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Working at Amazon

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Re: Working at Amazon

#21

Post by jorblumesea »

openasocket wrote: post #18
jorblumesea wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many companies have overseas teams that take the night shift, eg: every on call dev has 12 on during the day, 12 off at night. Amazon does not based on cultural reasons (allegedly) because it promotes ownership and accountability for those teams. Idea being if you're woken up at 4am because of a flaky test or some issue you'll be more inclined to fix it. And if it's a recurring issue, you'll really want to get it sor…

Amazon encourages developers to be on call, but there are also rolling on-call systems so no one gets paged in the middle of the night. A team I work closely with does this. It isn't very stressful for me, I'm just on call for small, well-defined intervals, something like 1 week out of every 6, and only high severity issues will cause a page. In the last year or so I've been on call I was only paged after normal busi…

I think it's different for each team, especially the AWS groups. I know some support engineers that do 12on/12off rolling calls like you said, but others where it's one person on call, 24/7 for a week and they catch everything, not just SEV 1. It really just depends on your org/boss but the AWS org is known to be particularly pager-slaved.

Re: Working at Amazon

#22

Post by pwinnski »

asdfasdfasd333 wrote: post #4

Thanks for writing this, and with all due respect: This exact article could have been copy/pasted from any of the other big-tech companies. What makes Amazon different?

I've read many posts here on HN about how terrible working for Amazon is compared to other big tech companies, so this makes for some balance, at least.

Re: Working at Amazon

#23

Post by ido »

vkou wrote: post #16
xchaotic wrote: post #9

The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're late, like applying to Amazon now would be,…

> I'd probably have nowhere to change jobs to, if Amazon didn't work out. Seattle rents/homes are, compared to SWE salaries, not that high (Yet), and Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Tableau are all hiring.

at senior developer at a major company like amazon we're talking...what? At least $200-250k/year? Even in Seattle that doesn't trap you in working-poor conditions.

Re: Working at Amazon

#24

Post by methodover »

sumitgt wrote: post #15
xchaotic wrote: post #9

The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're late, like applying to Amazon now would be,…

> Especially in places like Seattle if I was to relocate with the family, I'd be an indentured servant, with obligations to pay high rent/mortgage, I'd probably have nowhere to change jobs to, if Amazon didn't work out. That's quite the opposite. Wouldn't living in a big city mean more choices? Seattle for instance has high paying job options from Microsoft, Google, FB if you decide to leave Amazon. However, yes havi…

Aren't the Google and FB offices in Seattle relatively small, satellite offices?

Re: Working at Amazon

#25

Post by falcolas »

top256 wrote: post #2

it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.

> pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night

For multinational corporations, this has never made sense to me. Why do we insist on relying groggy, "at the bottom of their performance curve" engineers to keep your system up, instead of someone in the middle of their work day?

IMO, if you're waking someone up in the middle of the night, something is horribly wrong, and it's not the issue you woke that person up for.

Re: Working at Amazon

#26

Post by gamedna »

While informative, this post is extremely non-contentious, and i suspect on purpose. Much of what is said here can be said about most companies that are at scale. Probably by design b/c if his employer or manager found out about it, i am sure there would be backlash.

Re: Working at Amazon

#27

Post by RickS »

methodover wrote: post #24
sumitgt wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Especially in places like Seattle if I was to relocate with the family, I'd be an indentured servant, with obligations to pay high rent/mortgage, I'd probably have nowhere to change jobs to, if Amazon didn't work out. That's quite the opposite. Wouldn't living in a big city mean more choices? Seattle for instance has high paying job options from Microsoft, Google, FB if you decide to leave Amazon. However, yes havi…

Aren't the Google and FB offices in Seattle relatively small, satellite offices?

Yes. The optionality relative to rural america is excellent. The optionality relative to the bay area is very poor.

Re: Working at Amazon

#28

Post by mabbo »

xchaotic wrote: post #9

The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're late, like applying to Amazon now would be,…

I am sort of a remote developer for Amazon.

I'm a 'deployment engineer' who travels most weeks to different fulfillment centers (warehouses) for work, and when I'm not traveling I'm usually writing code for my team.

Of course, by saying that I reveal the real flaw in my entire remote role: aren't I supposed to be working instead of posting comments on HN?

Re: Working at Amazon

#30

Post by dsfyu404ed »

falcolas wrote: post #25
top256 wrote: post #2

it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.

> pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night For multinational corporations, this has never made sense to me. Why do we insist on relying groggy, "at the bottom of their performance curve" engineers to keep your system up, instead of someone in the middle of their work day? IMO, if you're waking someone up in the middle of the night, something is horribly wrong, and it's not the issue you woke that…

Most don't page people at 1am for the initial page. People only get paged at 1am when the problem has been narrowed down to some specific software and all the people with expertise in that thing are in the same time zone.
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