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

benadam.me

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

#41

Post by coldpie »

kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

A browsing tip: In Firefox, you can right-click on low-contrast text, select 'Inspect (Q)', and a thing will pop up showing all of the attributes of the text. You can uncheck the 'color' styles to restore a good text color, the filter at the top of the list helps find the 'color' entries. For some reason everyone loves grey-on-grey these days, so I find I'm doing this a lot.

I've been thinking of writing a Firefox extension to auto-detect the page background color and set the text color to the polar opposite of that. Haven't done it yet, but I'm getting close.

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

#42

Post by benadam11 »

kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

Just pushed an update - btw Cloudflare pages are fantastic its been perfection for a personal site.

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

#43

Post by kentonv »

benadam11 wrote: post #29
kentonv wrote: post #4

Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem…

- it has an 8+ contrast ratio so I thought it would be ok (also been mostly working in dark mode) - will update. Thanks for your feedback.

I think some of the stylesheets are not loading correctly, I get 404 on these:

https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css

https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css

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

#44

Post by Hadriel »

donretag wrote: post #28

Cases like these happen at companies at all levels. Massive companies such as Amazon and especially at startups, where roles are not as defined. After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a ye…

Yeah it's the same exact thing at Meta/FB lol

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

#45

Post by dymk »

kentonv wrote: post #31
dymk wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very interesting. This is what I see - https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png

Huh! It's more than just colors, you have padding between paragraphs whereas I don't. I think the page must not be loading correctly? I do see these two stylesheets returning 404: https://benadam.me/assets/prisma-dark.19c66771.css https://benadam.me/assets/work.b7de8a03.css

The padding for the paragraphs is indeed coming from prisma-dark.css - that would explain it!

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

#46

Post by itsdrewmiller »

Waterluvian wrote: post #7
erehweb wrote: post #2

"It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).

Formatting is a very very distant minor gripe compared to what I think is the main reason this is a problem: versioning. That being said, if it works, it works. If it doesn't work, make a case for why and develop a _holistic_ understanding of the costs and benefits of changing the current process. Maybe you can change it, or maybe you learn why it doesn't change. If it works, but it offends your sensibilities, perhap…

Excel has versioning now! But it doesn’t work when people email around hard copies instead of links to the shared file, which they still constantly do. >:-O

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

#47

Post by oblio »

klodolph wrote: post #27
chrsig wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why? probably too focused on frugality to consider retention

They do consider retention, make no mistake.

Could you expand on this, please?

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

#48

Post by uncomputation »

> It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains.

Enterprise work summed up in one sentence. Impressive. While I agree with Andreessen’s “software is eating the world,” it might be more apt to say “Excel is eating the world.”

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

#49

Post by mchaynes »

I left amazon after just under 2 years and I agree with everything you wrote here.

You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with.

On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with

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