Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer • Hacker News Board

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#241

Post by bob1029 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:02 PM UTC

jammygit wrote: post #146

bob1029 wrote: post #135

At what point does an organization get to be so large such that it is guaranteed to become a menace to society and individual human dignity? I cannot come up with any publicly-held multi-billion dollar technology company today that isn't seemingly run by psychopaths. Is there some new SEC regulation regarding corporate leadership I am unaware of? Is it an audit item that requires HR to fuck over all their employees w…

How do you find the best high paying jobs at smaller shops? Where do you look to find out about those companies?

That is the difficult part. You probably won't find the high paying jobs up front. What I had to do was take a modest salary up front and then revolutionize the business from within before I saw any major payout. This is how I prefer to do things though. If you are looking for good pay but don't necessarily want to bust your ass for unknown payout, you are honestly better off looking at some mega corps and getting what you want up front. The equation seems to be:

Megacorp:

  - Large up-front salary and benefits package.
  - More bullshit process just to get an interview and a job.
  - Non-existent-to-modest growth path.
  - Work just enough to get by or as hard as you can stand to, won't matter.
  - Contributions can feel meaningless due to all of the layers of people and process involved.
  - Stable work environment, you feel like your job will always be there.

Mom & Pop shop:

  - Regrettable up-front salary and marginal benefits.
  - Can be hired on the spot, will likely interview with the owners of the business on first or 2nd round.
  - Can work your way onto the board and can have major pull on decisions. 
    Sometimes, you will even become the executive decision maker for an entire project due to the team scale.
  - Must work your ass off on an almost daily basis because you have a small or no team. 
    Conversely, this also means your successes are directly visible to the business owners, 
    as you don't have to fight through middle management, HR and other team members to get to your kudos (money/position).
  - Contributions can feel incredible if you are on a successful project, or at least moving it in that direction.
  - Potentially more unstable work environment. Smaller businesses are much more likely to fail, 
    so this can add to your stress levels significantly.
    Especially, if your project is the only thing keeping the lights on.

I found my current role on a StackOverflow careers posting. Nothing special at first glance, but I've really enjoyed the experience thus far. It really is what you make of it when you take up a position at a smaller business. I will never have this amount of impact at a place like Google/Amazon/Facebook/Microsoft.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#242

Post by opportune » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

k-ian wrote: post #240

opportune wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That's basically it. You have normal vacation time, then "personal time", which is what is used as sick leave. It doesn't roll over and you're encouraged to use that by the end of the year.

I see, didn't realize it doubled as sick time. I guess that is good if you are a young and healthy person, since it encourages you to not lie about being sick and lets you use that time for extra vacation.

Other competitive companies will often do "unlimited sick days" and start you with 3 weeks of vacation, which I would still personally prefer even though I am unlikely to be sick for over 5 days of a year.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#243

Post by scarface74 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:07 PM UTC

jjwhitaker wrote: post #120

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…

I interviewed at Amazon recently but didn't get an offer. I'd say there is clear division between white and blue collar conditions and though I don't want in on the warehouse side their main offices would be a major career bump for me. I'd be one of those 3-5 year survival jobs where, like my other AMZN main office employee friends, a promotion means changing teams asap to capitalize on the good PR internally. Like,…

I’m seriously debating what I want my next role to be. I’ve reached close to the statistical peak[1] of my earning potential as a software developer/team lead/architect in my local market (Atlanta) and definitely will not be moving to the west coast. That only leaves a few options.

1. Stay in development and make sure I do enough Resume Driven Development to stay current and be happy with cost of living wages. Not a bad thing, my wife and I make enough to enjoy ourselves and reach our short and long term goals and I enjoy development.

2. Go into management - mid level managers don’t make enough more to be worth the headache and I really don’t enjoy managing.

3. Consulting (not staff augmentation), I have the skillset to be an overpriced “digital transformation consultant”/“Enterprise Consultant”/various AWS consulting roles, but I’m not sure I want to do it. But that would be basically the only way I could make significantly more without moving. AWS hires SAs, TAMs, and other consultant type roles that don’t require relocation but require a lot of travel.

