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I'm just curious, what was your experience trying to develop games in your spare time? Were you told to stop?
There's an explicit company policy about game development that is separate from their open source policy. It, among other things, prevents you from working on a game project with anyone else.
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Average tenure of an Amazon employee on the tech side is something like a year or so.
The length of tenure by level would make more sense. Senior and Principal SDEs (L6&7) in Amazon are like semi and full god, while lower level ICs are design to “hire fast, fail fast”
Maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounds like you deify L6 engineers as "better" and that's why they remain. I don't think that's exactly it lol.
Also..people leaving in 2 years as L4/5s aren't "failing fast." They're bailing for better gigs with a few Amazon projects on their resume - I'd even go as far as to say that's many of their plans coming in!
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Umm I guess you could ignore the comment then. Part of what I like about HN is the tangential discussion and the personal experience that commenters share.
If "you should ignore it"/"just downvote it" was sufficient, we wouldn't need site guidelines or moderators. Off-topic Amazon hate will always win the upvote wars unless people are principled.
I thought it was a useful and interesting comment. If you've had your fill of some subtopic, do what I do: keep scrolling.
One of the things I really liked about working for AWS was the accessibility of the S-team. Even as a fairly junior engineer I was in meetings where you could get their opinions, see where they were going, and understand their goals. AWS has a lot of things I don't love (not least of all, their policy towards developing games in your spare time), but they had a ton of rigor around setting goals while still giving dev…
Man I'm glad these threads pop up. Every so often Amazon starts to look tempting as a place to work, and I need threads like this to remind me that it sucks and isn't worth it.
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There's an explicit company policy about game development that is separate from their open source policy. It, among other things, prevents you from working on a game project with anyone else.
Why games though? I don’t see any obvious reasons why they would care.
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You're certainly allowed to be proud... but others don't have to respect your career choices (and many won't, which is fine). Personally speaking, I've had Amazon try to pull me a few times and I just stopped responding to their emails. It's a large company and I can agree that there's leagues of separation between, say, AWS and warehouse operations... but I also just don't care, I can't co-sign the kind of stuff tha…
I've been rejected at Google and Facebook and most of HN doesn't think my total compensation is all that impressive, so, I probably don't have many options to be real with you.
I had a co-op who used to be chill, laid back, and wasn't strong from engineering perspective (a wee bit lack of passion too). All he did was leetcode and he got MSFT -> Google.
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> The tech industry is large enough that if you're good enough to work at Amazon, you probably have options. > I've been rejected at Google and Facebook These two statements are not contradicting each other...
Perhaps, but my goal is to make ~$250k a year as fast as possible. To do so at my current company would take at least 3 years and 2 promotions, whereas even James Damore was making $400k+ 4 years into his tenure. I can't get offers at trading firms, so I'm kinda SOL overall.
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> my goal is to make ~$250k a year as fast as possible. To do so at my current company would take at least 3 years and 2 promotions Hi, I don't want to dunk on you, but I would truly encourage you to gain some perspective on just how myopic a view this is. (I couldn't reply to your comment below where you said this)
I don't think it's myopic if everyone I follow on twitter and see on instagram is getting Hawaiian offsites and European work trips at Google and Hudson River Trading while I can't even go to Seattle for our internal ML conference because it got filled up too quickly for the last 3 years or whatever. I enjoy what I work on..I just wish I was treated more like all of my friends and former coworkers.
You're not myopic but you just follow a niche group of people.
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Why games though? I don’t see any obvious reasons why they would care.
I always thought that they were doing it because they had a really low opinion of their own game studio. Maybe they were trying to kill as much future competition as they were able to (legally).
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The length of tenure by level would make more sense. Senior and Principal SDEs (L6&7) in Amazon are like semi and full god, while lower level ICs are design to “hire fast, fail fast”
I think you gave it backwards. Or at least it goes both ways. Long tenure naturally results in becoming L6 if you have a boss who develops you and aims to get you there (+ understands how to work in the review/promotion system and check the boxes.) Maybe I misinterpreted, but it sounds like you deify L6 engineers as "better" and that's why they remain. I don't think that's exactly it lol. Also..people leaving in 2 ye…