Laying myself off from Amazon
daniel.do
Laying myself off from Amazon
1–10 of 374 posts
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#2This was a good read. I guess we do have to rip off the bandaid sometimes.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#3Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly.
Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting tickets to teams responsible for the automation.
More often than not these tickets would be ignored and issues would persist for weeks beyond what's reasonable.
I'd actually force myself to write even trivial code on weekends to ensure my ability to develop didn't atrophy as a result of lack of use.
That, paired with the awful corporate culture and constant fear of PIP/job loss forced me to finally leave.
Generally a very unpleasant experience all around, sans the compensation and name on the resume.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#4This was a good read. I guess we do have to rip off the bandaid sometimes.
Thanks. An upvote would help, I'd love to have more people read it.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#5Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly. Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting ticket…
>I'd actually force myself to write even trivial code on weekends to ensure my ability to develop didn't atrophy as a result of lack of use.
I did not mention this in my blog post, but I have actually done similar. That's incredible. Thanks for sharing this comment. Our tenures were almost the exact same length too.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#6No voluntary layoff plan you could take advantage of to get some severance pay? Might have been worth holding off a week to see if they rolled one of those out. Water under the bridge now, though.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#7Amazon's internal tooling really is the ninth circle of hell. It seems unsalvageable too; ostensibly the teams are supposed to be customer obsessed and the developers are the customer, but there's no accountability for anything to work well at all.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#8How was the work/life balance though? Did you find you were able to have downtime and rest or were you constantly worrying about unfinished work and looming deadlines?
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#9same reasons here that contributed towards deciding leaving Amazon despite it being a dream job entering the industry (i did have a significant "pull factor" to another job that accelerated the timing). when you realize you wouldn't be happy even with the best case, it's time to go. However, i've heard many reports of talented, smart people doing fulfilling, challenging work at Amazon and its probably the luck of the draw on what team you get staffed on. So the case could be made that you couldve simply tried for a transfer.
i suspect that, if you work on a "slow and kludgy product", the responsible thing to do would have been to write a memo laying out why it sucks and what needs to be done. I've seen a rare few folks actually get heard and get the mandate to do what needed to be done. but I know it can feel overwhelming for most and ultimately its the responsibility of the GM/PM to know whether this is true or just the whining of an underling with no context.
also kudos for having the guts/integrity to do this before thanksgiving. make it count!
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#10How was the work/life balance though? Did you find you were able to have downtime and rest or were you constantly worrying about unfinished work and looming deadlines?
I don't think I've ever heard a testimony of Amazon having good work life balance. The best you hear is that some people get lucky and things are "ok" on that front.