151–160 of 374 posts
Pile that money up high (in something like index funds) while you're earning the big bucks, and there comes a time where you can choose whether you want to keep doing it, or move to the beach and surf and still be young enough to enjoy it.
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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.
They all look shining from the outside, problems start when you join the new team and realize the pile of s t you will be dealing with. Btw this happens in most companies, tons of tech debt. And those who created that s t are off onto new projects recreating the exact same mess all over again. It is a cycle that never ends. Only chance is to join early and be in for the long run.
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Curious, did you go somewhere that at least matched your salary? I know Amazon compensates very well, so much so that it's probably difficult to find something else unless it's another FAANG company. I have a friend working there who basically deals with all the not-so-good things mostly because the compensation is so good.
Haven't moved on yet (intentionally took some time off to relax and refresh), but I expect I'll have to take a bit of a pay cut. > I know Amazon compensates very well That's not been my understanding - I thought it was noticeably below other FAANG companies (at least until the pay hike earlier this year)? I have only just started reaching out to possible employers so I don't really have any points of comparison.
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…
However, I disagree that aiming to get enjoyment out of a coding job is necessarily a mistake. But it does often have to be weighed against competing factors like ease of getting a job and pay.
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.
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Yup, and the other flipside is devs being extremely nitpicky and regurgitating irrelevant Amazon principles BS in code reviews because they're trying to get promoted.
Agreed! If I never hear "You should employ a bias towards " again it will be too soon.
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Former Amazonian here. The learning is unmatched. I've been in different FAANGs but the way that Amazon pushes one to learn and challenge the status quo is unthinkable. I never saw "no, you can't do that, that system/business/area is sacred". Everything is up for grabs all the time. While there are pathological side effects to this (AWS promotion-per-launch, constantly battle for scope), the amount of knowledge one c…
>AWS promotion-per-launch Can you elaborate? You mean a new service gets someone promoted?
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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.
Coding is mostly optimizing and compromising between all those factors, rather than staring at the wall waiting for inspiration expecting the solution is an act of poetry.
This is not to say that engineering is void of creativity, some sort of beauty, cleverness, etc, it obviously is, but it's not the same kind of creativity involved when painting or writing music.
Art has the goal of touching, moving and expressing the author's self.
That's just not the goal of writing a form, a serializer, a validator, a logger, a queue, a shader or a git hook.
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"?
Someone who's dealt with websites at scale before is going to be able to skip the first 20 of that process, so if you're a startup dreaming to get big, you find someone that's worked "at scale" eg Amazon or Google to design and build your systems and avoid some pain points like the website going down because the system can't keep up.
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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.