311–320 of 365 posts
I've also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don't get how I'm still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed. Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they ha…
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IIRC it’s 10 days for the first year and after that what you describe
https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/pto-overview-us 10 days of pto + 6 days of personal time
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exit interview advice (applies everywhere): politely decline the exit interview. there is zero upside to doing an exit interview
I recently had an exit interview at IBM and my manager basically told me not to say anything. There is no point or benefit.
Every time I've talked to AWS Recruiters they've belittled by past experience and just generally made me feel bad about my career. I will never ever work there, no matter how cool their tech stack must be.
Yes. I remember AWS asked about the size of the databases I have worked with in the past, and then negged me when it was smaller than their databases. Of course the databases I worked with were smaller, they deal with some of the largest in the world.
Could someone from AMZN confirm that 18 months is the common duration of their non-compete? This is upping the ante considerably even compared to the already abusive terms by Google/FB/MSFT in WA (1 year, never seen it enforced). Unless offered truly staggering compensation, I wouldn't even consider a job which upon termination requires me to not work anywhere for a year and a half.
AFAIK, software engineers don't get the 18-month non-compete clause that triggered the cited lawsuit. There's a less harsh clause of 18-months that prohibits working with Amazon customers and vendors. And, there's also a 12-month period where you can't work with any ex-employee who worked at Amazon in the past 12 years. More details in the thread.
Amazon is not the only company to sue over this, Microsoft successfully sued as well[0]. In fact, several large companies have pushed to keep these non-competes in place in Washington State[1]. I don't think it's fair to focus only on Amazon. The reality is that in Washington State, this benefits many large corporations ( while being harmful to employees ) so it is the company's incentive to try and keep the non-comp…
In Washington state non-competes are ubiquitous, and hair-stylists and estheticians have been sued over them. That person that waxes people's legs? Works 36 hours a week so the company doesn't have to call them "full-time" and signs a non-compete that says they can't leave and work for someone else for a year within a 10 mile radius of any location of the prior company, which usually means they can't work anywhere wi…
They are no longer enforceable for employees earning less than $100k, or contractors earning under $250k.
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Given their abysmal warehouse management, it's no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. Do you think any of the tech companies would treat their blue collar workers any better? It just so happens that all of the products produced by Google, Microsoft and Apple that need a lot of blue collar workers are done by contractors in a different country. I bet none of the…
I work in defense. We treat blue collar pretty well - hands on people are critical to large production of things like warplanes. We used to treat them even better, of course.
I'm not saying Amazon can't treat their workers as decent human beings, just that on the benefits/compensation front they have different constraints.
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I'm guessing you didn't get to do this interactively? If I interviewed someone and they seemed knew something I didn't and could prove it by actually running the query/code I would be impressed. At the very least the interviewer should have checked your claim after the interview if they were skeptical. I think it's a real mistake when you don't let candidates write actual code and run it during interviews.
Correct, it was a "remote whiteboarding session". It has made me absolutely loathe non-interactive sessions. Not being able to run the actual code is ridiculous. Some of the best analysts and programmers I know of are "architecture guys/gals" who can create complex systems but may not knock out the actual code so quickly, or, as I like to call it "error message programmers". Creating an interview test to weed out oth…
So I indulged them. I spoke to a manager who said that he'd reviewed my coding project, and been happy with it ("so we can skip that"), so we talked (largely about K8s, as I am looking for an SRE management role - I'd told them I was happy where I was but was curious, and after all they'd reached out to me).
I talked about my experiences architecting K8s from a green field mostly by myself, and he was excited.
I spoke to someone else and he was excited. Okay, I thought, this has potential.
Email from HR: "We have a tech screen lined up for you. Please nominate some languages." I went with Python. Bear in mind I haven't written substantial code in _any_ language (except YAML, hah), for years. And was looking for a _management_ role in SRE.
So I had two rapid fire coding exercises (15 mins each ostensibly). Python lists and comprehensions, and some tokenization stuff. I struggled. Google was my friend but there was a good bit of "error message programming". I walked through the processes and my thoughts. I hesitated a bit at what Big O notation some of my code was, but I recognized routes to loop optimization and could see what was happening, even if I didn't know what the name was.
"Sorry, we are unable to continue following your tech screen".
Oh well. If your SRE PMs and group managers are required to write Python list comprehensions, maybe your idea of "manager" and mine... differ.
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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.
>just because software engineers have a huge "grass is greener" syndrome "Grass is greener" is a strange label to use for the ability of even mediocre developers to get $50K+ raises by switching jobs, while the industry as a whole remains myopic about giving comparable pay increases to existing employees.
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 happens everywhere; The superstar software developer (no) who knows everything (no) gets to interview you, and sometimes they are simply not right. Your story reminds me my ~7th (?) interview with Google where for LRU caching I mentioned Java's LinkedHashMap; which resulted in he explaining me "what a ridiculous, memory-wasting data structure would that be!" - and going on for a good 5 more minutes bashing my la…
> I continuously refused all their recruiters since then.
Even the almighty Google has people who don't know what they're talking about. Unless they're all like that, I'd write it off as a fluke. It's an embarrassing fluke for the interviewer--this is their problem, they should know it forwards and backwards and all the common solutions. If you get a lot of interviewers like that, then you should run.