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Amazon SDE. I know this was not the primary point of your post but I need to respond to "It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work". There ar
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Amazon SDE. I know this was not the primary point of your post but I need to respond to "It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work".
There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive. A lot is expected from you. The perks are nowhere near a Google's or many SV shops.
But corporate and micromanaged are the furthest thing from the truth. There are VERY few "top-down" directives. (we call them S-team goals for the SVP team). And each and every team is given a TON of autonomy, independence and ownership.
This of course has its own problems, and why sometimes some teams breed awful internal cultures that lead to NY times articles. It's why the AWS console is built with 23 different web technologies and each one is slightly inconsistent from the other. It's why most of the company's internal services are still not on native AWS (though we are essentially 100‰ on EC2).
But this ownership and independence is 90% Fabulous and genuinely freeing. You are given a tremendous amount of autonomy over your technical decisions. You get a chance to decide on the working culture and attitude towards software development that makes sense for the people on your team, depending on your strengths, preferences, projects, and customers.
Amazon is not for everybody. But it is far closer to a group of a few thousand startups than a corporate behemoth.
Also, the SDEs here put a stop to all that Proctor-driven interviewing, though sadly Amazon PR doesn't want to make a public declaration as such. Oh well.
- ta_wh 10y agoI want to see if I can clarify your last point, because it'd be huge if this is true. You're saying that internal pressure has caused HR to drop ProctorU across the SDE/intern pipeline? What's the replacement, traditional phone screens + onsites?
- amzn-throw 10y agoYes to all that, internal pressure from the SDE community. Except the onsites for interns - Interns in the US sometimes get only multiple phone screens - it's been like that for a while. I think they had some issues with cheating which is what led to the Proctor overreaction.
- dismantlethesun 10y agoMicromanagement critically comes from the next-person in the heirachy. It is rare to have a workplace like Apple, where the CEO was rumoured to involve himself in every aspect of the company. Most workplaces' simply suffer from bad team leads, bad middle managers, bad shift managers, bad scrummasters, and the like. In fact, it may be that extreme team autonomy allows micromanagement to flourish since the top leaders don't know what's going within the teams, and do not try to stop poor team dynamics from occurring unless it affects performance in a visible way.
- amzn-throw 10y agoSure. But I've been on 3 different Amazon teams in 3 different offices. I've never experienced this (though I have experienced a bad manager, micromanagent was not their issue)
- throwaway420 10y agoFair enough, you gave a great response and I'm sure there's some nice things about that and many things outsiders don't know As a computer guy, my opinion is probably most heavily influenced by Steve Yegge's infamous software platforms rant which was both fascinating and painted a mixed picture.