Laying myself off from Amazon

Post by gruffle » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 10:17 PM UTC

olladecarne wrote: post #36

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 10:27 PM UTC

gruffle wrote: post #68

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…

Completely agree. Interesting how the internal dev satisfaction polling always shows that the vast majority of devs just absolutely love the internal tooling and processes. Might have something to do with the polls not actually being anonymous. When hr/polling teams are asked about anonymity they generally skirt or ignore the question, but I've learned that enough metadata is collected to identify any responder in pr…

Post by pbronez » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 10:40 PM UTC

scruple wrote: post #41

dimmke wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

Post by gruffle » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 10:41 PM UTC

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…

Post by yazaddaruvala » Wed, Nov 16, 2022, 10:47 PM UTC

dimmke wrote: post #22

buremba wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.