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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#131

Post by dilyevsky »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #45
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 an…

So 20% spent on tests and another 20% on meetings where presumably you decide what to build is not part of the job they applied for? Nonsense! If we’re doing hot takes here there’s no way everyone else on his team is spending 40% of their time on tooling without management doing anything about it

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#132

Post by matai_kolila »

at_compile_time wrote: post #117
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.

Beauty doesn't put food on the table, is my point, and I'm beyond sick of working with people who put "code beauty" before "code usefulness".

Ugly code that works pays bills. Beautiful code that doesn't work is, in a very literal sense, worthless.

I'm not against writing clean code (there's utility in that), but I feel like some folks lose the plot and quit their jobs when they can't make "beautiful" things anymore, and I think that's more often a sign of burnout than it is a desire to "return" to creating art.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#133

Post by amzn-throw »

marcinzm wrote: post #43
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.

Maybe so, but don't you think I talk to new employees? It's half of my job to support my whole team and deliver through others.

I battled those tools when I started. I watched them get better.

I've seen what new hires struggled with 5 years ago and what they struggle with 1 year ago.

Night and day.

The tools have gotten a lot better.

Here's the other ugly truth: That "40% of struggling with internal tools" may be saving the engineer 300% of time of having to implement the same from scratch themselves. Software engineering isn't all algorithms and data structures. A lot of it is just boilerplate code hooking up A to B. And better leave that boilerplate code to the internal tool that you have to figure out how to configure than implement it yourself.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#134

Post by ethanwillis »

epolanski wrote: post #124
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.

> There's a limited number of solutions to a programming task

But this is literally and technically not true.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#135

Post by anyfoo »

I did not feel super sympathetic when reading the breakdown of percentages (with only 10% "actually writing code"). Yeah, those specific percentages were a bit egregious, but working on a big project it's not uncommon at all to spend more time thinking and talking things through than to actually write code. There's a lot of complexity to be tamed, and in my experience that can be a very enjoyable part of actually engineering.

This however:

> And the worst part is, I feel like the product we were shipping was really bad. It was slow and kludgy. It was the opposite of the qualities I value in software products. I didn’t feel like I was adding any value, and I was miserable.

Yeah, there is absolutely no excuse for that. And if that is the case about the product you're working on, what I said just before about "enjoyable engineering" will never apply. Good for getting out of there.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#136

Post by ethanwillis »

matai_kolila wrote: post #132
at_compile_time wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Beauty doesn't put food on the table, is my point, and I'm beyond sick of working with people who put "code beauty" before "code usefulness". Ugly code that works pays bills. Beautiful code that doesn't work is, in a very literal sense, worthless. I'm not against writing clean code (there's utility in that), but I feel like some folks lose the plot and quit their jobs when they can't make "beautiful" things anymore,…

Why is the dichotomy "ugly code that works" and "beautiful code that doesn't work"

Surely there's also "ugly code that doesn't work" and "beautiful code that does work." And I'd argue there's a lot of in between as well. Unless the software literally does exactly what it needs to do, no more, no less then there's also the variants of "works well, somewhat well, etc."

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#137

Post by paulcole »

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 sometimes hire marketing writers where I work (I have many years of experience as a marketing writer). One of the most important moments in the first interview is when I explain that what they will do is not creative writing.

We can find ways to do our writing jobs creatively, but fundamentally we type to get things done. We write to influence people. It’s not art, not even a little bit.

It’s obvious who gets it and who doesn’t.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#138

Post by spike021 »

fdgsdfogijq wrote: post #28
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 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.

Before I left Amazon I tried transferring to multiple teams after speaking with hiring managers. They all (IIRC 4 separate ones) wanted either a full on-site loop or at minimum two coding interviews).

I was an L5 with about 5-6 years of experience, 1.5 at that point at Amazon.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#139

Post by spike021 »

randomopining wrote: post #130
bitL wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You get a bunch of cash up front; majority of RSU's come from your 3rd year vest date on.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#140

Post by greedo »

deathanatos wrote: post #99
techsupporter wrote: post #50

> 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 th…

How, pray tell, is someone utterly unfamiliar with a code base supposed to be able to deal with unforeseen issues in production for that service? (Worse, the incentives for improvements to production quality, and thus on-call quality, are utterly mis-aligned.) Ironically, I say this as someone presently on-call for a bunch of stuff for which I am utterly unfamiliar with the code base of, and have no time to become fa…

On call isn't about fixing the problem yourself, it's knowing who the right person is to contact when an issue arises.
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