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Laying myself off from Amazon

daniel.do

311–320 of 374 posts

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#311
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I visited New York City and went to the MoMA. At the time, they had an entire floor dedicated to mid century design. I was always particularly taken with the Kennedy Armchair and the Eames lounge chair. Those pieces to me are undoubtedly art. But they also serve a function. They're chairs. A business analyst once told me - "you programmers have it so easy. It either works or it doesn't!" as if the vag…

> as if the vague 2 sentence requirement from their spreadsheet that I have to turn in reality doesn't require any creativity to implement Do you really need creativity, though? Unless you’re working in uncharted territory and you’re just building some CRUD app like 90%+ of software in the world, you don’t. Software engineering patterns exist, and even so much of the innovation that supposedly came out in the last 5…

I'm getting a little tired of all the "creativity" in UI myself, a.k.a. reinventing the wheel.

I use a dozen different-looking web interfaces per day, often internally inconsistent in the same application. Here, it's OK Cancel, there it's Cancel OK, another one is Yes No.

There are two buttons on the "modal" dialog in a web page. One is a different color. Does pressing Return mean anything? Escape? Can I tab through them? Does the modal with one required text field (e.g. 2FA entry) focus that field? Does Ctrl-V work? Is it some bizarre custom design that can't keep up with a normal rate of typing?

Will it allow my password manager to autofill fields? I saw an interface recently using Angular that didn't even provide name or id on the text fields. Thanks.

The desktop app side of things is equally annoying. Either it's electron/nwjs, or it's attempting to look cool instead of just following the guidelines.

This is a bad time for users.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#312
post #273
post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just rewrite everything I possibly can in Rust and I've yet to regret it. And hopefully no one else regrets it...

By then you're onto the next thing and it's their problem, right? Thus is the circle of (engineering) life. Just kidding. Please write maintainable code.

"Please write maintainable code"

Not in the requirements, sorry.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Legacy rescue

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, yes, having your manager say "I will destroy your career if you think about leaving" would be a kind of approval needed, but short of that level of viciousness it sounds like no? Not familiar with Amazon culture so I don't know if that'd be considered acceptable behavior. I hope not!

have you considered that the manager may rightly have bad things to say? or that is just never warranted.

> have you considered that the manager may rightly have bad things to say? or that is just never warranted.

The manager should put those bad things _in writing_ during performance reviews instead of trying to prevent their employees from leaving by dunking on them after they are informed about the fact.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your code breaks something, you should fix that code. Who else should? If your system/product/service is down because you have a dependency on something that broke -- well it's up to that team to fix their code.

Ideally incident handling should "just" be rolling back the broken change. Fixing the problem should be done in the morning with no time pressure, not in the middle of the night half asleep with customers on the other side of the world yelling at you. Of course it's not always that simple, but most of the time that's what on call should be about

It would be nice if things only broke during "business" hours and didn't have real world impact. Nevermind impact millions of people around the world. But if you look at the customers of say code that is running cloud infrastructure it is running airlines reservations/checkins, government workloads, banks, hospitals, critical infrastructure, netflix, gaming services. That's a lot of things that can't typically wait for morning.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#316

I just laid myself off from Amazon too after 2+ years. I just couldn't take the janky-as-shit internal tooling, the myriad pointless/redundant meetings, and pointlessly stressful and toxic work environment anymore. Also, I enjoyed my first two managers at Amazon, but my third manager was a tool, which is a systemic problem at Amazon. I'm glad to have Amazon in the rearview mirror of my career.

I am seeing a lot of hate on the internal tooling. Can you elaborate on that a bit more?

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#317
post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon runs an annual survey with typically quite high participation rates, it is very detailed, and the results are often illuminating (and like many things at Amazon, widely accessible to all people).

Yeah, but you can't see stuff outside your group, I imagine? I mean, dis-aggregated, to drill down to team level. OP was making it sound like you could get the results for a specific team you'd want to transfer to.

What OP was suggesting is exactly what you get. You can see results at the level of any manager and zoom out recursively.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#318
post #7

Amazon's internal tooling really is the ninth circle of hell. It seems unsalvageable too; ostensibly the teams are supposed to be customer obsessed and the developers are the customer, but there's no accountability for anything to work well at all.

Can you elaborate on this a bit? I am really interested in which area of the tools space was annoying to this extent.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#319
post #59
post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My work life balance at Amazon as an SDE is great but I don't have 24/7 oncall, make of that what you will. That being said, I agree that the internal tooling at Amazon is not that great. It's actually a place where newer employees tend to clash with older Amazonian because it compares unfavourably with GitHub actions or any modern CI/CD while being significantly better than anything that existed in the early 2010s.…

This is really baffling to me. In fact, since leaving Amazon in June, I've been really frustrated by how much extra work setting up a CI/CD pipeline is in (say) Drone and Argo/Flux than with Amazon's internal tooling. You can set up a standard Amazon pipeline with a single command and answering a few prompts about naming, whereas with the open-source systems you have to hand-craft everything yourself, hack in a way t…

I've actually really been of two minds about this since leaving AWS, though it's been a few years. On one hand, I remember spending an absurd amount of time debugging esoteric internal tooling errors that were un-googleable. The cases where you were lucky enough to find someone else who had the same issue on the internal stack-overflow or wiki were the good ones.

On the other hand, I've actually found myself missing features from amazon internal tools at the jobs I've had since. One example: I remember a pipelines feature where you could look at any change and quickly tell exactly how far that change had made it in your pipeline. At my current job, determining exactly when change X deployed to region Y has been a multi-step exercise in manually comparing commit hashes.

Re: Laying myself off from Amazon

#320
post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few years ago I visited New York City and went to the MoMA. At the time, they had an entire floor dedicated to mid century design. I was always particularly taken with the Kennedy Armchair and the Eames lounge chair. Those pieces to me are undoubtedly art. But they also serve a function. They're chairs. A business analyst once told me - "you programmers have it so easy. It either works or it doesn't!" as if the vag…

> as if the vague 2 sentence requirement from their spreadsheet that I have to turn in reality doesn't require any creativity to implement Do you really need creativity, though? Unless you’re working in uncharted territory and you’re just building some CRUD app like 90%+ of software in the world, you don’t. Software engineering patterns exist, and even so much of the innovation that supposedly came out in the last 5…

You know what takes creativity? Shoe-horning new code/requirements into code that is not abstracted in any sane way. The end result doesn't make me look like an artist though, it makes me look like an asshole for not rewriting the whole mess. But alas, that wasn't factored into the current epic.
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