14 ms·

I'm so glad that this is getting more visibility. I spent 5 long years at Amazon Web Services from 2008 - 2013 as a Software Development Engineer, and was at so

• solutionyogi 11y ago
  I am curious. If work environment was so toxic, why did you stick around 5 long years? What was your thought process? I have had similar happened to my friends who somehow get stuck at one place for one reason or other and don't realize what they are missing out. Right now, I am trying to help another friend who is stuck in similar situation (not at Amazon).
  • enraged_camel 11y ago
    People stick around in toxic environments mostly because of social reasons. Adversity breeds camaraderie. When you commiserate with people on a regular basis about the shitty work environment and terrible company policies, you build mutual trust tend to become really good friends with them. Leaving those people behind can be tough for a lot of people, especially if it is their first job out of college (and they don't know what they are missing out on).
    • mylons 11y ago
      This is a great point. I worked at such a company in a satellite office. A favorite activity was to get drunk and bitch about corporate, etc. Everyone loved each other, but _hated_ the company.
    • gaius 11y ago
      There's a right way and a wrong way to do this. The military make boot camp/basic training tough in part to build camaraderie amongst new recruits, the experience binds them to everyone who has been through the same ordeal. But that is in service of some higher ideal than "shareholder value".
      • omegaham 11y ago
        It doesn't end after boot camp, though. We frequently referred to the Green Weenie, which was the omnipresent malevolent force that made everyone miserable. It's the main reason why I got the hell out. I've found that a lot of other companies seem to have Green Weenies, and I do my damndest to avoid them. Five years of getting fucked was enough for me. At least buy me dinner first.
  • nemtaro 11y ago
    That's a very good question! I should have left after 3 years. I did not know any better. Specially when it came to compensation, I only knew about my promised stocks' grown value, and not what other companies would have offered me. Year 1: learning, excitement, keen to prove myself, also economy had just crashed Year 2: under pressure, but feeling ownership and hopeful that we would "fix our problems" Year 3: jaded, but waiting for the growing stock to vest (Amazon's RSUs start vesting in the 3rd year) Year 4: over-stressed, extremely unhappy Year 5: detached, not really working, interviews, exit.
    • georgebarnett 11y ago
      RSUs vesting at year 3 gives a good indication of what they expect the tenure of a drone to be.
      • x0x0 11y ago
        Exactly. Amazon discussed an offer with very backloaded RSUs. They must think engineers are idiots: if you offer 5/15/40/40 vesting (those may not be the exact numbers but they're not far off), it's a giant flashing sign with a klaxon on top that you expect the majority of your eng to churn inside of 2 years. I replied anything but 25/25/25/25 wasn't even worth discussing and that was that.
• enraged_camel 11y ago
  >>Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval, practice for interviews and get job offers from Apple/FB/Google for substantial (> %75) raises. Is that 75% number normalized for the area's cost-of-living? Seattle isn't nearly as expensive as the Bay Area (which is where those other companies you mentioned are located), so of course the nominal salaries will be substantially lower.
  • jvolkman 11y ago
    All three have offices in Seattle.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • nemtaro 11y ago
    All of the friends whom I helped, and myself included have transferred from Amazon to Facebook/Google/Apple located in Seattle. I went from ~$150 total comp to ~$260 after a couple of rounds of negotiations with the companies who gave me offers. This was a couple of years ago, and I was happy to see another friend who left Amazon for Google get offered over $300k recently at the same SDE II level.
    • whitenoice 11y ago
      curious to know how many years of experience do you have?
    • compostor42 11y ago
      Damn, 260k and 300k? Why are these so high? Do you and your friend have some valuable speciality?
      • seiji 11y ago
        When one bedroom apartments cost $5,000 per month, you need a minimum salary of $200,000 to even qualify at the low end, but then over half your take home pay goes towards rent. A safer salary is easily $250k to $300k. Those levels of salary get you above the line of working just to pay for your overpriced apartment.
• dastbe 11y ago
  So what's your coaching strategy?
  • nemtaro 11y ago
    Read cracking the coding interview and solve every single problem in it. Then start with the leetcode.com problems and solve every single one. Hen do 5 practice interviews with companies that you don't care about. That's all. It's simple but it takes determination and time to do.
