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I would wager moving from being a tenured private university professor in Pittsburgh to Seattle to work for Amazon for money, even in a VP level role, would be
by jsolson 10y ago
I would wager moving from being a tenured private university professor in Pittsburgh to Seattle to work for Amazon for money, even in a VP level role, would be a poor choice.
Unfortunately, moving because you believe Amazon will throw resources at a problem shows a distinct lack of familiarity with the "frugality" aspect of Amazon's culture.
- mattkrause 10y agoFrom what I've heard, they are willing to pay well for talent, but tend to be frugal on "perks" like free lunches. Besides, it sounds like the resource he's particularly interested in is compute (and maybe storage) and AWS has this in spades...
- jsolson 10y agoI have worked for Amazon (although not in AWS). The compensation was ok at the time, but starting to lag their peers by the time I left (within a year of leaving my comp had a little more than doubled). My understanding is that they've made an effort to catch up there. Regardless, Pittsburgh is a staggeringly cheap place to live (I grew up there) while Seattle is decidedly not (I live there now). Unless he's tripled his comp, he'll be making effectively less. That wasn't my point, though, I assume he's not moving for the money. I was actually talking about resources to dedicate to research. What makes you think Amazon will be willing to supply compute (assuming they actually have substantial excess cycles to sell, particularly on GPUs, FPGAs, or ASICs) to internal development efforts? Simply having the resource doesn't mean making it available. Actually making appropriate resources available to people trying to solve problems would run completely counter to my experience there.
- mattkrause 10y agoI don't have any inside information or anything like that, but...they are hiring him to extend his previous research on large-scale machine learning systems. As the lab head, I imagine he won't have a hard time getting resources--they must have given him something like a startup package to lure him there. As a big name, they have a strong incentive to keep him happy: if he were to leave in a justifiable huff (e.g., "they promised me tons of compute and all I got were these Fire Phones"), it would make recruiting much harder.
- taliar 10y agoHe will probably be a principle or senior principle and will have a lot of freedom over what his group does, as long as he can justify that it helps the company in some way (which really shouldn't be any more difficult than justifying funding to ${government-organization}).
- jsolson 10y agoFreedom to control what your group works on versus resources (high quality staff, compute, etc.) to effectively pursue that work are very different things.
- taliar 10y agoFor an influential principle or senior principle who is in high demand, none of these are problems.
- jsolson 10y agoFair enough. My experience didn't take me to AWS, but in retail it was a problem for entire tier 1 services to get resources with VP support, let alone new development/research initiatives. Perhaps Amazon has changed, or AWS is simply different/better in this regard.
- taliar 10y agoMy only experiences are as an SDE in retail in a group with little power and as a research intern in AWS in a group that is more influential. I don't think the difference in organizations is what does it so much as the difference in power; the researcher who started our group is very well-known in our domain and has a lot of say in how things work internally. Even things that I used to think were impossible to have any say over. This professor's situation seems similar to me, so my best guess is that he'll have the same freedom (both in direction and in resources).