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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#11

Post by buremba »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #3

Worked 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 thought that the deployment pipelines are part of their core business considering AWS has such products that are meant to be used by customers. I assume that the internal tools are different than what AWS customers use for deployments?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#12

Post by d_burfoot »

> 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc…

This gives the lie to Jeff Bezos' whole "Day 1" philosophy. If you're at a Day 1 company you don't spend 40% of your time fighting with the crappy internal tools.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#13

Post by unnouinceput »

This mirrors my experience with my prestigious job I had at SiemensVDO in 2005/2006. Same stuff of wasting time on anything else than coding. He said 10% of his time was coding. I suspect mine was like 20% and I felt miserable after a year. The honeymoon of getting to write embedded code for real cars, cars that would be driven by millions of people only lasted like 3 to 4 months. After that the job had nothing else to teach me and over a little year later I quit too, with a total of one month shy of 1.5 years there.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#14

Post by rad_gruchalski »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #3

Worked 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…

> 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.

Considering rather good quality APIs they expose to the external world, this is shocking to read.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#15

Post by dilyevsky »

d_burfoot wrote: post #12

> 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc… This gives the lie to Jeff Bezos' whole "Day 1" philosophy. If you're at a Day 1 company you don't spend 40% of your time fighting with the crappy internal tools.

Not sure what the Amzn situation is but something I've noticed at few previous gigs that there're some folks who claim they spent significant time wrestling with tooling but when you actually go in and make them formulate the issue it's either something really obvious or a 10-min google/github search like 9/10 times. These also weren't coming from people who I considered lazy or unintelligent (well, for the most part) so I can't really explain it logically. I suspect it may have something to do with motivation or cultural issues ("not my job" sort of folks).

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#16

Post by zug_zug »

dilyevsky wrote: post #15
d_burfoot wrote: post #12

> 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc… This gives the lie to Jeff Bezos' whole "Day 1" philosophy. If you're at a Day 1 company you don't spend 40% of your time fighting with the crappy internal tools.

Not sure what the Amzn situation is but something I've noticed at few previous gigs that there're some folks who claim they spent significant time wrestling with tooling but when you actually go in and make them formulate the issue it's either something really obvious or a 10-min google/github search like 9/10 times. These also weren't coming from people who I considered lazy or unintelligent (well, for the most part…

I've seen people complain about it who were wrong, but I've also seen people fail to complain about it when they really should have been.

I just worked at a fang company, and here's an example - to search CI logs to see if a certain log happened frequently you would : WRITE A SCRIPT to download 100MB CI logs and search them for you.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#17

Post by amzn-throw »

Amazon has a lot of bad internal tools, but this person's experience doesn't match mine (being here for 8 years) at all

> 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc…

The tools for code submission, pull requests, pipelines, metrics, and logging are fantastic. Google is better. Most companies aren't.

I have never spent 40% of my time battling internal tools....

> 20% of my time in meetings

Developers complain when they're not invited to meetings, and they complain when they're invited. On my team we brutally introspect the value of every meeting, and if it looks like it's not delivering value, we find a new process.

> 20% of my time writing unit tests to hit the 100% coverage requirement of the codebase I worked on.

This makes no sense. This isn't a company mandate, every team is free to determine what code coverage percentage makes sense for them. Give this feedback to your tech lead, nearest Sr. SDE or PE -> 100% test coverage should never be "required"

> 10% of my time tracking down bugs in other team’s codebases for either internal tools or frameworks and trying to get them to acknowledge the problem by filing tickets.

So, software engineering?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#18

Post by dilyevsky »

Is this just me or aside from 40% spent on tooling (which I don't know what the deal is in this case but tbh I've seen some folks really spent their time inefficiently trying to make everything perfect) the breakdown looks completely normal for an established project at medium to big corp?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#19

Post by zeroonetwothree »

amzn-throw wrote: post #17

Amazon has a lot of bad internal tools, but this person's experience doesn't match mine (being here for 8 years) at all > 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc… The tools for code submission, pull requests, pipelines, metrics, and logging are fantastic. Google is better. Most companies aren't. I have never spent 40% of m…

I’ve never complained about not being invited to a meeting. I’d be happy never going to a single one.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#20

Post by Yhippa »

To be completely honest, what he describes seems to be what I've run into at nearly every stop I've been at as a consultant. I honestly never thought of it as hell, but I've also never been in a much better, tech tooling-friendly environment like at one of the FAAMNGs.

I suspect the people who end up leaving those environments for a more normal F500 company are going to be in for a shock in terms of work ergonomics and pay. This guy was lucky that he was able to squirrel away so much tech-worker money to be able to quit without a backup plan.

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