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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

#161

Post by tinyhouse »

masterof0 wrote: post #17

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this: - RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...) - Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, wh…

| - Make it easier to switch teams

It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.

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

#162

Post by oblio »

samspenc wrote: post #144
vishnugupta wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (5% - first year, 15% - second This is done on purpose because a vast majority of employees leave Amazon within 18 months or so. And those who can withstand that environment for 24 months and beyond develop thick enough skin and make enough internal connections to survive till 5+ years. (bit of a tangent) > in case HR is reading this HR's primary (perhaps only) job is to protect the upper management (execs and abov…

I heard that their (miserly) first and second year RSU vests are made up for with a cash component during those two years, or am I mistaken about that?

Yes, you get money. There's some strings attached, you have to return the money under certain conditions.

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

#163

Post by sharkweek »

robby_w_g wrote: post #125
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…

Yeah my entire experience could be summed up by saying everyone who sat across the table from me that day (with one exception, one person was super nice), was trying to prove that I was too dumb to work among the likes of them.

This was in 2004 though so maybe that has changed but it certainly stuck with me.

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

#164

Post by [deleted] »

ryanianian wrote: post #66

> The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics. Of co…

[deleted]

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

#165

Post by swyx »

this actually turned out a lot more evenhanded than i was expecting from the title.

i took a job at AWS myself, and left after 8 months. partly it was pull factor to a more exciting offer, but i wont deny some push factors. Amazon hires generally very smart people, but the bureaucracy and legacy is just stifling for someone used to a faster pace in tech. After a while I identified the 4 things I felt that we had to ship in order to be a competitive product, and having determined that we'd take years to do it, left in good conscience hoping that whoever stayed would carry on the good fight. I didn't know it but my manager would leave 2 months after I did, lol.

good times, decent pay but it is clearly no longer Day 1 in many parts of AWS. If I were Adam Selipsky this would be job #1 IMO. AWS can only coast on past reputation so long.

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

#166

Post by oblio »

MattGaiser wrote: post #145
tablespoon wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I believe the commenter was implying that their policy takes retention into account, and amazon simply doesn't value retaining employees I think there's some Bezos quote about people being lazy and it being easier to extract labor from fresh hires trying to prove themselves.

> Bezos believed that workers' desire to perform well decreased over time and that an entrenched workforce was a "march to mediocrity," Niekerk told The Times. https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...

That's a solid degree of irony from someone that worked in the same place for 27 years :-D

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

#167

Post by kentonv »

kentonv wrote: post #134
benadam11 wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Yeah that page looks much better, not just the colors but also the headings and paragraphs are now formatted correctly. Crazily enough, it looks like the missing files are actually a problem on our (Cloudflare's) end. We're looking into it. But a re-deploy should fix it for now, I think.

Hey Ben, we think your re-deploy solved the problem, but the old content is still being served from Cloudflare's cache for many people. Can you do a cache purge in the Cloudflare dashboard?

(It just updated for me, looks much better. But the old version might still be cached in some locations.)

The root cause was actually something we fixed last month, but it seems problems can stick around if the site was originally deployed before that fix... we're working on that.

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

#168

Post by benadam11 »

strgcmc wrote: post #116

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't? I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and…

Really glad it came across that way (that was definitely my intent).

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

#169

Post by oblio »

MattGaiser wrote: post #120
matsemann wrote: post #62

> When I read through they offer they were pushing aggressively for a start date (2 weeks from the offer). Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn't swept away from under your feet one day.

3 months? So if you accept an offer today, it would be customary to stay until April? That's incredible. How are job tenures in Norway? Where I am, lots of people stay 14 + or - 4 months typically.

In many places in Europe it's 1 month for regular roles and 2 months for leadership.

And it's 3 or 6 months for being fired.

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