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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

#191

Post by Zimahl »

patientplatypus wrote: post #55

AMZN even recruits evilly. I once got an email from them that was an email blast to 100s of people. "Congratulations ! You have qualified to go to for a recruiting mixer where you may then apply for a chance to then be interviewed." I want to work for a company where people care about me, at least enough to email me in person and treat me like a human being. I think people think that working for a powerful evil compa…

I interviewed with them twice (shame on me after the first debacle).

The first time I interviewed with a DB team - my entire resume up until that point was heavy UI development. The problem is I didn't know what team it was with to begin with, I would've declined since it really didn't cover my skills nor interest.

The second time was with a search team, and by then I was more into middle-tier development. Interview went well I thought, no red flags. They asked me to do a coding assignment, I said ok. Here's where things go to shit. The interviewer told me he'd send me his email so I could send him the code. I did the assignment but never heard from him about where to send it. Contacted the recruiter, they said to send it to them and they'd forward it on. I got the hint, the interviewer literally did it to waste my time. What an ass.

Anyways, I learned my lesson. First, fuck Amazon, their recruiting emails go straight to the trash. Second, no coding assignments ever. I'll do stuff on site if you want but I've never gotten a good result out of coding assignments, and now I'm too experienced to see anything that would be appropriate.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#192

Post by blaser-waffle »

goatinaboat wrote: post #159
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. Why do we need the downside of unions when we can just move company and have only the upsides? Think of it like ageism. The time to do something about it is when you have the leverage. Not when you’re over a barrel.

Damn. Never thought of it that way.

It's like how they say the best time to jump jobs is when you're doing alright, and not when things are desperate or you're clearly on the way out.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#193

Post by jorblumesea »

mirceal wrote: post #183
jorblumesea wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah Amazon has 15 and 20 at 7 years, which is pretty common in the US at least.

IIRC it’s 10 days for the first year and after that what you describe

Nah I know many people that work for Amazon and at least for devs/engineer it's 15 days min.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#194

Post by mruts »

jedberg wrote: post #161
mruts wrote: post #154

Amazon pay is shit. I was laughed out of the room for asking for a salary that some analysts make in finance. People get paid so much more in finance than any other industry that I wonder why tech people aren’t more interested in those jobs. Also the work is more exciting and challenging. And it’s better for the world, though I suspect I’ll get a lot of downvotes for that one.

I once got offered a job in finance that was double my Netflix salary. I didn't take it because: 1) I'd have to live in NYC 2) I'd have to use their super locked down Windows machine. 3) I would only be allowed to talk to people in my department, and would never even be allowed to associate with the people making the trading algorithms, even though the job was to build them an infrastructure for back-testing their al…

It really depends, finance is a big big place. There are banks that are terrible and there are banks that are pretty great. Also finance is the buy-side as well, and the buy-side is pretty lax, especially if you are working at a small prop trading firm or hedge fund.

Maybe not everyone has a passion for finance, but I find it probably the most interesting thing in the world. The movement and character of markets are one of the last and great unsolved problems of humanity. They are also so incredibly old and have an outsized impact on the world compared to really anything else at all that I can think of.

I only got interested in markets in my mid-20s and before then, I wanted to be a compiler writer or something like that. On a whim I took my first job in finance at a portfolio analytics company and I was absolutely hooked, the rabbit hole ran so so deep. Now after working at a bank, a hedge fund, and now currently another bank structuring derivative products in Africa, I can't think of anything else.

The math is so interesting and the programming even more so. There's no right answer anywhere you look, just fields and fields of unsolved problem everywhere you look. I eventually realized that the reason why I find finance so interesting is the same reason why I find computer science interesting: because no one really knows what they're talking about. I relish the idea that I could be the first one to come up with some brilliant hedging mechanism or some product that solves a lot of people's problems.

Also I think that managing risk and making the world money is a noble endeavor. Client's call me on the phone I tell me, "Without you guys, I would have lost a shit ton of money", or "Without you, I wouldn't have been able to make a deal in Africa", etc etc. I'm not unique, and my firm isn't unique, so maybe this isn't true. But I do my absolute darnedest to help my clients, and by helping my clients, my firm.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#195

Post by Jare »

jaf656s wrote: post #165
pavel_lishin wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

a lot of people like the single quote, e.g. 'pavel_lishin

Is that a Lisp thing?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#196

Post by MrLeap »

oarabbus_ wrote: post #105
cliffy wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm guessing you didn't get to do this interactively? If I interviewed someone and they seemed knew something I didn't and could prove it by actually running the query/code I would be impressed. At the very least the interviewer should have checked your claim after the interview if they were skeptical. I think it's a real mistake when you don't let candidates write actual code and run it during interviews.

Correct, it was a "remote whiteboarding session". It has made me absolutely loathe non-interactive sessions. Not being able to run the actual code is ridiculous. Some of the best analysts and programmers I know of are "architecture guys/gals" who can create complex systems but may not knock out the actual code so quickly, or, as I like to call it "error message programmers". Creating an interview test to weed out oth…

This is me. I've used so many different programming languages over the years that for the first week of any new project, I am definitely an error message programmer. It goes something like this on day#1

Okay, I need to iterate through a collection. Which is it again?

foreach (int element in elements), no that's C#.

for (int element : elements) .. nope that's java

for (var element in elements) .. There we go.

Probably wouldn't exactly go like this, I know js isn't typed when I sit down to write it. (except for when it is!) ;)

Regardless, I call this my "tooling up" period. Each day i'm faster, and it takes about a week to get to 100%. but then I'm golden until the project is done and I inevitably have to switch techs again. I probably need to flex more than specialists in interviews because of this. Whenever pseudo code is on the menu I breath a sigh of relief.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#197

Post by bootlooped »

vonmoltke wrote: post #102
phpnode wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my FB interview I was told I wasn't allowed to run the code, which seemed completely ridiculous to me. It was even more frustrating when my interviewer told me I'd missed an edge case when I was certain I'd covered it - I'm still not sure who was right.

At least you got to type your code. I had to write mine out on a whiteboard (actually, a patch of wall with whiteboard paint).

I went to an interview where there were no spare computers, so I was asked to write out a blackjack game in Java with pencil and paper. That was a lot worse than any of the whiteboard ones I've had.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#198

Post by hollerith »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #134
sidr wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

"/u/dvt" does have the advantage of being readily understood by most HN readers (probably).

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#199

Post by mnm1 »

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.

Almost all their tech products are garbage. How cool can the internal tech stack be? They can't even produce decent tech products that don't require a giant team of AWS experts and constant tech support to work. And then there's the random bugs that make it hard to know if it's just a regular shitty product or you've hit a crazy bug. AWS is the worst part of my job, hands down. I wish they never existed. I'd rather be on a VPS somewhere or even putting in hardware servers in a coloc.
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