• cesarbs 11y ago
  My wife works there as an SDET and her experience so far is vastly different from yours and from what the article says. Most days it's a 9-5 job. The only times she has stayed late were because she really wanted to finish something that day i.e. she was never told to do that. Maybe there's less pressure on SDETs? But she says the devs seem to work about as much, at least from her perspective.
  • jdubs 11y ago
    SDET?
    • satyajeet23 11y ago
      Software Development Engineer in Testing, I think.
      • cesarbs 11y ago
        That's right.
      • scurvy 11y ago
        Funny how Bezos has disdain for Microsoft, but then steals all their jobs titles. MS first coined the term SDET for that role.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
      • cesarbs 11y ago
        Yes.
    • cesarbs 11y ago
      As others said, Software Development Engineer in Test. She's a dev that writes test automation code.
  • untog 11y ago
• cesarbs 11y ago
  I'm curious about one thing: what exactly was the source of your work-related stress, apart form the on-call pages? This is something people rarely elaborate on and I think is very important to get a good picture of the place. I see two different sources of stress in engineering work: large volume stress and "hostile dev environment" stress (sorry, I wish I could come up with a better term). The first means just that you have a large load of things to do. Personally I am not that much bothered by it if my environment allows me to execute on that volume of tasks. What often has me going into mad rages is the second type of stress: IDE slowness, random unexplicable build crashes, inefficient engineering systems, poorly designed code that makes it really hard to test it quickly. You get the idea. You have a task to get done and you could get it done if it depended on your competence alone, but the development environment is so fucked up that you constantly battle it when trying to make the smallest of changes. That builds up a ridiculous amount of stress because now you feel like you're lagging behind, and it's not because you don't know how to do something, but simply because the very thing that should enable your work prevents you from doing so. What of those kinds of stresses did you have at Amazon? I'm genuinely curious.
  • ams6110 11y ago
    A bad carpenter blames his tools.
    • cesarbs 11y ago
      When you can choose the tools you want to work with and still complain about them, then yes, you are at fault. But when you are forced to use a set of really bad tools and there's not much you can do about it, it's legit to complain about them. It's one thing being able to choose to use e.g. Emacs, git, and a language of your choice vs. working on a project that requires you to use an outdated version control system, a clunky IDE and more of that sort.
      • crucifiction 11y ago
        What on earth are you even talking about? Most people at Amazon I know use IntelliJ or vim, its their choice. The languages teams use are also that teams choice. The whole company uses git. I don't think you ever worked there...
• umanwizard 11y ago
  I worked at Amazon for 2 years and it was literally nothing like this. I feel like the article is talking about a completely different company. Why didn't you change teams?
  • omouse 11y ago
    Yeah it's a big enough company that I wouldn't be surprised if some middle managers are forcing the devs/employees to do a lot of work. It's kinda like Microsoft, I heard there were just a few good teams or departments that were really good and the rest were meh.
  • serge2k 11y ago
    For me I quit rather than switching teams because I felt like I was in a lousy position to switch. Level 1 SDE, didn't want to lengthen my time before promotion and didn't want to go be the ops bitch on another team. Decided to look outside the company and wound up getting a job with higher pay, promotion, and a nicer company overall.
    • umanwizard 11y ago
      Right, that's basically why I left. Amazon is bad to mediocre in my experience, but it's nothing like what this article describes. It was more poor business decisions, boring projects, and laughably bad tools/environment compared to other famous "big league" software companies. I worked 40h weeks and got along with everyone. Only one time in two years did my manager ask me to work on a Saturday, to finish a project that had VP level visibility, and he felt extremely awkward and apologetic about it.
  • MCRed 11y ago
    When you have a toxic manager at Amazon-- and I did-- you can't change teams. I had an offer from the manager of another team, but was fired when I attempted to change teams. The idea that you can change teams is kinda a fallacy... sure it happens sometimes but it's more like horse trading than anything else
    • 11y ago
• oneshot908 11y ago
  IMO Even if you love your current gig, you should interview elsewhere at least once or twice a year to estimate your market value. Do not let your HR department establish your value for you, they will always sell you short.
  • xur17 11y ago
    Serious question: It feels a little weird to interview somewhere with little intention of accepting the offer (unless it is a huge pay boost / much better position). I've been at my job just over a year, and enjoy the job / believe I am paid fairly well, but I'd like to see what else is out there (as I'm very flexible on locations, etc). Do I just apply for a few jobs in different areas, and only accept if it's a huge pay boost? Is it wrong to go into the interview like that?