[1] I’m sure there is a company out there that is looking for a “rockstar ninja developer” that would pay a premium over market value without having to relocate but that would be rare.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#244

Post by SilasX » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:08 PM UTC

kmarc wrote: post #232

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…

This happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right. Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my la…

My story: an interviewer stubbornly insisted that my code had to be O(n^2) because it had an inner loop, even though the inner loop was only iterating over the substructure of each element, rather than every pair of elements, and then demonstrated that he had no idea how to resolve a disagreement of that kind, and then immediately vetoed me from the rest of the day's interviews.

https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/1ilh7o/w...

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#245

Post by SilasX » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:13 PM UTC

jaf656s wrote: post #167

oarabbus_ wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I simplified the ask to be honest. It was not a simple `select date, country, sum(gdp) from table group by 1,2`. There were additional components to the question. And as you mentioned, you can also distinct on the window function. This is not an inefficient operation in Redshift. Also I fundamentally disagree with your premise. One result set is equivalent to another, and as long as you aren't using unnecessary neste…

>One result set is equivalent to another, and as long as you aren't using unnecessary nested loop joins or such, there are a dozen ways to solve a query. If they consume similar resources I'd almost always opt for the simplest one to understand. In cases where the simpler one is less efficient, I might still use it if the task didn't require absolute optimization.

Sure, and that would be a fair criticism, to say, "is there a version of this that's more intuitive and easier to read with the same load on the server?" But the interviewer (assuming the OP faithfully represented the exchange and the domain) is insisting that the query does not do what was asked -- when it does -- and is saying so based on the interviewer's own incomplete understanding.

That's not a good reason to reject a candidate, even if there might be other good reasons in this case.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#246

Post by soVeryTired » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:25 PM UTC

gtsteve wrote: post #106

I once met a guy who was a programmer for a hedge fund. The strategies and knowledge he had would be very useful to competitors. They didn't have a non-compete agreement in the contract, as this is almost never enforceable here, instead he agreed to a six month notice period - after working two months' notice they then paid four months' salary for him to take a holiday while his knowledge became less and less useful…

I got a couple of months' gardening leave (as it's known in the industry). The most senior guys would typically get six months off work: three paid, three unpaid.

It's just an industry-standard way of doing things. I didn't leave for a competitor but still got a paid vacation (though in principle I was "on call" while I was on the books).

To be honest, it sort of felt like a courtesy they extended rather than a means of protecting their IP. There's already a huge amount of lateral hiring in asset management, so everyone already kinda-sorta knows what everyone else is doing.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#247

Post by mruts » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

Tehchops wrote: post #234

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 wonder why tech people aren’t more interested in those jobs. For all the hobgoblins and stories of bad-faith intent by big tech companies, they are still far more progressive than financial companies when it comes to things like hours, working arrangements, tenure, schooling, organizational hierarchy etc... Find me a finance job that lets me work 100% remote and doesn't care I didn't attend $prestigiousCollege and…

I don't know about remote (No finance firms I know of would allow that), but I haven't even graduated from college and I make good good money working as a quant at a bank. Maybe you don't want to wear a suit and tie each day (I do and I think it makes me looking fresh as fuck), but finance hasn't been a backwater in a while. Maybe there's no slide and free haircuts, but there's something better: cash money baby.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#248

Post by coding123 » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:46 PM UTC

They are going after an executive for non-compete. They'll lose the case because they probably didn't go after hundreds of other employees that went into competing roles. A selective lawsuit like that will definitely fail - it will look vindictive.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#249

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:47 PM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #243

jjwhitaker wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I interviewed at Amazon recently but didn't get an offer. I'd say there is clear division between white and blue collar conditions and though I don't want in on the warehouse side their main offices would be a major career bump for me. I'd be one of those 3-5 year survival jobs where, like my other AMZN main office employee friends, a promotion means changing teams asap to capitalize on the good PR internally. Like,…

I’m seriously debating what I want my next role to be. I’ve reached close to the statistical peak[1] of my earning potential as a software developer/team lead/architect in my local market (Atlanta) and definitely will not be moving to the west coast. That only leaves a few options. 1. Stay in development and make sure I do enough Resume Driven Development to stay current and be happy with cost of living wages. Not a…

[deleted]

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#250

Post by mjevans » Mon, Aug 05, 2019, 10:48 PM UTC

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…

This is why the real-tests should be entirely in pseudo-code and about the logical structure.

Any optimization should happen after a basic algorithm that works and might go along the lines of (telemetry suggests our platform has a bottleneck here) how would you speed things up if there's an issue in this section?