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Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

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Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#131

Post by sidr »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #104
scarface74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? It just so happens that all of the products produced by Google, Microsoft and Apple that need a lot of blue collar workers are done by contractors in a different country. I bet none of the…

> Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? Okay, but we're talking about what Amazon is doing now , not how other hypothetical companies may or may not treat potential employees.

Here's an example of how another non-hypothetical tech company treats fully realized (is that the opposite of potential?) blue-collar workers: * https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat... * https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#132

Post by socialist_coder »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…

To be fair, in my opinion, you chose the wrong tool for the task. Why would you use a sum window function instead of a much simpler aggregate sum function (that does require a group by)?

Without the group by, you will be returning every row from the table, which isn't what the task calls for. You'd then have to do an additional row_number() or distinct or something to just get the unique rows per month per country.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#133

Post by kiliantics »

There are many reasons to reject Amazon and other companies and prefer to use your labour towards more ethical efforts. The DSA tech action working group and the Tech Workers Coalition are compiling "rejection letter" templates for companies that have committed particularly egregious misdeeds here:

https://github.com/nycdsa/tech-rejection-letters

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#134

Post by pavel_lishin »

sidr wrote: post #131
pavel_lishin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? Okay, but we're talking about what Amazon is doing now , not how other hypothetical companies may or may not treat potential employees.

Here's an example of how another non-hypothetical tech company treats fully realized (is that the opposite of potential?) blue-collar workers: * https://www.theverge.com/2019/6/19/18681845/facebook-moderat... * https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo...

I'm betting dvt won't work for Facebook, either, and I applaud 'em for it.

(How do we specify that we're referring to a user here, anyway? On reddit, I'd just type /u/dvt and be done with it, seems weird to do it here.)

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#135

Post by bob1029 »

At what point does an organization get to be so large such that it is guaranteed to become a menace to society and individual human dignity?

I cannot come up with any publicly-held multi-billion dollar technology company today that isn't seemingly run by psychopaths. Is there some new SEC regulation regarding corporate leadership I am unaware of? Is it an audit item that requires HR to fuck over all their employees with as much legal nonsense as possible? I seriously don't understand why there can't be at least one 100bn+ tech company that treats its employees like humans.

I will probably end up working in smaller shops and startups for the rest of my career judging by the way these megacorps have been conducting themselves. I used to dream of going to work on the bleeding edge with huge tech companies like Google and Amazon. Now, I treat their recruitment emails like any other spam items. I gladly accept my relatively paltry salary knowing that I can walk away and do whatever I want at any point in time without fear of legal or financial repercussions.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#136

Post by [deleted] »

gtsteve wrote: post #106

I once met a guy who was a programmer for a hedge fund. The strategies and knowledge he had would be very useful to competitors. They didn't have a non-compete agreement in the contract, as this is almost never enforceable here, instead he agreed to a six month notice period - after working two months' notice they then paid four months' salary for him to take a holiday while his knowledge became less and less useful…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#137

Post by ghobs91 »

Based on what I'm seeing in this comment section, I'll be doing as much of my online shopping with Costco as possible. They have just as much, if not more of an emphasis on customer service, and they actually treat their employees very well.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#138

Post by giglamesh »

balls187 wrote: post #123
cameronbrown wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The tech industry has the best horizontal mobility of any other right now. Why do we need the downside of unions when we can just move company and have only the upsides?

> The tech industry has the best horizontal mobility of any other right now. Until you age out. And you will age out.

At what year does this happen? I'm 57 and finding it harder than ever to land a position this time around, just when one would think otherwise...

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#139

Post by SteveNuts »

_q1cj wrote: post #33
SteveNuts wrote: post #16

Every time I've talked to AWS Recruiters they've belittled by past experience and just generally made me feel bad about my career. I will never ever work there, no matter how cool their tech stack must be.

I can tell you from experience, the internal Amazon stack is not cool or inventive.

Certain things must be pretty cool/groundbreaking though. Just watching things like Youtube videos about how VPC works is pretty amazing. I won't let that blind me to the fact that the company seems pretty toxic.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#140

Post by [deleted] »

neilv wrote: post #128

I was leaning strongly towards AWS, after talking with people. I find the business model very appealing, and it sounded like I'd probably be valued well there. Then I did a little due-diligence searching of news articles and such that I vaguely recalled, about both the blue collar and white collar cultures, and was very disappointed. The various stories about non-developer treatment seemed much closer to home and rea…

[deleted]
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