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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

benadam.me

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#121

Post by deltaonefour »

emptybottle wrote: post #80

It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work. My own experiences, the horror stories I've read, the broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession. It di…

Is this the norm? I thought this was mostly just amazon.

If it is the norm I blame it on the over supply of software engineers. The salaries stay high but the churn is now higher because with that high of a salary they will burn through as many engineers as possible to get the perfect person.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#122

Post by benadam11 »

kentonv wrote: post #88
benadam11 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

Hmm I don't see any change yet but LOL if the 404s turn out to be my own fault due to a Workers bug. :)

https://3be909f6.personal-site-v4.pages.dev/ has the updated styles but the change doesnt seem to have propagated to domain yet (made the background pure white instead of grey)

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#123

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

monster_group wrote: post #53

FTA - "I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript)" But hey, you bet he knows topological sort and dynamic programming.

The article writer said he was in the Devices org so I would bet there are a huge number of hardware engineers there. That engineer could be very proficient with C and firmware and might have not touched web stuff since college, even if that was covered then.

Really telling of an organization that your personal skills don't matter when they just need bodies.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#124

Post by Invictus0 »

batmaniam wrote: post #96

The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being 'normal' at Amazon. And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse. At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working condi…

Why do we have to have "solidarity" on this issue? What does that even mean in practice? Everyone knows the deal with Amazon or learns very quickly, and either deals with it or quits.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#125

Post by robby_w_g »

sharkweek wrote: post #25

Hey congrats on making it 10 months! "Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work" Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on som…

> I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later).

Hey, I had a similar experience with Google! It was my first technical interview for my first job out of college. The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

Personal grievances aside, I've come to think that the Leetcode interview style has morphed from a "let's see how you handle problems at scale" test into an ego-driven hazing ritual. My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. It makes me sad for the less privileged candidates who might be working a job while also trying to break into the IT field.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#126

Post by optymizer »

behohippy wrote: post #75
donretag wrote: post #28

Cases like these happen at companies at all levels. Massive companies such as Amazon and especially at startups, where roles are not as defined. After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a ye…

> Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for Why does Amazon do this? I've bailed out 3 times on interviews with them now because somehow the role they sold me on end up being completely different by the time you talk to the team members doing the actual job. It's a huge time waster for everyone involved.

I was hired as an Android developer. After 1 year, my manager called me on a Sunday afternoon, and asked me: "do you know HTML?". I said: "yes, who doesn't?". On Monday I was transferred to the web team to work on customer retention.

From the business's point of view, they were trying to plug an urgent hole, from my career's point of view, I wanted to work on mobile Android apps. I moved back to an Android team in a month, which required VP-level approval.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#127

Post by tablespoon »

atlasunshrugged wrote: post #107
batmaniam wrote: post #96

The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being 'normal' at Amazon. And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse. At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working condi…

By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually? How many people who read this article and the likely scores more or bothered to look at glassdoor will bother to apply or accept a recruiter call? Eventually something breaks internally and the company is destroyed (albeit likely a very slow death) or it gets fixed. I don't worry a ton about HQ people, most of those can get other jobs…

>> If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.

> By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually?

Yes, but it usually takes an unacceptably long time for something like that to happen, and in the mean time a lot of people get hurt. As they say "in the long run, we're all dead": it doesn't do us much good if letting the problems work themselves out means we'll never live to see the solution.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#128

Post by joegahona »

kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

This page is almost unreadable for me too -- a giant oil-spill of light gray text on a white background with no discernible headers, no spaces between paragraphs, etc. Brave, desktop, Version 1.33.106 Chromium: 96.0.4664.110 (Official Build) (arm64)

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#129

Post by encryptluks2 »

delecti wrote: post #103
encryptluks2 wrote: post #33

I finally started just marking their recruiter emails as spam. I still get a couple a month despite asking them to stop. I interviewed for them a few years back and it was clear then that they are looking for people that are technically smart but total pushovers. If you are the type of person that are susceptible to abusive relationships then you'd fit right in. The sad part is many of their employees prob feel lucky…

What filter rules do you use for that? As a frequent Amazon customer I wouldn't want to accidentally filter things I want to receive. My recruiter strategy has just been to reply with a direct "Hi , No thank you." that doesn't leave room for foot-in-the-door.

I just routinely do a cursory glance of my spam folder, but so far no issues. I am guessing it doesn't do much but I like to think if enough people flag them as spam that they then get marked as spam throughout Gmail.
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