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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

• igorstellar 6y ago
  It's an old gist, you should flag it as [2015]
  • dang 6y ago
    Yes. Added now. That was really misleading.
• MattGaiser 6y ago
  A former colleague of mine suspects that Amazon is going to eventually run out of developers to hire because of how rapidly they burn through them. Yet to know anyone who lasted more than a year or two there. Obviously some do, but they go through an enormous number of people.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • mmcconnell1618 6y ago
    No, they won't run out of people to hire but the cost to hire them will go up. At a certain point, they may have to pay more and offer more perks to attract the level of talent they want. The culture will mellow once the payroll expense starts climbing.
    • mrep 6y ago
      Yeah, I'd probably go back if they started paying more than G/FB/N.
  • dagav 6y ago
    There is an endless supply of wide eyed new grads looking to prove themselves at a big 5
  • ncallaway 6y ago
    It really, really depends on the teams you're on. I was at Amazon for four years and enjoyed my time there. I had one stint on a high profile high-pressure team that lasted about 6 months (no on-call, though). That was the busiest time I had at Amazon but it was kinda known going into that project. I generally worked 45-50 hour weeks, with the occasional 50-60 hour weeks but that was pretty rare. It's a big company. It really depends a lot on your manager, your team, and your org.
• samirillian 6y ago
  This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they want to believe that they are somehow fundamentally different from the distribution and grocery store workers, and fundamentally similar to Bezos? I can't help but feel it's just this kind of false consciousness that prevents developers from _getting organized_. Sidenote, payroll tax on Amazon in Seattle trying to get revived. It's a long and winding story. Check out taxamazon.net
  • alharith 6y ago
    There is something about the human psyche that makes you partial to something that treats you well. My work treats me exceptionally well. It does not treat the sales center employees as well. I find it hard to say it's a terrible place to work, because as mentioned earlier, it takes tremendous care of me, and is the reason I am able to have the life I have, the house I have, and support the family I have in the way I can. It's ok to want to continue to be treated great, and also have them treat others better.
  • google234123 6y ago
    Payroll tax? The website should be taxamazonworkers.net
    • dlp211 6y ago
      Payroll taxes may or may not be borne by the worker. Oversimplifying tax burden is a dishonest argument that is consistently perpetuated.
      • jedberg 6y ago
        Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller. That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.
• thoraway1010 6y ago
  The loaner thing is so true - having two bosses is THE PITS! That and not sleeping. My first job out of college I had two bosses. HORRIBLE. This came up recently, a manager, trying to be helpful, not sure they could manage someone said why don't we both manage them. NO! The other things - trading sleep and shutting off friends - the first will destroy your quality of life and the second you will regret for a LONG time no matter how critical the day to day was. I'm not perfect. Setting boundries. I focus on situations in my case - what situation lead to bad results. Also - you can sometimes trade time for reduced money - which in some of these situations is a NO BRAINER. I'm trying to do that. Society really IS NOT setup to support that. I go home even if I'm behind. I sleep next to my wife and play with my kid. Covid has made catching back up with friends harder. I think what folks from the outside don't realize is that folks making big money+ - you put a lot of pressure ON YOURSELF. You are given lots of money, often lots of responsibility, your work impacts lots of people (internally and externally). This is even if Jeff Bezos is not your boss.
  • harrisonjackson 6y ago
    My favorite example of having two bosses was as an intern. I was getting loaned out to a team that thought I was working full-time when I was really working 20 hours per week. I wasn't aware of this until I started getting super negative feedback from the manager. She basically thought I was the worst developer alive haha - then when I clarified I was a part-time intern and full-time student she totally lost it on my og manager. Of course he then was furious at me for blowing his scheme... not sure exactly how the internal budget/trading hours/money worked, but they were offloading 40 hours of full-time budget for my part-time efforts.
• itsspring 6y ago
  > On-call wasn’t (and isn’t) too terrible for my team. At first we averaged 1 page every 2 weeks; now we’re up to about 1 a week. Wow, I wish I had once a week. This is way better than my previous employer/role. I was on-call for months straight, and would get paged multiple times a night, every day, even at 2am, 4am. I had to carry my laptop to dinners, date nights, game nights, etc. I got burned out and moved careers into a role that never has on-call. I don't get to code much anymore, but I've found other things to enjoy
  • neurobashing 6y ago
    same. i was oncall 24x7 for about, I dunno, 8 years? I'd share it with my co-founder, so I'd get a week or two off here and there. It was horrible and in retrospect a really bad decision with the expected outcomes, mostly broken mental health.
