The key word here is "savings".
And good on you for doing it and great you don't have obligations to provide for others. What a freeing decision you made for your self!
Laying myself off from Amazon
21–30 of 374 posts
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#22Worked 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?
A lot of internal teams don't use the AWS software for various reasons. So like, CodePipeline might be great, but there's an internal analogue (I'm not sure the detail I can go into here) that is awful that a lot of teams use. There's been an internal movement to try to get all teams onto AWS services, but it's incredibly slow moving and there's no timeline that I know of.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#23How 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?
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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#24> 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…
When it’s an internal tool you can’t google it. You search through internal wikis that haven’t been updated in years
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#25You should have waited few days for the package.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
When it’s an internal tool you can’t google it. You search through internal wikis that haven’t been updated in years
When I worked at google you could =) j/k moma was terrible but most issues were easily searchable via a combination of email list/bug tracker/codesearch
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#27> I also know that every team at Amazon is different, so please don’t take my description for what it’s like working there as a whole.
No, no, this sounds pretty much like every team I was on for the nearly-decade I was there.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#28Worked 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…
You should have just switched teams. Amazon has amazing teams working on deep technology, they also have huge systems with technical debt and stress. People dont realize how different it can be inside the company.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#29No post body was provided.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#30Amazon 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…
Yeah I actually think this guy was just underperforming