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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#281

Post by jstx1 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #95
olladecarne wrote: post #36

My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). My advice is to look for founder-led teams (not companies). If there are plenty of founders still on the team, they will likely care a lot about the product and code and hold everyone to high standards which make the work easier in the long run. On the other hand when I've been on teams where all the original founders left, it's been a constant s…

> My experience has been similar at other large companies (MSFT, Google). I would expect Google to have better engineering discipline than Amazon or Meta.

Why better than Meta? My impression was that Meta have outstanding engineering (regardless of what else is happening with their products and company direction).

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#282

Post by nixgeek »

oblio wrote: post #265
Chamix wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tech survey results, ops load via CTI tickets, CR/LOC stats, accolades, COEs, promotion rate, turnover/attrition.... There are so many data sources that are all queryable via API. There are a couple basic greasemonkey scripts already floating around but as an SDE it really isn't that hard to write something yourself... It does take a bit of experience to get a good heuristic on weighting the different data points but…

> Tech survey results, ops load via CTI tickets, CR/LOC stats, accolades, COEs, promotion rate, turnover/attrition... Tech survey results??

Amazon runs an annual survey with typically quite high participation rates, it is very detailed, and the results are often illuminating (and like many things at Amazon, widely accessible to all people).

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#283

Post by anon7725 »

amzn-throw wrote: post #243
gruffle wrote: post #87

Earlier 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.

I like building things with code. I don’t like group bikeshedding about processes, tools and “best practices.” Do I even like software engineering?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#284

Post by nixgeek »

gruffle wrote: post #82
ldjkfkdsjnv wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope no approval required

Interesting, I was told the opposite by my managers...

Unless you’re in Focus or Pivot, you’re a free agent. When Amazon is performance managing you in any sense it isn’t up to your existing manager if you can move, it would be an L10 (VP) exception on the receiving side to allow you to move, even if the hiring manager thinks you’re great.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#285

Post by PartiallyTyped »

nyarlathotep_ wrote: post #3

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…

> I'd actually force myself to write even trivial code on weekends to ensure my ability to develop didn't atrophy as a result of lack of use.

I am glad I am doing a master's in parallel because outside that I haven't written code in a while ...

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#286

Post by [deleted] »

wmichelin wrote: post #168

This author sounds insufferable. Tooling sucks? Fix it. It's important to lead with a culture of quality and impact. Wasting 40 hours a month on something broken? It'd literally be faster to stop your feature work, fix that thing, and then go back to your feature work. Be the change you want to see.

[deleted]

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#287

Post by dxuh »

Sadly where I work I split my time very similarly and I thought it was a sign of a dysfunctional organization and a sign that I should leave. It's been my only professional software job, so I thought it's likely going to be better somewhere else, but now I am concerned this might be more normal than I thought. Is that so?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#288

Post by glogla »

Aeolun wrote: post #239
gruffle wrote: post #68

Earlier 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…

> The goal is to determine the state of the internal tools, not to purge any dissenters…

Well ... maybe?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#289

Post by menaerus »

silisili wrote: post #253
pbronez wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the tip - Exercism looks great. https://exercism.org/

Thanks for the link. I initially thought it was a misspelling of exorcism, and OP was making a joke.

Me too and I was like wtf ... Made my day

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#290

Post by oblio »

nixgeek wrote: post #282
oblio wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Tech survey results, ops load via CTI tickets, CR/LOC stats, accolades, COEs, promotion rate, turnover/attrition... Tech survey results??

Amazon runs an annual survey with typically quite high participation rates, it is very detailed, and the results are often illuminating (and like many things at Amazon, widely accessible to all people).

Yeah, but you can't see stuff outside your group, I imagine? I mean, dis-aggregated, to drill down to team level.

OP was making it sound like you could get the results for a specific team you'd want to transfer to.

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