Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

pastebin.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

261–270 of 281 posts

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#261

Post by rantwasp »

abdabab wrote: post #257
rantwasp wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

yeah no. as someone who has worked at Amazon for 7 years I can tell you that it’s not true across the board and there are good “pockets” where there is respect for people’s boundaries. To add to this, in my time there I worked during the weekend 3 times (i don’t count oncall here). My work day included 8 hours at most. I would get in at around 8AM and leave at 4PM. (optimizing the commute) I started as an SDE 2 by th…

> I started as an SDE 2 by the time I left I was a Principal SDE. How many promotions was that? 4? How did you manage to do that in 7 years? That doesn’t sound easy at all.

2 promotions. SDE2 -> SDE3 -> Principal First one was in 2 years. 2nd one took 3.5 years.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#262

Post by qeternity »

sa46 wrote: post #92
qeternity wrote: post #62

> 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…

In the military, we had a 2 hour recall for a large chunk of our battalion, about 200 people for a few months at a time. If you got a call, you were expected to be ready to go in less than 2 hours. Social norms meant the expectation was closer to 45 minutes than 2 hours. I think oncall is a common requirement for anything involving large sums of money, treatment of high risk injuries, or geopolitical power struggles.

One I hadn’t even considered (typical stereotype here: no friends who are in the armed forces). But yeah I imagine loads of others (military, EMT, police) are in a similar situation.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#263

Post by xamazn »

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 can confirm that unlike most other companies' "mission" the Leadership Principles are a real thing(tm) that even those of us who are skeptical about corporate yadda yadda were caught up using and being influenced by.

Two things about it: it's not feel-good bullshit like the parent said. That makes it real. And another: so many principles are at direct odds. Do you "Insist on the highest standards" and delay the launch or do you "Deliver results" now? How do you "Think Big" while also obeying the mandate for "Frugality"? There is a lot of tension in the principles which matches real-world choices. It's not the shallow corporatese of most mission statements.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#264

Post by valbaca »

Hi there.

So, I wrote this. I'm the original author. I'm amznymous (still proud of that username)

It's wild to see this pop-up at the top of HackerNews 5 years later, but I'd be more than happy to answer any questions anyone has.

I'm still at Amazon and have been on a couple of different teams since then, but this was definitely written at my lowest time at Amazon. I've had low times since then and high ones as well.

I'm still an SDE II but on-track to become SDE III soon.

I've interviewed elsewhere but was either unimpressed with the company (Facebook) or the company was not impressed enough with me and asked to try again later (Google). Facebook interviewers all looked absolutely exhausted and stressed and lifeless. They zoned out in the interview and just in general left a bad taste.

One low point was when I found out (years after 2015) that the whole project that I had brutalized myself over was shutdown. Deleted. Scrapped. All of it.

It was devastating and cathartic. I've become a bit more balanced, jaded, and care-free since then. Not totally, but just a bit.

It's all just code. It's all just business and sometimes the business fails and everything you did doesn't matter anyway.

I'm still glad I wrote the paste, if it helped one person out there. Based on reddit responses, I wasn't the only one going through this.

=============================

Since then things that help:

0. Get that "Fuck You Money" I pinched pennies and followed Dave Ramsey's approach to get 100% debt free and thriving to ensure I never was locked in as I felt I was.

1. Being absolute about my sleep schedule.

2. Finding a good team. When you find a good team/manager, stick with it. Manager matters 10x more than the company

3. Therapy. duh

4. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl

5. "The Depression Cure" by Ilardi. This is NOT A SUBSTITUTE for therapy or medication. ONLY use it as a supplement . The tl;dr is take care of your body or your mind will pay the price.

6. Soft skills: developing skills on how to provide estimates, pushing back on deadlines, and finding compromises between what business wants and what's feasible. It sounds obvious, but sometimes it really is just as easy as saying "that will take 2 weeks, what can be cut?"

(Obvs, my opinions are my own and not my employer's)

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#265

Post by valbaca »

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…

amznymous here.

You're right. The proportional compensation is something I was very wrong about.

At the time, I was also in debt due to being straight out of college and having been dumb AF with money (student loans, car, & credit cards) and so owing anything would've been bankrupting.

It was so easy to be stupid with money when you're making an engineer's salary.

Not shifting blame, I did that debt to myself and I dug myself out of it after educating myself.

Just giving more context.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#266

Post by spike021 »

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…

Not sure anyone will see this since the post is rather old now and off the front page, but just to add my two cents:

I was made an offer for L5 at Amazon earlier this year. For compensation, it's like you suggested: the offer is structured such that the first two years weigh more heavily toward cash (a separate signing bonus for each of the first two years, which IMO was pretty good and _does not_ need to be paid back, it's just combined with your normal bi-weekly paychecks) and then the latter two years are where you get the majority of your RSU rewards, which wind up being worth the same or more than the cash bonuses of the first two years (assuming I suppose that the stock price continues to be stable and/or increase from what it was at time of signing).

A note about the signing bonuses, the offer letter details basically do not say anything about needing to pay them back for leaving early. If your employment is terminated (by yourself or Amazon itself), then you just end with the prorated portion for the current pay cycle and that's it, you don't get any more of it (fairly obvious anyway if you leave a place).

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#267

Post by valbaca »

DethNinja wrote: post #63

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…

amznymous here

Don't do it :) Please don't be envious

It didn't produce good code, but to be fair, the project didn't need to have great code, just working code.

It absolutely increased the bug count. Again, in hindsight and with a calmed mind, it's obvious.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#268

Post by valbaca »

curiousllama wrote: post #178

I don't want to minimize what this guy went through - anything that takes you to the edge is too much - but I can't help but interpret this story as a story of professional & personal growth rather than an example of why Amazon sucks (Sidenote: I happen to agree they suck, just not for this particular reason). How many people in other professions have had similar experiences from the perspective of intensity/amount o…

amznymous here

You are absolutely right.

As other have pointed out, it's probably 1000x worse to be a doctor saddled with med school debt who is literally operating on people. I will not argue that, ever.

But that's also not me and so I told the story I could; mine.

I really want this to be more about how vital professional and personal boundaries are.

While also highlighting how certain company behaviors make it challenging (on/call, etc.)

Before Amazon I had worked at a company that (due to the nature of the work) necessitated a strict 9-5. You literally couldn't work a minute more.

Before that, I was in college and had hourly jobs.

So you could say this was my first big-boy job with salary-hours, as well as real responsibilities (rent, car, wife, life)

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#270

Post by valbaca »

hinkley wrote: post #166
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…

I have a suspicion. If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies. The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look ha…

amznymous here

you're 100% right

Post reply on HN