Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly. Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting ticket…
Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink Sometimes I get frustrated at my own job for some reason or another, but I appreciate learning that the grass isn't really greener anywhere else & even places where tech is the core business are having a lot of the same problems.
Laying myself off from Amazon
241–250 of 374 posts
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#242I left this feedback a bunch of times with different people in the org and I really hope they scrap their janky "frameworks" and dev tooling. They should just move to more standard open source tools options that evolve and get better quicker than barely maintained internal tooling.
Open Source tools also have bigger communities and resources online to debug and solve issues, compared to mediocre documentation from internal wiki. If absolutely needed, make thin wrappers above open source tools. Some other teams within Amazon had the luxury of using better tools, but I bet a lot of people are in the shoes I was in.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#243Amazon has a lot of bad internal tools, but this person's experience doesn't match mine (being here for 8 years) at all > 40% of my time trying to tame the bad internal tooling I was forced to use to submit my code, get it merged, deploy it, check logs, etc… The tools for code submission, pull requests, pipelines, metrics, and logging are fantastic. Google is better. Most companies aren't. I have never spent 40% of m…
> On my team we brutally introspect the value of every meeting, and if it looks like it's not delivering value, we find a new process Oh yeah I love the multiple hours we have spend every week 'introspecting' processes, just to throw out one of the dozen we'd already defined and add another one. And this 'introspection' typically boils down to the loudest, most ambitious mouthbreathers forcing their BS down everyones…
Quit, and go make sourdough bread, shit.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#244Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe so, so long as we disagree with the notion that that the most senior engineers, the ones who are having "discussions" and making technical decisions, should not have to be active in the code, work with the development teams, and have a deep technical understanding about it works today. They don't have to have the highest commit counts, but if they're not the ones the rest of the development team look to for hel…
I mean, of course. That's part of the job: you can't search for multiplier effects without knowing what they are.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#246Worked for AWS for just under a year and a half; this mirrors my experience exactly. Poorly designed, failure-prone, brittle internal tooling was a time and energy sink to the point where even the most trivial deployment change was a nail-biter. Automated tooling and tests that were ostensibly created to make life easier were the number one pain point and constantly failed in obscure ways that required cutting ticket…
You are pretty much validating that Amazon is a 2-year company, as reflected in their vesting schedule.
If you do the math on their TC to see how it actually works out from month to month, it makes sense. Unless you get more RSU's, you take a huge hit in pay, unless you weren't cashing in on them to make ends meet.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On my team we brutally introspect the value of every meeting, and if it looks like it's not delivering value, we find a new process Oh yeah I love the multiple hours we have spend every week 'introspecting' processes, just to throw out one of the dozen we'd already defined and add another one. And this 'introspection' typically boils down to the loudest, most ambitious mouthbreathers forcing their BS down everyones…
Who hurt you? Do you even like software engineering? Quit, and go make sourdough bread, shit.
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#248Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely agree. Interesting how the internal dev satisfaction polling always shows that the vast majority of devs just absolutely love the internal tooling and processes. Might have something to do with the polls not actually being anonymous. When hr/polling teams are asked about anonymity they generally skirt or ignore the question, but I've learned that enough metadata is collected to identify any responder in pr…
Why would you respond positively even on non-anonymous polls? The goal is to determine the state of the internal tools, not to purge any dissenters…
Re: Laying myself off from Amazon
#250heh. try one of the teams with no coverage reqs…