261–270 of 270 posts
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I'll work for them in a heartbeat. Seriously, I want to work somewhere where I'm never bored, and can take part in conversations, etc. It seems like a good place for an ambitious new grad for a few years. If there are any Amazon employees reading this, please reach out!
Feel free to get in touch (email is in my HN profile) or to look at the AWS Careers page.
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I'd be happy to get you into the interview process, or at least point you in the right direction. My experience at Amazon has been great. I don't know anyone who cries at their desk, works 80 hours per week, or feels like they're being pushed through a meat grinder. I worked for Microsoft before Amazon, and that was brutal. You'll find bad teams at every large company. One of my friends was on one at Google.
I'd take you up on that offer. I'd love to have a third crack at it. I've had two coding challenges within that last year. One for an internship and one for a full time position (earlier today no reply yet don't expect one). The problem for me is I freeze. As soon as the "testing" type pressure gets put on I go cold and freeze. Then as soon as the test is over I can pull alllllll the information forward. It sucks bec…
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I'd be happy to get you into the interview process, or at least point you in the right direction. My experience at Amazon has been great. I don't know anyone who cries at their desk, works 80 hours per week, or feels like they're being pushed through a meat grinder. I worked for Microsoft before Amazon, and that was brutal. You'll find bad teams at every large company. One of my friends was on one at Google.
I'd love to have a go at the interview process if it's possible. I had an interview process a while back (at the end of April I believe) but I don't know what went wrong - I kept getting calls from Amazon (Seattle number) claiming I had not done the test (which I had already done) and the HR folks mentioning I was not selected - and to try 6 months later. I would definitely like to have another go at it, if possible.
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Justify to me why you shouldn't be replaced by someone who has comparable skills, but doesn't rely entirely on pair programming? I can't hand you an important task and expect it to get done unless I give you a second resource? You are talking about burnout. Would you really walk into an interview and respond to a coding question with "Oh, you'll have to write with me directing because I only pair program"? I'm going…
1. Why are you assuming that my job description would/should be "engineer"? Why not, say, QA lead? 2. Why hand me the task? Why not hand someone else the task, and I'll wander in and make sure they get it done twice as quickly? Why does everyone need to be modellable as a task-queue that atomic problem-statements can be dropped into? You don't expect, say, your office manager to program; but you do expect that, by hi…
Because that's what this entire conversation is about.
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Hard work, get it. But what about the stories of people bringing their laptops into the bathroom stalls (which are always packed to the gills because why would Jeff want to waste money on, you know, extra bathrooms and stuff)? And once there, talking to each other about work stuff while doing, you know, their "business"? Taken together, these anecdotes paint a picture of a company that's not just hard-driven, but...…
No one takes their laptop to the stalls and they are not packed.
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/at-amazon-employees-treat-t...
Particularly this little vignette:
Even more alarming was the bathroom culture. I can only speak to the men’s room, most of which each had two urinals and two stalls. I come from a background where a bathroom is a place where you do a certain kind of business, in silence, and you leave. At Amazon, the men’s room is an extension of the office. People chitchat about work in the bathroom, as if it is just another meeting room where you can piss everywhere.
The most horrifying moment of my employment at Amazon was the time I was using the toilet and a coworker began talking from the stall next to me. He asked me why I had not responded to his very pressing email. I closed my eyes and pretended this wasn’t happening. What email could be so important that it could not wait five minutes for me to use the bathroom? He began tapping on the wall between our stalls, asking why I wouldn’t respond, as if inter-stall conversation should be a totally normal, not disgusting means of communication.
He became more specific about what he needed—referencing a project I’d never heard of, nor would I ever have involvement in—and I realized he had misidentified me from my shoes. (Many brown dress shoes look alike, apparently.) We both exited our stalls around the same time, and he realized his mistake. He didn’t apologize, only explained that he thought I was someone else. As we washed our hands, he just laughed, and I vowed I would never use the stalls on that floor again.
Is the guy lying? Just imagining things?
Please share your thoughts.
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I'd love to have a go at the interview process if it's possible. I had an interview process a while back (at the end of April I believe) but I don't know what went wrong - I kept getting calls from Amazon (Seattle number) claiming I had not done the test (which I had already done) and the HR folks mentioning I was not selected - and to try 6 months later. I would definitely like to have another go at it, if possible.
Shoot me an email. It's in my profile.
