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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#111

Post by belval »

scubbo wrote: post #59
belval wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

This is really baffling to me. In fact, since leaving Amazon in June, I've been really frustrated by how much extra work setting up a CI/CD pipeline is in (say) Drone and Argo/Flux than with Amazon's internal tooling. You can set up a standard Amazon pipeline with a single command and answering a few prompts about naming, whereas with the open-source systems you have to hand-craft everything yourself, hack in a way t…

Perhaps it's just a green engineer thing. I know GitHub actions, CircleCI, Drone, etc... I don't know pipelines and sometimes it feels like dark magic to me.

As far as the other tooling goes, I often find that they are very Java-oriented (which is fine considering the AWS background) and everything in Python feels janky.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#112

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

> but also a job that made me feel more unhappy than any other job I’ve ever had.

I can relate. I worked for many years for one "those" companies that is a household name. The pay wasn't outstanding, and the job was not one that gave me much fulfillment, but it was at a marquee brand. My business card opened a lot of doors.

When that job finally ended (after almost 27 years), I started looking at working for other companies. I would have been a particularly good fit for startups, as I was financially secure (thus, didn't need to be paid too much), and have a huge arsenal of skills and experience, that can be quite useful to any small outfit that has "many hats" employees.

What I found, is that us older folks are quite unpopular, and got tired of slamming doors and passive-aggressive insults.

So I just decided that I was in early retirement.

Best decision I ever made.

I would have liked having the extra money, but the soul-sucking aspect would have probably killed me, by now.

I am in a good position. I have enough set aside to be OK, but not at an exorbitant level, and I get to write awesome code every single day. It's basically, my "dream job."

I feel terrible for over-leveraged young folks, having to deal with this kind of thing, early on. I feel even worse, for the ones that have "crossed over" into "old," and are still over-leveraged. They won't feel old, but they will be treated as such.

It's really humbling and infuriating.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#113

Post by femto113 »

dimmke wrote: post #91
yazaddaruvala wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh man, we disagree! I miss Pipelines (the internal version of CodePipeline). Having worked at startups and now at Google, that tool is honestly best in class. FWIW, I don't miss Quilt, or VersionSets, or Apollo, or Hydra, or TOD, or NAWS Pipelines bridge. But Pipelines itself, brining all of those tools together is amazing!

I was referring to Apollo specifically, since we're naming things.

I was once pitched a startup by some Amazon vets whose elevator pitch was "Apollo for everyone". I literally laughed out loud, which was followed by some very awkward assurances from them that they were not, in fact, trying to be funny.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#114

Post by conqrr »

Been there done that too.The thing that hit me really hard was Software Engineering vs Writing code/Computer Science are two very different things. Yes they overlap in theory and behavior of systems.There's no deny Amazon chooses to amplify the worst parts of Software Engineering today (poor tooling etc), but most places aren't much better and even if it is, its not forever.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#115

Post by verelo »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #112

> but also a job that made me feel more unhappy than any other job I’ve ever had. I can relate. I worked for many years for one "those" companies that is a household name. The pay wasn't outstanding, and the job was not one that gave me much fulfillment, but it was at a marquee brand. My business card opened a lot of doors. When that job finally ended (after almost 27 years), I started looking at working for other co…

I really want to know what you do and how i can do it with you.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#116

Post by craftyguy98 »

iLoveOncall wrote: post #47

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.

> as much scale

I'm an early career software engineer and am curious - why do people say working "at scale" like it's a good thing? Why is that desirable? What are you doing differently from someone who doesn't work "at scale"?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#117

Post by at_compile_time »

matai_kolila wrote: post #104

Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…

Code may not be art, but there is beauty in design.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#119

Post by einpoklum »

IMHO you shouldn't have worked for Amazon in the first place. Most of what they do is more negative than positive for society overall. Good that you're out of there - please consider doing something more redeeming with your skills.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#120

Post by olladecarne »

yodsanklai wrote: post #95
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…

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

It was much better 5+ years ago. It's impossible to maintain high code standards when a company grows as fast as Google has. Eventually the law of large numbers applies. It's probably still better due to starting from a stronger base, but they are all converging.
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