I think AWS is probably the place to be Amazon. The whole idea of the cloud is that everything gets automated so good and clean engineering will be rewarded. I think working on the Amazon e-commerce is much less fun because it's much messier to deal with issues like customer support, taxes and other stuff.
Working at Amazon
31–40 of 65 posts
Re: Working at Amazon
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
You mean on six pages? ;)
The 20 minute quiet reading in the beginning is kinda different. At the other companies I've worked for, you were expected to come to the meeting having read the docs sent over email.
> At the other companies I've worked for, you were expected to come to the meeting having read the docs sent over email.
It may be expected but large numbers of people don't do it. The 20 min. thing is a bit odd but I can see how it could be a net positive.
Re: Working at Amazon
#33it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.
> pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night For multinational corporations, this has never made sense to me. Why do we insist on relying groggy, "at the bottom of their performance curve" engineers to keep your system up, instead of someone in the middle of their work day? IMO, if you're waking someone up in the middle of the night, something is horribly wrong, and it's not the issue you woke that…
Having done Amazon on-call for five years, I can give some background on that.
First, the front-line pager duty is usually hit by an ops eng team first. Each of those teams has an India group and an North America group. If they can't resolve the issue, they page in the developers. Having good Ops Eng guys supporting you is a blessing.
There's also a very strong incentive for teams to write good software and test before deploying when you know damn well that if you're deploying something that doesn't work, you're the guy who will have to deal with it at 3am. Having strong integration and system tests suddenly becomes incredibly important.
Edit: and as dsfyu404ed said, the Ops Eng guys will be smart enough to narrow down where the problem is usually. If you're being paged, it's usually your team's fault.
Re: Working at Amazon
#34The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're late, like applying to Amazon now would be,…
I go into work every day. I wish I could work remotely. But I don't, because I find I hate every time I'm forced to interact with the people who do.
Working remotely makes you a pain in the ass to interact with.
Re: Working at Amazon
#35it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.
Amazon on-call engineer here! I'm on-call for three rotations. Two are "Call leader" rotations where a call leader like me is engaged if there's any kind of large event (e.g. Amazon.com orders aren't working, or an AWS service is having issues). I volunteer for those because it's super rewarding to be able to help materially make a tangible difference now and then, wouldn't trade them away for anything. For those rotations, I am paged in the middle of the night, and there's nothing I can really do about that.
The other rotation is for one of my dev-team's software, and I'm hardly ever paged - like once or twice a year max. That's how it's supposed to be: by having skin in the game and being directly on the hook for the reliability of what we produce, I'm sure that we automate to a much greater degree than we might otherwise. We have a culture of strong ownership: it's not uncommon to see senior engineers elect to be engaged on all of their team's live issues, even if they aren't on-call themselves.
Some other teams make different trade-offs, and have follow-the-sun rotations or engagements that are more reliant on humans following run-books than automations. There can be a place for that, but it gets old quickly and is not scalable. Good teams will prioritize the work to get out of that above almost anything.
Re: Working at Amazon
#36The biggest flaw in working for all those mega corps, is that despite their size, they still haven't fully embraced remote work. Yes there are island, but Amazon are still looking for that "2nd city" to locate in. Some people may dig going to an office, I don't. If you're lucky to be early in a given neighborhood, you can probably retire on renting out your house. If you're late, like applying to Amazon now would be,…
I am sort of a remote developer for Amazon. I'm a 'deployment engineer' who travels most weeks to different fulfillment centers (warehouses) for work, and when I'm not traveling I'm usually writing code for my team. Of course, by saying that I reveal the real flaw in my entire remote role: aren't I supposed to be working instead of posting comments on HN?
I hardly think that is unique to remote work, as evidenced in the same manner by my comment from my office.
Re: Working at Amazon
#37it's interesting how Amazon is now positioning themselves as a tier 1 employer. They used to be a tier2. AFAIK they also have a brutal pager culture where you're awoken in the middle of the night.
I've experienced that when the coders are getting paged they'll focus on quality and writing better proactive tests. But when you throw the ops responsilities over to another team then that other team gets to decide how and when new code gets shipped which slows down the whole operation. I've experienced that Dev vs. Ops arrangement too where the ops team was incentivized to maintain stability over allowing new code to be shipped which resulted in no code being shipped! When devs own the ops responsibility too then things move faster.
Re: Working at Amazon
#38Amazon has one thing going for it that I think is a huge deal for a standard BigCo job: if you don't like your initial team, you can switch ANY TIME. And if you're an engineer, you can probably join any team you want. The reason this is such a big deal is that when applying to any company, you'll get placed on a team and it's really hard to get enough information on the culture, mission, management, etc. Once you're…
What was wrong with the first team? How large are teams, generally? Are we talking like, six people, or sixty?
I'd also like to hear more on this, if possible
Re: Working at Amazon
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 20 minute quiet reading in the beginning is kinda different. At the other companies I've worked for, you were expected to come to the meeting having read the docs sent over email.
The Amazon way appeals to me because in my experience pretty much no one ever does the pre-reading.
And even if they do chances are they've context switched enough since reading that most of the details are lost.
Re: Working at Amazon
#40> kid engineers
If he described pretty much any other group with type of label he would be lambasted for it.
Just saying.
Anyway, I'd be wary of the experience of a well known senior-principal level AWS employee being anything like the day to day for someone coming at SDE-2 with 5-10 years experience. He's well past the point where some shitty low level dev manager can make his life hell.