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Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

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Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#301

Post by karmasimida »

neofrommatrix wrote: post #144
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products.…

Right, this is accurate.

You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc.

Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#302

Post by jp57 »

neofrommatrix wrote: post #144
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products.…

My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.

When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets.

During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win.

Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#303

Post by delecti »

ixfo wrote: post #248
keeptrying wrote: post #234

[flagged]

My experience is that working in an office is _much_ worse for distraction. Even if you're lucky enough not to be in open plan, the shoulder taps and quick chats easily demolish any chance of focus for me. At home I can knuckle down for a few hours and deal with something complex easily.

Yeah, 100% agreed with this. My team is currently 1 day/week (Thursdays) in-office, and for both better and worse, there are conversations that happen which wouldn't otherwise. A lot of great things come out of those conversations, but also I can reliably write off getting work done that day.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#304

Post by elevatedastalt »

tourmalinetaco wrote: post #200
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team.…

> Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog.

Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#305

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

adabyron wrote: post #167

The irony here... "On the first topic, we’ve always sought to hire very smart, high judgment, inventive, delivery-focused, and missionary teammates. And, we have always wanted the people doing the actual detailed work to have high ownership." Then shortly later.. "We are also going to bring back assigned desk arrangements" So they hire smart people with great judgement who have high ownership but also treat them like…

As someone in a hot desking situation, I would kill for an assigned seat.

I do not even have someplace to put a coffee cup. Have to pack/unpack all of my stuff daily.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#306

Post by hintymad »

pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#307

Post by Yeul »

colmmacc wrote: post #190
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a b…

Yeah for me work is work. It's not life. I don't make friends. I don't celebrate co workers birthdays. I make money for my employer and after that I go home.

I do my research if the company has a ping-pong table or cafetaria I am not going to apply.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#308

Post by joshdavham »

hintymad wrote: post #306
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company'…

That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#309

Post by hughesjj »

ranman wrote: post #275
pknomad wrote: post #117

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then…

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS. That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre ar…

Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM.

There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry.

Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.

Re: Amazon tells employees to return to office five days a week

#310

Post by fhdsgbbcaA »

spacemadness wrote: post #285

I feel like Big Tech management is simply in revenge mode. Managers and executives felt a tiny bit less powerful for a small amount of time due to their workers pushing for remote and having the leverage to do so. Now that interest rates have wrecked the employment market they are wasting no time going scorched earth on their current remote employees. The narratives they keep shoving down peoples throats are insultin…

Imagine being a billionaire CEO and still having to bend over backwards to give “perks” to entitled engineers!

Think of those years and years of suffering that must put a CEO through! To be at the top of the mountain - and still beholden to little people! That is the worst kind of injustice.

And the joy - the relief! - of finally being able to treat the engineers with the same contempt you feel for your customers. It must feel GLORIOUS.

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