    • oneshot908 11y ago
      Are you an at-will employee? I'll bet that you are one. From: http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employment-at-will-definition-30022.html http://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/employment-at-will-de... "An at-will employee can be fired at any time, for any reason (except for a few illegal reasons, spelled out below). If the employer decides to let you go, that's the end of your job--and you have very limited legal rights to fight your termination." Now after reading the above sentence, do you still feel weird about this?
      • meowface 11y ago
        There are still issues of regular human decency and courtesy. How would you feel if a company interviewed you with absolutely no intention of hiring you, even if you did really well, and was just experimenting with their interview process or training interviewers?
        • phillmv 11y ago
          a) You are not a company. The incentives and the amount of relative power each entity has in this relationship is skewed. A job to you is life changing. To a large enough company, you're just a conversion or churn metric. b) That happens all the time. For instance, in order to get an H1B, a company has to document that they can't fill a given position in the local market. Which you accomplish by putting out hyper specific job ads. If you want to be nice about it, don't pull that game on small startups but that's about it.
• seiji 11y ago
  Since I left, I've helped multiple other friends/colleagues detach emotionally from the need for approval Literally cult de-programming. Kinda amazing we let companies go so far. Fuck Jeff Always good to re-read Steve's platform rant (https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX https://plus.google.com/+RipRowan/posts/eVeouesvaVX): 7) Thank you; have a nice day! Ha, ha! You 150-odd ex-Amazon folks here will of course realize immediately that #7 was a little joke I threw in, because Bezos most definitely does not give a shit about your day.
• x5n1 11y ago
  Perhaps I should abandon AWS.
• rebootthesystem 11y ago
  It is interesting to read some of these accounts. We have several hundred clients who sell on Amazon. I can probably say we hear horror stories on a daily basis. If I were to summarize the stories and reach a conclusion it would be that Amazon (retail side) exists as a set of silos characterized by incompetence mixed with a solid dose of indifference and total lack of consideration for sellers. I've seen sellers damaged to the point where they lost everything. Business, home, cars, everything. Why? Well, in the one case I can think of we heard from this seller who had been doing millions of dollars per year on Amazon for about four years. One morning he wakes up to an email from Amazon telling him that his "Selling privileges have been revoked permanently". And, in the true style of a lot of large internet companies there was no way to engage with someone at Amazon to try to solve the problem that led to the permanent suspension. In fact, apparently he was only given one opportunity to send and email. It was rejected. He was told they do not discuss the reasons for these decisions. This person lost everything they built over four years of hard work and had to file for bankruptcy when the commitments made by the business to support a multi-million-dollar-per-year supply pipeline caught-up with what had happened. If you ask me, that says a lot about Amazon and the people who work there. They are willing to make decisions that can destroy families and don't seem to care enough to engage in a proper business-to-business discussion aimed at solving problems. Instead it's "off with their heads" and that's it. Businesses are not machines, they are people. What Amazon is doing to families with businesses is sick and disgusting. The latest trend we've been hearing has to do with their ads platform. Apparently click fraud is rampant and Amazon is doing exactly nothing about it. And, if what I am reading is correct, it is entirely possible they aren't even equipped to deal with click fraud at all. A number of our clients are reporting click through rates that are 10x to 60x historical rates and no sales whatsoever out of thousands of clicks per day/week. Their experience isn't far different from that of the people who face suspensions: Amazon refuses to discuss what is going on. Advertising on Amazon, for some sellers, has turned into the equivalent of throwing dollars into a bonfire. I could go on but I don't think it's necessary. My conclusion based on what I've read here and experienced through our clients is that it almost makes sense that the third party seller side of Amazon seems to be as messed-up as it is. If portions of their operation are as caustic and abusive as some of the accounts on this thread relate nothing good can come out of that. As I said before, business, ultimately, is about people. And if the people who are the business are not happy, the business isn't going to run well. That's what our clients are seeing out of the side of the Amazon monster they face every day.
• JabavuAdams 11y ago
  I wonder how much mental illness and poor decision making this culture has caused. Staying up days in a row or working 80+ hour weeks is not a recipe for good decision making. Not even considering the human angle, this makes me very concerned for Amazon's future business prospects. Disclosure: I'm an AMZN shareholder.
