Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

Post by rhizome » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:19 AM UTC

scarface74 wrote: post #243

jjwhitaker wrote: post #120

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I interviewed at Amazon recently but didn't get an offer. I'd say there is clear division between white and blue collar conditions and though I don't want in on the warehouse side their main offices would be a major career bump for me. I'd be one of those 3-5 year survival jobs where, like my other AMZN main office employee friends, a promotion means changing teams asap to capitalize on the good PR internally. Like,…

I’m seriously debating what I want my next role to be. I’ve reached close to the statistical peak[1] of my earning potential as a software developer/team lead/architect in my local market (Atlanta) and definitely will not be moving to the west coast. That only leaves a few options. 1. Stay in development and make sure I do enough Resume Driven Development to stay current and be happy with cost of living wages. Not a…

Post by rhizome » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:23 AM UTC

kylek wrote: post #95

shados wrote: post #26

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> Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. 5 years is pretty darn high by tech company standard, as people already mentioned. Partly because of the culture of "you have to jump ship to make more money and promotions", but even the most employee friendly company will barely edge that, just because software engineers have a huge "grass is greener" syndrome.

I think "5 years" is a good indicator for amzn, as many (most?) L4/L5's sign up with a big chunk of stock that takes 4 years to vest.

Post by oarabbus_ » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:33 AM UTC

socialist_coder wrote: post #299

oarabbus_ wrote: post #258

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Exactly, it would have been fair game to ask why I used a window function instead of an aggregate function + subquery joined back onto the main result set. Or, to ask if I could rewrite the query another way which would be more efficient. However, the interviewer didn't simply insist the query does not do what was asked (when it did indeed return the correct results). Instead, the interviewer actually insisted it was…

From their perspective, they have hundreds of candidates and need to quickly filter a bunch out. So, having low-technical knowledge recruiters ask questions and look for a standard set of answers is the way they do it. There is no room for technical discussion during this phase, no room for nuance. I'm not saying this is a good process or that it's fair, but it is the reality right now. You still get OK results and i…

Post by oarabbus_ » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:39 AM UTC

ben509 wrote: post #293

oarabbus_ wrote: post #72

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst/business intelligence engineer role. When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of: select date_trunc('month',datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc('month', datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1 The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. "Don't you need an ad…

This is the reason whiteboarding gets a lot of hate. It's really a great way to get insight into how people approach problems and how fluent they are in a subject. And if they get something wrong, but they thought it through, that's a problem that will fix itself pretty readily. The person who doesn't think stuff through likely won't start. But the naive approach to whiteboarding is to do it as a test, can the person…

Post by jorblumesea » Tue, Aug 06, 2019, 4:43 AM UTC

mirceal wrote: post #183

jorblumesea wrote: post #169

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Nah Amazon has 15 and 20 at 7 years, which is pretty common in the US at least.

IIRC it’s 10 days for the first year and after that what you describe