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Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

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Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#321

Post by alexbanks »

kkapelon wrote: post #64
zippergz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no such thing as a "recruitment list" to be removed from, unless you remove all traces of yourself from the internet. Sourcers don't work from a shared list. Also, you might be surprised to hear how often people will say "no" at one point, and later say "yes." Circumstances change. Asking again later works.

There is certainly a recruitment list. I get emails from Amazon that start with the sentence "We already know that you applied in 2012, do you want to try again?" or something similar. I have asked twice to remove me from their applicant database.

Not sure it works the way you're thinking. Obviously they keep a record of everyone that interviews, but I seriously doubt they look at that list before deciding to email you. There is no list of candidates to remove yourself from, as every recruiter will just troll github/linkedin/facebook/twitter and email you.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#322

Post by dehrmann »

AaronFriel wrote: post #144

> Non-Competition. During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sol…

One reason I won't be moving to Seattle. I worked for AWS in the Bay Area, and while I didn't go to a competitor, I didn't have that in my contract, either.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#323

Post by dehrmann »

_q1cj wrote: post #33
SteveNuts wrote: post #16

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.

I can tell you from experience, the internal Amazon stack is not cool or inventive.

That can be a good thing.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#324

Post by m0zg »

DVassallo wrote: post #315
m0zg wrote: post #307

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.

I posted my full Amazon contract in this thread, with highlights on the key parts. I was an SDE-3 (Level 6), hired in Dublin, and then moved to Seattle after 2 years: https://twitter.com/dvassallo/status/1157698145632976896 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 vend…

So basically anyone who moved from AMZN to GOOG, MSFT or FB or another large Seattle employer is breaking that last clause and can be sued by AMZN? That's nuts. Those companies have quite a number of ex-AMZN people.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#325

Post by greyskull »

algaeontoast wrote: post #176
ryanmarsh wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If anything it’s scary. From what I’ve heard software engineering practices at AWS leave much to be desired.

Yep, it's almost as much've a shit-storm as Amazon's internal tools - which are rife with errors and pushed by Amazonians because "open source is shit" (verbatim from a lead engineer).

That seems a bit inflammatory. Anecdotally most of the people I've interacted with especially like open source. My team is increasing our involvement in the open source projects we use.

A lot of the internal tooling is due to legacy and inertia. There's 20+ years of history, and so much has been built and continues to be built that it's enormous investment to steer a different direction. Incremental improvements have higher reward ratio. But people do want better a better development experience, especially w.r.t. idiomatic language tooling.

That being said, initiatives are brewing for that "enormous investment".

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#326

Post by twic »

jedberg wrote: post #209
twic wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every financial firm is that paranoid. Many are, though - i got offered a job in London that your description would fit perfectly! Still, i ended up working at a firm that's the polar opposite of that. I'll also disagree with you about money. Once you have enough to cover all your needs and few wants a year, more money starts to get interesting , because then it goes directly into building financial independence.…

> Once you have enough to cover all your needs and few wants a year, more money starts to get interesting, because then it goes directly into building financial independence. I agree with you in theory, but even if you made $200,000 more a year than you need, how many years will you have to work at a crappy high paying job to save up enough to do any of those things? The only way to build that kind of wealth is eithe…

If you can invest with a return of 3% above inflation, 200k/yr buys you 6k/yr/yr of income, so five years would buy you 30k/yr. I lived on roughly that when i was a graduate student.

In any case, i'm not suggesting you take a crappy job to get that money - my first point was that there are quite enjoyable jobs which will provide it!

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#327

Post by stunt »

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…

I remember suggesting one of my colleagues to take an interview instead of me and my manager disagreed and said I never saw him admitting to make a mistake.

Ideally you only hire people with good soft skills, but if you couldn’t, at least you should make sure they don’t do the interviews.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#328

Post by stunt »

goostavos wrote: post #256
kmarc wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is pretty much why no one should feel bad if you're rejected after some FANG interview. It all 100% comes down to the people in your loop. You're likely to hit an ass hole or two. I made it into Amazon, but honestly, after sitting in on a bunch of interviews, I now appreciate the amount of pure dumb luck involved (i.e. I got a loop of people who liked me and had questions I understood) rather than any skill (whi…

Skills you can learn. Obviously if you have them already, it is a big plus. Otherwise, if you show you have some skills, that’s a good sign that you can learn new ones too. That’s why some interviewers ask questions more relevant to your CV than the job requirements.

It’s more important that you have a professional attitude and can contribute to the culture and values. That’s much harder yo learn. And a wrong character with even all the hard skills can ruin everyone.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#329

Post by msiyer »

xyzzyz wrote: post #116
msiyer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many of these workers are from the prison industrial complex. Pay is non-existent or abysmally low, AFAIK.

Do you have any source for that? If anything, Amazon’s warehouse work is known for relatively high wages compared to other warehousing work.

It is a real problem. People think downvoting will make the problem disappear.

Link 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prison%E2%80%93industrial_comp...

Link 2: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58e127cb1b10e31ed45b2...

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#330

Post by krageon »

anon44 wrote: post #266
goostavos wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is pretty much why no one should feel bad if you're rejected after some FANG interview. It all 100% comes down to the people in your loop. You're likely to hit an ass hole or two. I made it into Amazon, but honestly, after sitting in on a bunch of interviews, I now appreciate the amount of pure dumb luck involved (i.e. I got a loop of people who liked me and had questions I understood) rather than any skill (whi…

Well I appreciate these interview loops because at least they are still far more objective than big company promo processes when whoever lies the most and forces others to do their dirty work gets promoted. I do wish the interview process was even more objective, just administer and extremely difficult IQ Test instead.

IQ tests are rarely objective and they most definitely don't measure the things most important for a large company.
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