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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#41

Post by scruple »

dimmke wrote: post #5
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'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.

When I worked for a BigTechCo, I was doing exercism every single morning for ~30 minutes for the same reason. It really is incredible. I know a few of my former colleagues were doing the same. Today I'm on a team with 4 other engineers, so I keep busy coding.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#42

Post by dfxm12 »

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

Sometimes I get frustrated at my own job for some reason or another, but I appreciate learning that the grass isn't really greener anywhere else & even places where tech is the core business are having a lot of the same problems.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#43

Post by marcinzm »

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

In my experience, not at Amazon, long tenure employees get used to the quirky tools but the impact on new employees can be massive. Same with bad code bases, bad documentation and so on.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#44

Post by belval »

dangerwill wrote: post #10
stuff4ben wrote: post #8

How 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.

My work life balance at Amazon as an SDE is great but I don't have 24/7 oncall, make of that what you will.

That being said, I agree that the internal tooling at Amazon is not that great. It's actually a place where newer employees tend to clash with older Amazonian because it compares unfavourably with GitHub actions or any modern CI/CD while being significantly better than anything that existed in the early 2010s.

I've heard a lot of testimonies of SDEs maintaining pipelines that are making them miserable.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#45

Post by TheRealPomax »

dilyevsky wrote: post #18

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?

While it's not just you, and there are lots of folks who think that's just fine: if someone hires a dev and then make them spend only 10% doing the job they applied for, whoever hired them lied about the job, and the product they're hiring for has fundamental problems that you can either commit to solve, or burn bodies over in the hopes that you get transferred out to a different position and it's not your problem anymore. One of those may be good for business, but it's not the one that makes for a good company.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#47

Post by iLoveOncall »

If you're thinking of joining big tech, try to join a team that develops an internal tool.

You have as much impact and are exposed to as much scale (maybe not in terms of TPS but in terms of data, etc.), but you usually have much lighter development processes and a much more frequent release cycle. Your ops will also be a lot lighter.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#48

Post by leros »

dilyevsky wrote: post #18

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?

It's really difficult getting hundreds or thousands of people working together. Tooling, communication, etc become really critical. Otherwise, it's just chaos. As a result, you spend a lot less time "actually working" and a lot more time "collaborating" and "project managing". Spending less than 50% of your time on "actually working" is very normal in large companies

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#49

Post by francisofascii »

dilyevsky wrote: post #18

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?

Was thinking that same. The 40% spent on tooling to deploy code and of course on call time is never fun, but the other time seems normal. But leaving only 10% of real development is not great and the author can probably do better. It is a good reminder that if you get to do greenfield development or generally enjoy your work, don't be quick to jump ship just for higher pay/prestige.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#50

Post by techsupporter »

> This is not counting the weeks where I was “on call” and forced to drop all of this to work on a backlog of DevOps related issues.

I want to say sorry at the beginning if I misread what the author (you?) intended when you wrote this. And I'm coming at this from someone who is not a developer and who, compared to the lofty Software Engineer salaries in this industry, feels underpaid and underappreciated for doing the operations/administration work.

With that said: I truly wish those who are leaving their roles where this kind of requirement exists--feels "forced"--would speak more loudly about the need to have actual people doing system administration work. This is especially true, I feel, in large companies who operate "the Cloud" and who ought to know better; someone needs to be doing that work and it can't always, or usually, be the people who are writing the features and implementing the updates to the core product you are selling.

But what seems like has happened is everyone in the tech industry has forgotten it, or named it "Site Reliability Engineer" with a job of 55% failure analysis, 35% coding, and 10% "are the infrastructure and products actually online and functional." And then this role gets looked down on and paid less because the people in the role--people like me--are not seen as "delivering" "value".

Which culminates in the proper software developers seeing it as a thing they are forced to do, resulting in disdain, and furthering the cycle.

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