  • amzn_throw_away 11y ago
    I work for Amazon and this has not been my experience. I can't speak to what others have said, but in my org it would be extremely unusual, and considered alarming, for people to work more than 40-50 hours per week. The only times I've really worked over 40-50 hours would be while I was on-call, which occurs about once every two months for a week, and even then only during major issues (maybe once or twice a year?). The culture, once again, at least in my org, is actually pretty chill - I had a doctor's appointment last week, I just sent an email the morning of saying "Hey everyone, I'll be in around 1:00, cya then, here's my status for standup" and it's cool. My boss actually chided me for checking my email too aggressively during my time off. So yeah, I can't speak to everything mentioned in the article, I can only say that my experience has not matched up with this.
    • nemtaro 11y ago
      So, let's see... 1. You check your email aggressively during your time off. 2. You think that 50 hours a week is normal. 3. You think 1/8 weeks of _unpaid_ on-call is reasonable. How many sev-2s and sev-3s do you get during your one week on-call? If more than 10/week, can you think about how many are outside of business hours?
      • amzn_throw_away 11y ago
        1) I do that regardless of where I work - that's part of my personality - I did that at less intense jobs - I've done that since college - my boss actually threatened to lock me out of my email if I didn't stop 2) I think 40-50 is acceptable, I would ask you to find anywhere salaried that 40 is the true upper limit - I'm telling you I can't remember a week I spent more than 50 - 40 is definitely the norm though. 3) I get paid for my time in the office, work outside of the office is highly unusual for my on-call rotation - it happens maybe once or twice a year as I noted. Far less than ten - almost none outside business hours. Last time I was paged outside of business hours it was because someone messed up who they paged :)
• throwaway6497 11y ago
  I heard few stories from friends/colleagues who worked there - There was a production outage once at Amazon and my friend's manager and her team (including my friend) gave a post-mortem to a large audience. Port-mortem sessions are open for everyone to attend. He mentioned, it was a free-for-all. Execs were hurling F-bombs every sentence and the team was publicly humiliated. The manager was in tears and was later demoted. I could see how my friend was feeling for her as a person/human being. - One employee asked about possibility of providing free food ala Google/FB in a org level all-hands. Exec pooh-poohed Google for being highly irresponsible and that they can never sustain themselves spending so much on free food. Lazlo Block says it is one of the best things at Google. - Frugality - I heard you don't even free get pop at Amazon. No paternity leave. Maternity leaves are much shorter compared to what people take at Google/Facebook out of fear. Poor health benefits and 401K matching compared to Microsoft/Google/FB. - Sweatshop - People are over worked and are working on weekends/holidays a good chunk of time. 70 hr weeks seem to be the norm. Get only one day-off for Christmas and Thanksgiving. Many Amazon execs are probably laughing their asses off looking at companies in the valley one-upping each other with great pay, quality free food, extending maternity/paternity leaves, generous health benefits and 401K contributions. "Look at these losers in the valley, and look at us, we pay employees pea-nuts, treat them like garbage, don't give a fuck about their well-being or families but still get a ton of shit done. Our stock is soaring! " A good chunk of their engineers who are willing to take this kind of abuse are H1-Bs waiting for greencards. All new college grads wisen up after looking at their friends from Google/Facebook/Mircosoft, jump ship after a couple of years. Only people who stay there for a long time seem to be people who really like this kind of confrontational/psychopathic environment or incompetent engineers who rose into management, and cling onto their jobs.
  • retailengineer 11y ago
    22 days ago, you commented: "For a 25-30 year time frame AMZN will beat S&P and Walmart by several X. AMZN, GOOG are companies which will have a huge impact on how we live. I have put some money into them. They are Berkshire Hathaways of our time." So you seem fine with whatever (exaggerated and imaginary) evil things the execs are up to, as long as you profit from that as well.
• tlogan 11y ago
  My experience with working with people from Amazon and visiting them is that it is the same as any other big corporation: hard work or initiative does not get you anywhere. Just make your boss happy and try to work as least as possible and you will be fine. If you are ambitious and you want to grow or something - I do not know. I'm not aware of any big corporation where hard work or new ideas/initiative will get you somewhere. You can say "fuck Jeff" - but that is because you were naive and Amazon is not red cross. (I have to make a note about initiative: my previous company sent us to some management classes and on these classes they told us that "Initiative is the key to becoming a star employee" - and we all were laughing since real-world experience thought us that "initiative is easiest way to get yourself sidelined".)
