have to pay back signing bonus or relocation if you leave within 1 year.

Yea, that's something else I forgot to mention. I chalk it up to OP possibly being inexperienced/naive (I think this was his first job out of college), but I have worked with a lot of companies and all of them require you to pay back at least part of your signing bonus if you quit within a year.

When I graduated college, all of my friend group discussed it and we all took out a small chunk of the bonus to go on a small group vacation, but the rest of the bonus got put into an investment account and not touched for at least a year. That way if we did decide to leave, the money was easily accessible to be paid back. I know not everyone has that flexibility, but it's probably the best way to approach signing bonuses if you're not 100% sure you will be at the company long term.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#228

Post by dlp211 »

fourmyle wrote: post #218
dlp211 wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment has nothing to do with spending. So what makes the Seattle budget out of control? That was the original assertion that I took issue with.

The rate of budget increase increased dramatically without an increase in revenue.

They increased about .5% inflation adjust per year from 2010-2020. That again does not mean that spending is out of control especially when you consider that 2010 was still in the depths of the great recession.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#229

Post by ikRwS3Nb6Y »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #65

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.

Fellow happy Amazon SDE - hopefully you're not being literal saying you have depression from HN type crowds displaying their typical amount of empathy. just in case you are, take this as a friendly reminder that you're not the only person with that experience and it's easy to just stop reading the nonsense

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#230

Post by jedberg »

dlp211 wrote: post #191
sokoloff wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Higher cost than what ? By the same argument, customers are paying the costs for Best Buy's internal logistics and retail floor operations to enable “free browse and instant pickup”. If those costs are higher than Amazon/NewEgg's costs for "free shipping", I'd expect to see exactly the relative prices that you're seeing.

I'm sorry, but I can't track the point you are trying to make. I'll reiterate my point that shipping is a cost that has to be paid, but who bears that cost is not necessarily the customer. If it was the case that the customer was the one bearing that cost, there would be a difference in the price you pay for goods at a physical store vs. goods shipped to your home, implicitly or explicitly. There is generally no diff…

I think you're confusing who writes the check vs who bears the cost. The person writing the check isn't always the one bearing the cost.
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