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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

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Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#291

Post by chocolatemario »

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…

My Amazon experience was similar. Especially the lack of coding due to the emphasis on devops/meeting culture. I have since felt that once a product reaches maturity, additional headcount (butts in seats) are operators first and secondly a swarm for something like a broadly scoped breaking change, runtime upgrade or platform migration. There is plenty of fat to trim even in aws despite it being among the more secure jobs to have at the company.

I’ve seen work slow down across a few teams and it just leaves me in a place of boredom and complacency with a major technical itch. Despite this itch looking to be scratched, I cannot seem to find the time/energy to pursue coding regularly outside of work in the limited free time I have. Maybe if I were single, no kids, dogs…

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#292

Post by wikfwikf »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #276
horns4lyfe wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know the types of companies that are Microsoft shops come with their own problems, but my quality of life via tooling at two Microsoft shops has been great.

Do you mean Azure? I don't quite follow your comment.

I think they mean places which use Visual Studio, (usually) C#, Windows Server, Azure, etc. Lots of components of this stack tend to work a bit better if you use all the others. Common in finance, because of Excel.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#294

Post by wikfwikf »

epolanski wrote: post #124
matai_kolila wrote: post #104

Sigh... another loss at the hands of, "Code is Art!" It's not art. Art requires no function, it exists as a representation. (Professional) code, and software engineering generally, must produce valuable things, and sometimes the process of making those valuable things isn't "fun", but that's never been part of the equation. Aligning "fun" with "valuable" is nearly impossible, and when you try you're dooming yourself…

I hate this whole idea that coding is a creative (in the artistic sense) activity. There's a limited number of solutions to a programming task, it's about finding the one that meets most constraints, it's about cost, effort, trade offs analysis and finally implementation.

Do you think that building a bridge is not a creative activity?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#295

Post by ranting-moth »

> ... 100% coverage requirement of the codebase ...

Is 100% really practical? Probably in life or finance critical code.

What about those "should never happen" cases? Incredibly hard to trigger because you only know from gut feeling it can happen in some really weird way.

I know it would feel very nice to have 100% coverage, but my gut feeling is that it will also affect the code base in a negative way. Developers might skip catching errors that would be very hard to reach.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#296

Post by simonebrunozzi »

I suggest, in this discussion, to not consider a single company a real, monolithic entity, where everything works the same way everywhere on the planet.

I was at AWS 2008-2014, two years each in EMEA, APAC, Americas. I didn't contribute to code directly, but I built my own software demos (I was the tech evangelist for these regions).

My experience has been vastly different between these 3 "regions", and also when interacting with HQ in Seattle (which I visited very frequently).

There are certain things that unfortunately heavily affect the company - the internal tools were already considered quite bad back then, and I'm not surprised it hasn't changed much.

There are others, though, that in my view are even more important. I had a total of 4 managers, and three of them were amazing, average, and quite bad.

But in all honesty, I was probably not perfect all the time (real modesty, uh? :D), and it might be that the "bad" manager and me were just a poor match, or that I failed to understand things that made me perceive him as bad.

I will never work for someone else ever again in my life (I can afford to, both economically and career-wise; in fact, I just launched a VC fund in Europe), and I love that. But if I had to go back to a corporate job, my single best piece of advice would be: pick your manager wisely, especially if you're early in your career. Everything else is important, yes, but your manager is going to have a huge influence on how you develop, how happy you are, etc.

If you're curious, this is how I got hired by Amazon back in 2008 [0]. I find that post a bit naive in retrospect, but I also wrote it ~15 years ago.

[0]: https://simon.medium.com/2008-how-i-got-hired-by-amazon-com-...

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#297

Post by _jppe »

I quit Amazon over a year ago with my managers encouraging me to stay. I was on a cross road of decisions between being stuck in an engineering work that intensify my depression vs taking the high road and hope for the best in uncharted startup territory.

Engineering at Amazon is not for a fainted heart, and internal tooling is definitely the source of most people's miseries. On multiple occasions, I had to fix external tools at the expense of making progress on my own work, in the name of exhibiting a "deep dive" ethos.

On another hand, however, I think Amazon is a good place to work for people who will eventually get into startups.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#298

Post by nickd2001 »

throwawaylinux wrote: post #192
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #112

> but also a job that made me feel more unhappy than any other job I’ve ever had. I can relate. I worked for many years for one "those" companies that is a household name. The pay wasn't outstanding, and the job was not one that gave me much fulfillment, but it was at a marquee brand. My business card opened a lot of doors. When that job finally ended (after almost 27 years), I started looking at working for other co…

> What I found, is that us older folks are quite unpopular, and got tired of slamming doors and passive-aggressive insults. Some of the older engineers I've worked with are among the most brilliant and productive people in the groups. In those cases I have seen bar none, they have been revered and respected among the other members. Age discrimination is definitely a thing, but not everywhere. Maybe that rotted mindse…

As a slightly older engineer, I believe there are 2 sides to the coin. Age discrimination can happen. On the other hand , older engineers don't always help themselves. In my last job, a colleague who was early 50s kept talking about 1980s TV sitcoms (which included various racist, sexist content that would at least come with a warning nowadays). This made him look like a dinosaur to younger colleagues. I generally find, younger engineers can sometimes play it a bit cocky and make out they know more than their older colleagues but when you show 'em a few old skool command line tricks or rapid edits in vim, and generally be a nice person to pair with, they quickly appreciate what you've got to offer, and the combination of youth and experience can be a great team dynamic. But its true I guess, people shouldn't have to get past initial prejudice based on age, and work harder to prove themselves, same as they shouldn't have to for race, gender etc.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#299

Post by xnorswap »

beebmam wrote: post #251
BurningFrog wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're good at cleaning up "pile of shit" code, you will always have work! It's s lot of fun with the right attitude.

I've made a great career of being a code janitor and doing what others don't want, while having a good attitude. In the last few years, I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it.

> a code janitor

I prefer the term troubleshooter specialising in legacy code, but "code janitor" definitely has felt more appropriate at times.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#300

Post by Aeolun »

glogla wrote: post #288
Aeolun wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I suppose? I’ve always answered honestly and never been purged so far.

N1 doesn’t really help, but it’s a start.

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