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It really depends on the individual situation. The biggest cost variance is in housing. In the Midwest, you can get a 2,500 sq ft home for ~1.3k +/- $350. [0] Under normal leasing standards (no more than 1/3rd your income to rent), you can pay that if you have a job in the $50k-$60k range. And that's almost the standard -- big houses and big yards for everyone. In LA or SEA, you're looking at 2.5x-4x that, which is a…
>(In SF or NYC, you probably can't obtain a comparable living situation, but a 2500 sq ft apartment apparently runs around $15k/mo, meaning you'd have to make almost $1M/yr to barely afford one) I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The mcmansion trend hit the bay area just as much as it hit anywhere else. The burbs are 20-30 minutes away with tech worker job hours. The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dol…
Searching for rentals within the actual city limits. Burbs are fine but already addressed; generally you are looking at 1 hour+ commutes before it starts to get into "affordable" range (looking at 1.5x-2.5x the median cost for comparable housing in other metros).
In LA and SEA, it seems it's possible to find housing that's closer than 1 hours' commute for 2.5x-4.5x the national median.
In NYC and SF, it doesn't appear that way -- these areas are so dense that it's not possible to get a 2500 sq ft home within 1 hours' commute (meaning freestanding homes that have a yard, not condos/apartments; such homes actually appear to be so rare within city limits that you'd have difficulty getting them no matter how much money you were willing to spend). That's why I singled them out. I'm talking about a rush hour commute here, the need to get to work to do a 9-5. For example, I know Daly City is only a few miles from SF proper, but that doesn't mean you can get doorstep-to-doorstep in under an hour given the transit conditions.
I've never lived in either SF or NYC so it's completely possible that I'm making an incorrect extrapolation here.
>The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dollars, so your mortgage cancels out the additional bay area income. But that mortgage money doesn't go into a black hole, it's equity. So at the end of the day you can sell your bay area house, go back to oklahoma, and buy ten houses. This is probably the best opportunity going in the world right now to build dynastic wealth.
This is a good idea if you can get the timing right.
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The worst I've seen is a recruiter that didn't tell me I had been accepted . I found out when someone at the company followed up on why I hadn't responded to the offer. I have no idea how a commission-based business manages to do something like that.
Are internal recruiters (sales people) commission based? Seems strange.
Which makes this utterly weird - it was literally a matter of giving up (potentially) several grand by not forwarding an email.
Hearing that the recruiter more or less committed to a 170K+ range, only to waste significant amounts of interviewee time before rendering a below market offer is really concerning. Amazon is in direct competition for talent with Google, Facebook and Microsoft and from what information I can gather they all pay significantly more while also lacking the bad reputation Amazon has accrued over the years for being a comp…
Amazon is not in direct competition with those companies. Amazon bottom feeds on new grad hires, people with restrictive visas, and interns. Their 90th percentile pay for developers is going to be about $120k per year with maybe a $150k total comp target. They may hire a few dozen top people per year, but for the most part no one ever quits those companies to go to Amazon.
The real question to ask is how many individual technical contributors does Amazon lose to the others?
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>(In SF or NYC, you probably can't obtain a comparable living situation, but a 2500 sq ft apartment apparently runs around $15k/mo, meaning you'd have to make almost $1M/yr to barely afford one) I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The mcmansion trend hit the bay area just as much as it hit anywhere else. The burbs are 20-30 minutes away with tech worker job hours. The 2500 sqft homes here cost a million dol…
>I'm not sure where you are getting this from. The mcmansion trend hit the bay area just as much as it hit anywhere else. The burbs are 20-30 minutes away with tech worker job hours. Searching for rentals within the actual city limits. Burbs are fine but already addressed; generally you are looking at 1 hour+ commutes before it starts to get into "affordable" range (looking at 1.5x-2.5x the median cost for comparable…
I'm not claiming these homes are affordable inside SF, but they certainly exist - anyone who has spent much time in the city or searched zillow can attest (I would link you if I weren't on my phone). There are three-story single-family Victorians all over the place. The yard is usually in the back, though, as putting one next to city street traffic is a waste of space. There are some gated communities with front yards.
The preponderance of single-family homes in the city is one of the causes of the high housing prices. Most of the apartments/condos are actually subdivided versions of the victorians, because it is not legal to build anything taller. And now you have owners evicting all occupants of a property like this, converting them back into a single-family-home with an open floor plan, giant deck, lots of windows, and asking price in the millions. The circle is complete.
>For example, I know Daly City is only a few miles from SF proper, but that doesn't mean you can get doorstep-to-doorstep in under an hour given the transit conditions.
The BART train from Daly City reaches Montgomery station in 15 minutes. If you can't stand a train you do need to commute in off-hours.
>This is a good idea if you can get the timing right.
Granted, there are possible scenarios where this won't work, but all you need is for housing to appreciate at the rate of inflation over a few decades. If that happens fifteen years after you buy, you can sell and lock in your gains early. It's not so different from putting your 401k in equities when you are decades from retirement.