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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

#221

Post by mountainofdeath »

ses1984 wrote: post #10
dvt wrote: post #5

I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed. Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they ha…

How many friends do you have who worked for a company more than 5 years? Work for Amazon for 2 years, learn a lot, get paid a lot, move on.

Amazon does not even pay a lot. It's 80% of everyone at best (yes, including the grossly overweight restricted stock units).

Amazon (among others) imports legions of new-graduates and mid-level engineers from oversees on a variety of visas, pays them the local wage but in the US. If you leave the company for any reason, you have something like 7 days to pack up and go home.

It's modern indentured servitude.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#222

Post by opportune »

whycombagator wrote: post #89

IIRC salaried workers at Amazon get 10 PTO days. This stops me from even applying. I wouldn't ever again consider less than 20, and really need a minumum of 25.

I know people who work on AWS and they were telling me that they get 10 days of some other kind of vacation they can use too. So it's like 10 "real" vacation days that I assume roll-over year to year, you get paid for if you quit with them, etc. and then another 10 that are completely use-it-or-lose it. I don't know the details though

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#223

Post by cbzbc »

dvt wrote: post #5

I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed. Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they ha…

The first and only time I interviewed at Amazon, the interviewing engineer was so obviously stressed that he was shaking from it. As the interview itself was fairly light weight I assumed it was due to his work -- nothing I've heard from current/former Amazoners has changed my mind.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#224

Post by oarabbus_ »

rb808 wrote: post #205
oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…

Rather than be annoyed, you'd probably get bonus marks if you could show him the group-by query (sounds like you could have done that easily), then explain why your way is better. The interviewer would have been impressed at your maturity and skill.

The actual interview was more akin to the interviewer telling an interviewee that "python doesn't support multithreading"; something patently false. No, this kind of erroneous statement should not be glossed over.

For your information, this was the later stage of questions. The very first question did involve a simple summation group by, so I'd already demonstrated my understanding there. I showed no frustration or annoyance during the interview in case you are attempting to imply that was the case.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#225

Post by cameronbrown »

kevin_b_er wrote: post #103
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?

As it turns out: You cannot "just move company" unless you live in California.

It's still a hell of a lot cushier than what others have to deal with.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#226

Post by fkdo »

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.

Yes. I remember AWS asked about the size of the databases I have worked with in the past, and then negged me when it was smaller than their databases.

Of course the databases I worked with were smaller, they deal with some of the largest in the world.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#227

Post by ShakataGaNai »

MrLeap wrote: post #196
oarabbus_ wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I'm with you on this, even beyond the first week. Been doing primarily Python for more than a year now and sometimes I still slide back to my Perl days and write the C-style for.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#228

Post by 420codebro »

bootlooped wrote: post #197
vonmoltke wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Fuck all these losers. I'm not kidding. They can get fucking aids and die at this point holy shit.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#229

Post by scarface74 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #104
scarface74 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? It just so happens that all of the products produced by Google, Microsoft and Apple that need a lot of blue collar workers are done by contractors in a different country. I bet none of the…

> Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? Okay, but we're talking about what Amazon is doing now , not how other hypothetical companies may or may not treat potential employees.

It’s not hypothetical at all.

Amazon depends on blue collar workers for its business to run. All of the other companies just outsource their blue collar workers to other countries. Apple for instance depends on hundreds of thousands of blue collar workers working at Foxconn. I doubt that workers at Foxconn are treated better than Amazon warehouse workers. Do we excuse Apple and condemn Amazon just because they don’t employ the workers directly? Google and Microsoft have much smaller hardware businesses, but they use Foxconn also as far as I know.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#230

Post by scarface74 »

pavel_lishin wrote: post #175
notyourwork wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those companies are not hypothetical at all though.

Then they're shitty companies that you shouldn't work for, either. I read scarface's comment as implying that every company is equally shitty, the only distinction being that some have been given the opportunity to show their ass and some haven't. My counter argument is that companies that are actively doing bad things are worse than companies that aren't.

What I’m saying is that the other companies aren’t actively doing bad things as long as you ignore all of the contract labor that it takes to produce iPhones/Pixels/Xboxes, etc.
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