Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

lastweekinaws.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

341–350 of 365 posts

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#341

Post by ses1984 »

algaeontoast wrote: post #32
ses1984 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How many friends do you have who worked for a company more than 5 years? Work for Amazon for 2 years, learn a lot, get paid a lot, move on.

Amazon benefits are shit and you generally can't negotiate a raise within 2 years. Generally, you're not really off the chopping block until you're an SDEIII or entered as an SDEIII and performed "above the bar" for at least 1.5 years or a requisite number of quarterly reviews.

Shit compared to what?

If you think Amazon benefits for software engineers are shit you should check where the surface of your bubble is. There's a big world outside it.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#342

Post by posixplz »

baseballMan wrote: post #300
posixplz wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Makes me appreciate working for a large cloud with a core value “don’t be a jerk.”

Is this Microsoft? If so, good to know they've adopted this policy!

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, actually. Oracle gets a lot of flak on HN, and some of it is justified. But the reality is that the team working on OCI is top-notch. And the product itself is quite compelling.

Oracle as an enterprise/legal behemoth is very different from the cloud transformation business unit.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#344

Post by Seb-C »

Last year I was contacted on Linkedin by a headhunter at AWS for an opportunity in Ireland as a senior lead dev. At this time I was working hard toward a different destination, so it didn't exactly match my plans, but the "wow" effect of an opportunity in Amazon made me accept to "have a chat" with him, because I thought it was worth seeing if on the long term they could help me to reach my destination.

After I accepted, the recruiter asked me a CV. I gave it to him even thought my LinkedIn profile is far more detailed and qualitative than any CV. Then I received an email for a technical automated test, which was ridiculously easy. Two weeks later, when I received an automatic email saying that I reached the first "candidate interview" step, I politely declined and explained why.

Copy/pasting my CV in a standard recruitment process and being handled like I had applied for the job by myself is not my definition of "having a chat" not of headhunting...

I already wasted the 4 first years of my career in a political and corporate "big company", thank you very much. I thought the ones like AWS may be different, but in the end it is seems to be the same corporate bullshit than in any big-sized company. I feel better working in human and really innovative startups with real entrepreneurs.

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#345

Post by SilasX »

sokoloff wrote: post #333
SilasX wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My story: an interviewer stubbornly insisted that my code had to be O(n^2) because it had an inner loop, even though the inner loop was only iterating over the substructure of each element, rather than every pair of elements, and then demonstrated that he had no idea how to resolve a disagreement of that kind, and then immediately vetoed me from the rest of the day's interviews. https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquest…

If you manually unrolled the inner loop during the argument, would that have worked? (I’m not saying you should have had to, but sometimes you need to pick up a clue by four and whack someone with it.)

See the follow up comments about the experience in the Reddit thread. Everything bounced off this guy. He even thought he had “got me” by asking “what happens when the words are really long?” And I was like, “if the average word is long, that just means there are fewer of them for a given n and it cancels out.” I then clarified definitions about what “n” refers to and showed how it’s the same thing as “average word length L times number of words w”.

I even asked him what he would need to see to believe it was O(n) and he had no answer.

Nothing worked!

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#346

Post by petre »

ShakataGaNai wrote: post #227
MrLeap wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is me. I've used so many different programming languages over the years that for the first week of any new project, I am definitely an error message programmer. It goes something like this on day#1 Okay, I need to iterate through a collection. Which is it again? foreach (int element in elements), no that's C#. for (int element : elements) .. nope that's java for (var element in elements) .. There we go. Probably…

I'm with you on this, even beyond the first week. Been doing primarily Python for more than a year now and sometimes I still slide back to my Perl days and write the C-style for.

Perl has foreach which can iterate over ranges, arrays, lists and is synonymous with for, yet works just like foreach (that's Perl just being Perl).

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#347

Post by xyzzyz »

msiyer wrote: post #329
xyzzyz wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Where exactly in these two links is anything about Amazon in particular?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#348

Post by phamilton »

kmarc wrote: post #232
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 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…

Just for technical closure: Is the idea that you move an entry to the front of the linked list on access and then expire from the back of the list?

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#349

Post by xchaotic »

shados wrote: post #339
crooked-v wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 said even at company friendly companies. Basically you'll see this happen even at companies where you CANT just switch job to get a raise (eg: companies that give out RSUs and had huge stock value bumps, making it unlikely you can get the same elsewhere). I've seen it happen many times. People who got promotions after promotions and are paid absurd amounts, and after 2-3 years will jump ship anyway, often with a pa…

It's a bit like this: if the pay is too low, you make the jump to get the money. If the money is good, you wait a few years and make a jump anyway because hopefully by then you've saved enough to be set for life (assuming normal pay elsewhere)

Re: Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

#350

Post by mlguy456 »

drblast wrote: post #119
Naac wrote: post #8

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…

What stops the highly organized HN crowd from writing a letter to attorney general of washington?
Post reply on HN