  • untog 11y ago
    So, you haven't ever worked for Amazon. And yet you're telling an Amazon employee what they should have made of an environment that they lived in, and that you've never experienced. Why?
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
  • anawsthrowaway 11y ago
    >hard work or initiative does not get you anywhere. Just make your boss happy and try to work as least as possible and you will be fine. I would say that's probably the least true thing here. Amazon is many things, but unrewarding to hard work and initiative is not one of them. One of the most prized traditions at the company is writing "one pagers". Many new services and product offerings come out of people writing and championing these.
• acd 11y ago
  A danger with Amazon since they are not based in California but in Seattle, there is non competition clauses enforced by contract. Amazon has sued ex engineers leaving the company. http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-sues-employee-taking-google-cloud-job-new-test-non-compete-laws/ http://www.geekwire.com/2014/amazon-sues-employee-taking-goo... I choose not to choose Amazon. Quote from the movie Trainspotting "But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else"
• mgkimsal 11y ago
  Wow.... it sounds like the software side of things isn't too much better than the warehouse side of things. I know it's not a direct comparison, but... amazon warehouse workers seem to be treated on the low end of warehouse worker jobs, and from what you're saying, the tech side is in a relatively similar position. Also... unrelated, but re: recruiters - I've had a friend who's been pinged... 5 (6?) times over the past 8 years for Amazon - was flown out and interviewed and at least once that I know of, and went through a separate phone screen process as well - both times was rejected, but... they still keep calling. He's asked that they stop calling, but 10 months later some other recruiter will call up and try to start things rolling again...
  • bane 11y ago
    That happens to me too. I don't think there's a good central system of information on past candidates there. I just tell them that I previously interviewed there and look up my file, but that doesn't seem to get anywhere, so I just tell them I'm not interested at the moment (it's always better to keep more doors open).
• bane 11y ago
  I interviewed there once and made it through the entire gauntlet only to stumble on the salary. They asked me what I was looking for and talked about how the vesting of stock grants worked. At the time I was making decent, but not great, East Coast money, and I figured that the cost of living is about the same where I lived and in Seattle so I asked for about the same. I've never seen a recruiter's eyes fall out of their head before, after a moment of stammering he said..."you realize that's more than what the senior directors, maybe some of the C-levels, earn?" It seemed kind of a bizarre statement, because I knew a couple SDEs at Amazon and their total compensation package had been far in excess of that figure, but a big piece had been due to stock grants that had, over the vesting period, exploded in size due to Amazon's stock growth. I have no doubt many of the senior management made some tiny salary, but it didn't matter because they made multiples of that every year in stock grants. I definitely came away with a very weird feeling about the place and was kind of glad when they called back a week later and said they just couldn't do it and thanked me for coming in. I'd much rather work for places that pay me a lot more to develop cool things using Amazon's infrastructure.
  • amazonthrowaway 11y ago
    Base salaries for execs top out at something like $175,000. Is that what you're defining as "decent but not great"?
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • rattray 11y ago
      In NYC, that salary would probably earn "decent but not great", if that, depending on your social circle (read: social class).
    • bane 11y ago
      My base at the time was in that ballpark, but not that high. My total compensation from the job I was leaving was within spitting distance, and I knew that number was under what my friends working at Amazon were making in their total package. I live in a major metro, so it's surprising sometimes how far that doesn't go. It worked out in the end though, that money was also tied to an incredible workload and ultra-high stress. I ended up someplace much less stressful for a few years, and now have taken a position and paycut in exchange for a much improved work/life balance at a non-profit. My stuff is not as fancy, but I live much better, though I wonder what would have happened if I had switched coasts, moved to Seattle and settled there instead. It also turns out all the people I knew at Amazon have all left for other places as well.
• hellbanner 11y ago
  Do you think Amazon will continue to do as well as they do in the long run? Will they run out of talent?
• teaneedz 11y ago
  So many similar stories like this - Amazon sounds like a place without humanity which originates from the highest leadership roles. However, what does this say about those who support and buy from Amazon?