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I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

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Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#371

Post by tech_tuna »

pjbeam wrote: post #181
sharkweek wrote: post #25

Hey congrats on making it 10 months! "Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work" Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on som…

10 months in the pit is no joke. I'm on 13 and often wonder how I made it this far.

I have a friend who lasted more than 2 years which amazed me but then his compensation _went_down_ because of Amazon's crazy comp structure works.

I have another friend who was offered a job there and turned them down, then the hiring manager fired back with "Oh c'mon, you just have to last a year here and then you can put Amazon on your resume" which is hilarious and totally fucked up.

"We aren't going to pretend that you will actually like working here but if you suffer for about a year, it's gonna do wonders for attracting future employers"

I often wonder if Amazon wouldn't actually be more successful if they treated their people better. I think there's a strong sentiment of Emperor Bezos' New Clothes and survivorship bias that has Amazon leadership convinced that being evil bastards is the only reason/way the company can be successful.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#372

Post by masterof0 »

tinyhouse wrote: post #161
masterof0 wrote: post #17

Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this: - RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...) - Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, wh…

| - Make it easier to switch teams It's actually much easier to switch teams at Amazon than most of tech.

Is not, is easy to switch team if you know people in that team, and the manager already wants you, otherwise you have to go through interview loops, etc... At Google for example is way easier, as it should be.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#373

Post by tech_tuna »

tucaz wrote: post #183
strgcmc wrote: post #116

I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't? I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and…

People on this forum are usually too good to find problems within. With folks here, usually the other party is always at fault.

No post body was provided.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#374

Post by Xeronate »

taurath wrote: post #220
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what I hear, Amazon is incredibly uneven in org quality, so it is really possible your friend got unlucky. My wife works at Amazon and seems to have a pretty good balance and has good things to say about her work environment, but she is not a SWE (rather a designer). Still, I don't think I would ever work there without a lot of careful research about the group I was going into.

This is what they always say but they never say which orgs are good or bad. When you’re a candidate you are rolling the dice

You can just search Blind to figure out which orgs are good or bad. I work at Music and it's great.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#375

Post by seebs »

colinmhayes wrote: post #219
MattGaiser wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Amazon has to be at the point of literally running out of nearby human beings to be concerned about retention. https://www.essence.com/news/amazon-burning-through-workers/

This article is about warehouse workers, not developers.

It may be, but you may rest assured that when a recruiter asks me whether I'd like to work for Amazon, how they treat warehouse employees is going to be a factor in my answer. I've never been confident of the viability of "it's fine, they only hate other people" as a social strategy.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#376

Post by anyonecancode »

Always interesting to see comments from people who worked at Amazon. I did a stint, and I hated it, but I am always trying to get a read on if I was just unlucky, or if I can fairly draw a broader conclusion about Amazon overall.

I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn't "Amazon proper," or maybe the lesson is "be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture."

OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there's probably something to the "avoid working in a cost-center" lesson.

Then again, there's so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being "unlucky" seems to happen more often than seems optimal.

I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can't say I'd recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#377

Post by tech_tuna »

franczesko wrote: post #146

Ex-Amazon. Lasted 2 years. I'll just repeat the comment I posted the other day: There are only two instances when you're happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren't worth it. Avoid at all costs. You've been warned.

What's interesting to me is that a few of the people I know how were AWS "long haulers" are massive assholes. It's almost like the kind of person who makes it there is not the kind of person I want as a colleague.

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#378

Post by kfarr »

paganel wrote: post #353
pyrale wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine getting fired because your manager is on a leave and their manager sees you as free real estate.

Tells a lot about company politics. Often times I'm left wondering how come capitalism still survives. Actually, writing this down made me think that big companies (like the FAANG mostly are) are quite anti-capitalistic. I'm not sure how to call them, because sure as hell they're not socialist or anything of the sorts, but it's reasonably clear that many of the theoretical capitalistic principles that many of us know…

Maybe more medieval: building up fiefdoms, power, resources, etc

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#379

Post by [deleted] »

qvrjuec wrote: post #188
ajkjk wrote: post #90

> I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used si…

Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with

[deleted]

Re: I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

#380

Post by DoctorDabadedoo »

ss108 wrote: post #248
that_guy_iain wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My biggest gripe is that Leetcode is systematically favoring candidates who have months of free time to memorize arbitrary logic puzzles. For me, leetcode is basically just what is taught at university level. So they're hiring people based on if they know stuff they would learn and forget from university. The thing is, it's not about having free time, it's about being so dedicated to getting the job that you'll spe…

> For me, the main reason I don't want to work for FAANG is they have a reputation for long hours I thought working at Google or Facebook was supposed to be a pretty chill "rest and vest" situation, esp at the former (?)

YMMV. From what I hear from my Googler friends, It's all about the team/manager/project you land.

Usually a good manager can spot pitfall projects from a mile away and put you on a good path to a promotion. But only being good is not enough, you have to work on the right projects, have the right results and the right visibility. If those variables are not there you may go through a downward spiral that ends up in a PIP.

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