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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

#181

Post by pjbeam »

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…

10 months in the pit is no joke. I'm on 13 and often wonder how I made it this far.

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

#182

Post by telotortium »

mynameisash wrote: post #38

I also left Amazon after ~10mo. I've written about this elsewhere, but the short version is: * New manager who was a nice guy but didn't help me or other folks onboard * A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire. * SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, an…

What's the company across the lake - Microsoft?

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

#183

Post by tucaz »

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…

People on this forum are usually too good to find problems within. With folks here, usually the other party is always at fault.

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

#184

Post by twiddling »

pc86 wrote: post #113
brazzledazzle wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out Wow. It’s really difficult to imagine a likely scenario where that’s justified.

They had a quota to fill, and they didn't know or didn't like anyone on that team. Not that that is a justification, but it's almost certainly the reason .

and if a mgr is not there to defend his team...

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

#185

Post by junar »

pcthrowaway wrote: post #64
delecti wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to pay them back pro rated. If you leave after 10 months you'd only have to pay back 2/12 of the bonus. At least that was the case when I started at Amazon (admittedly almost a decade ago).

If you get a signing bonus that you pay taxes on, then have to return part of it the following year, do you get to deduct it from taxes?

Yes, as long as the amount you repaid exceeds $3,000.

https://www.irs.gov/publications/p525#en_US_2020_publink1000...

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

#186

Post by mattnewton »

peakaboo wrote: post #154
Jemaclus wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Performance Improvement Plan. On paper, it's a program where management works with you to improve your weak points so you don't get fired. In practice, it's HR protecting the company by documenting reasons to fire you before they fire you. It's rare (not unheard of, but rare) to work your way out of a PIP. In general, if you get put on a PIP, I would immediately start doing some soul-searching as to why I might be on…

Soul searching is easy. The only people who put up with that shit are people who don't feel good enough, so they are begging their master like a dog to please, please like them!! The cure? Don't allow corporations to set your value, specially not mad and crazy corporations like amazon and space penis.

Some people are genuinely hired above their level or have been coasting so long the don't realize they are coasting, and so there are legitimate uses for PIPs. That being said, I hear it's a perverse shadow of that at companies like Amazon that use quotas to go looking for reasons to fire people.

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

#187

Post by seanmcdirmid »

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…

From what I hear, Amazon is incredibly uneven in org quality, so it is really possible your friend got unlucky. My wife works at Amazon and seems to have a pretty good balance and has good things to say about her work environment, but she is not a SWE (rather a designer). Still, I don't think I would ever work there without a lot of careful research about the group I was going into.

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

#188

Post by qvrjuec »

ajkjk wrote: post #90

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used si…

Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with

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

#189

Post by wallscratch »

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…

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to […]

Wouldn’t this be true of almost any other selective interview process?

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

#190

Post by cwkoss »

MattGaiser wrote: post #30
chrsig wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why? probably too focused on frugality to consider retention

Amazon has to be at the point of literally running out of nearby human beings to be concerned about retention. https://www.essence.com/news/amazon-burning-through-workers/

I read a stat that 1 out of ~154 Americans currently works for amazon.
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