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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#121

Post by delecti »

Has the tooling gotten dramatically worse in the past 5 years? I willingly left almost exactly 5 years ago because my team's responsibilities had shifted too much, but I remember the tooling being pretty great. Also, everyone being more or less on the same stack also meant that there was a ton of resources to solve problems, just search the wiki for your error message. I still miss how well Odin worked for service credential management, nothing I've used since comes remotely close to how seamless it worked.

Also, I found the PIP process to be overly dramatized relative to my experience. I had a PIP imposed on me a couple years before I willingly left, and I "graduated" out of it with support and cooperation of my manager. Everyone involved seemed to want me to succeed.

Also, when I left, I opted into a second PIP, because HR and my manager wanted me to leave on good terms. Doing so let me get severance while quitting (it was ~3 months worth based on my 5+ year tenure). I'm not sure if this option still works though.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#123

Post by blippitybleep »

Syonyk wrote: post #92
lozenge wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell ahead of time if the team you're switching to has it any better?

Find out what they drink for "Team alcohol evenings." Whiskey team? Ok, probably somewhat stressful but doable. Wine team? Plush and cushy, with a line of people who want to be on that team out the door. Vodka team? Oh hell no. Etc. ... I'm kidding. Sort of. But not entirely.

You better watch out for the team who all drink Tennent’s Super Lager.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#124

Post by epolanski »

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…

I hate this whole idea that coding is a creative (in the artistic sense) activity.

There's a limited number of solutions to a programming task, it's about finding the one that meets most constraints, it's about cost, effort, trade offs analysis and finally implementation.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#125

Post by epolanski »

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?

I thought the same, bar on calls it described most jobs I had.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#126

Post by jjgreen »

Syonyk wrote: post #92
lozenge wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell ahead of time if the team you're switching to has it any better?

Find out what they drink for "Team alcohol evenings." Whiskey team? Ok, probably somewhat stressful but doable. Wine team? Plush and cushy, with a line of people who want to be on that team out the door. Vodka team? Oh hell no. Etc. ... I'm kidding. Sort of. But not entirely.

RedBull & Ketamine?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#127

Post by a123b456c »

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…

He compared it to writing a novel. A novel can serve more functions than just being a representation, such as a puzzle, an entertainment device, an empathy exercise or a learning tool.

I read it more simply like, "Code is a craft that deserves careful attention."

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#128

Post by feyr »

adamwk wrote: post #7

Amazon's internal tooling really is the ninth circle of hell. It seems unsalvageable too; ostensibly the teams are supposed to be customer obsessed and the developers are the customer, but there's no accountability for anything to work well at all.

Buildertool's guiding leadership principle is "Contempt for their Customers"

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#129

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

verelo wrote: post #115
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.

Feel free to reach out (my handle has links). I generally prefer keeping it out of the limelight.

May or may not be able to work with me, but always happy to expand my network.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#130

Post by randomopining »

bitL wrote: post #97
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…

You are pretty much validating that Amazon is a 2-year company, as reflected in their vesting schedule.

So basically you get most of your comp at 2 years? So crank hard for 2 years and then bounce?
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