191–200 of 374 posts
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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.
> 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…
Some of the older engineers I've worked with are among the most brilliant and productive people in the groups. In those cases I have seen bar none, they have been revered and respected among the other members.
Age discrimination is definitely a thing, but not everywhere. Maybe that rotted mindset of prejudice has taken hold in the "I'm saving the world broken by boomers by working at a corporation that sells advertisements on the internet" crowd.
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>There's a lot of complexity to be tamed, and in my experience that can be a very enjoyable part of actually engineering In my experience there is almost no correlation between complexity of the project and time needed to do 'non-technical' work. Quite contrary, the most complex things I did as a dev required me to do a lot of coding - to prototype, to experiment, to load testing and so on. And at the same time the e…
I fundamentally disagree with the notion that design and discussion, of often very detailed technical aspects, is "non-technical work" of any kind, or that sitting down and writing code is the only "technical work".
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Nope no approval required
that can't be right (but i have no idea). In the new group, nobody has any desire to at least do a reference check with the previous group? That would be the first thing as a hiring manager i would try to check for, say "this person is a d-bag that the entire group hated, and we were about to pip him/her anyway"? That would be kind of an equivalent of an approval, even if there is no formal approval.
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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.
No voluntary layoff plan you could take advantage of to get some severance pay? Might have been worth holding off a week to see if they rolled one of those out. Water under the bridge now, though.
Literally today -- about three hours ago, Amazon extended voluntary buyout offers to some employees.
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Nope no approval required
that can't be right (but i have no idea). In the new group, nobody has any desire to at least do a reference check with the previous group? That would be the first thing as a hiring manager i would try to check for, say "this person is a d-bag that the entire group hated, and we were about to pip him/her anyway"? That would be kind of an equivalent of an approval, even if there is no formal approval.
Not familiar with Amazon culture so I don't know if that'd be considered acceptable behavior. I hope not!
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Agreed! If I never hear "You should employ a bias towards " again it will be too soon.
Everytime I bypass some stupid process or break glass, I now just put 'bias for action' as the reason. Ahahaha I don't give a shit anymore.
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Amazon's compensation wasn't anything special. The first two years were awesome because I got a $100K+ sign-on bonus prorated and tacked onto my paycheck every month. Once my first two years ended, my regular salary was pretty lackluster and I was easily able to find a job making a lot more elsewhere.
It's all about the RSUs. That all kicks in after year 2. If you're a lower level maybe you don't feel it as much. But for a high performing L6+ RSUs typically are -- or at least were designed to be -- the majority of your income compared to base pay.