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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

#211

Post by andrewguenther »

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…

Yeah, I was pretty surprised to read this complaint, but I would say iGraph is actually the weakest of the bunch. Logging and metrics tools at Amazon leave a lot to be desired. They get the job done, but definitely not best in class.

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

#212

Post by time_to_smile »

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…

> RSUs vesting schedule sucks

This is a crucial part of PIP culture. It took me awhile too realize how common a pattern it is for companies to offer promising RSUs as part of total comp and then drive employees out after 10 months.

That vesting schedule is just some slight of hand so that you think Amazon is paying you XX% more than they have ever planned on. In reality you're getting paid likely less than you would sticking at a smaller, saner company. If you knew that upfront you'd never join.

To be clear, not all companies that offer RSUs are like this (of course most of them have better vesting), but this is a pattern I've seen a bit too often.

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

#213

Post by Clubber »

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…

>an ego-driven hazing ritual

Last time I did an interview where this wasn't the case was 1998. Granted I don't really interview anymore.

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

#214

Post by throwawayboise »

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…

> The interviewer laughed at my code, and then after going through the logic said "Wow I can't believe this actually works."

OK, not professional, and fair grounds for deciding you don't want to work there (interviews are as much for you to evaluate the employer as they are for the employer to evaluate you) but.... have a bit of a thicker skin. Carrying something like that for 15 years instead of immediately dismissing it as the commentary of an asshole is just no way to go through life.

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

#215

Post by pkaye »

deltaonefour wrote: post #160
Waterluvian wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been doing this stuff for almost 10 years and I _still_ struggle with this lesson. I think it's a good sign. We have a deep desire for correctness. But I think while it's perfectly healthy to desire correctness, we all need to be able to do what you've demonstrated: accept that sometimes correctness is not a logical endeavour.

I actually don't have this problem. A lot of things programmers get hung up on is just OCD stuff that don't actually improve anything. I once named a function findGreatestCommonDenominatorGCDOfFraction(numerator: int, denominator: int) -> int and one programmer wanted me to rename it into GCD(x, y) because it was more elegant. While GCD feels more elegant it's actually less clear and less practical. The length and ve…

Why do you have GreatestCommonDenominator and GCD in that function name?

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

#216

Post by 6DM »

coldpie wrote: post #41
kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

A browsing tip: In Firefox, you can right-click on low-contrast text, select 'Inspect (Q)', and a thing will pop up showing all of the attributes of the text. You can uncheck the 'color' styles to restore a good text color, the filter at the top of the list helps find the 'color' entries. For some reason everyone loves grey-on-grey these days, so I find I'm doing this a lot. I've been thinking of writing a Firefox ex…

I'll do you one better, just use reader mode. It's the document looking icon in the url bar to the left of the bookmark button.

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

#217

Post by User23 »

tablespoon wrote: post #111
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…

> 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. I've heard this leads to a "hire to fire" strategy: managers hire some schmuck that's not expected to succeed in order to protect the rest of the team from the policy. Which is another reason I'd never touch A…

Six months of a six figure salary to take an on-the-job sabbatical sounds like a pretty good deal, from a certain point of view. It's a shame the hiring managers in question are unlikely to be transparent about the role's actual requirements.

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

#218

Post by munchler »

peakaboo wrote: post #143

I glanced through the leadership principles and laughed a bit. I feel sorry for the people who think they have to put up with that bullshit. It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible, that's the single reason those principles exist. To make specially young and clueless employees forget it's just a job, because hey, it must be an obsession! If you are young, this may seem normal i guess but…

As another old guy: Amen. I love being productive, but hate being pressured. All these FAANG jobs sound like the opposite. No thanks.

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

#219

Post by colinmhayes »

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/

This article is about warehouse workers, not developers.

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

#220

Post by taurath »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187
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.

This is what they always say but they never say which orgs are good or bad. When you’re a candidate you are rolling the dice
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