  • balladeer 6y ago
    I don't know how absurd this sounds but on-call is the only reason I have stayed away from backend or frontend/web development. I had worked on both for few months and ran back to native app development. There might be a place where the company has a "follow the sun" policy for on-call but I haven't come across any.
  • csharptwdec19 6y ago
    Yeah On-call can vary greatly by company, although how On-call issues are handled can have a huge impact on your perception of a job. At one previous employer, you were on a 2-week rotation for on-call. But Every time you were on call, it was the same set of problems, always at the same inconvenient times (Mid sunday afternoon, random weekdays but always between 3-5AM, etc.) Admittedly often they were NOPs (Oh, alert came in, but when you check the system it's fine.) But we didn't fix the false alarms. And we didn't fix the recurring real problems either; the Org's view was that was the entire purpose of the On-call person; that middle child you send to pay the loan shark not-quite enough because you don't care what happens to them. At later employer, I actually had to deal with -more- on call issues, both in severity and frequency. And yet, I hate being on-call less, because at the very least when we find problems on-call the org puts a focus on fixing them.
• mouzogu 6y ago
  I enjoyed reading this. 'Encourage employees to be critical not just of ideas, but also of expectations.' From my experience as a developer; I've never really been involved in the process of setting expectations. Something I find incredibly frustrating at times. It's like sure you can give your opinion but it's too late to make any difference. I think it comes back to the main point in the article about open communication. I think open communication needs to be inclusive. However, that's rarely the case at least in terms of setting business expectations. It's only natural to want to be involved in shaping some objective or some expectation that impacts you and for which you may be one of the more qualified to discuss.
  • bozzcl 6y ago
    >I've never really been involved in the process of setting expectations Nobody will ask you. You have to be upfront about it from the start. Request time estimations and fully fledged requirement definitions from the start. Review them before accepting a project, push back against overly ambitious plans and propose changes that allow you to deliver value quickly and iteratively. It's easier to react to surprises if you are able to test the ideas as you go. Stick to the plan as much as you can. Push back against changes to the requirements if they're not vital. Let others know about blockers clearly, as soon as you run into them. If you get behind schedule, communicate it properly. Stuff happens, unfortunately, and deadlines not being met is a part of life. You just get better at estimating with experience. There's no way the upper echelons will adapt if they don't receive input timely and loudly enough. If your boss is any kind of decent, they will listen to you and trust your input. If they don't listen, then you should reconsider your current job.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• maerF0x0 6y ago
  > I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and tells you “holy crap, this is serious.” A key difference is that the oncall engineer is usually able to directly influence the quality and robustness of the systems being watched. Sort of like preventative medicine, but much more direct. Crappy teams make crappy software that pages often (or not at all if their ops fails to write any meaningful alerts)
  • btmiller 6y ago
    I don't trust an engineer that can't troubleshoot their own software running in production. I think the "you write it, you own it" adage is really smart and raises all tides when engineers are empowered to root cause each issue.
    • disgruntledphd2 6y ago
      I think the second part is super important though, but it's often forgotten. If you work on a buggy-enough system, and don't do the root causing, then you will have incredibly bad on-call experiences.
  • johnmaguire2013 6y ago
    Plus, AWS literally runs life-saving applications. Doctors need AWS online to authenticate and use all sorts of applications.
  • grumple 6y ago
    Well... some of us join teams that have problem software that is going to take a long time to fix, and don't have the manpower for it. And sometimes the alarms are overly sensitive.
  • dagav 6y ago
    Crappy managers stress delivery over quality, and then engineers pay for it when they're oncall. The manager doesn't care how much their team gets paged because they'll be sound asleep while their engineer bangs their head against the wall at 2am, and the manager gets their pat on the head for delivering more projects.
• redredrobot 6y ago
  I appreciate this being shared, but I have some qualms. I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto' is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other companies I've seen. They don't include things they don't actually care about, like most corporate mottos do (you'll notice the lack of 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs). At least in my experience, you only need to pay back Amazon proportional to (2 years minus duration employed) so it really isn't that bad (maybe that wasn't the case when this was written). Maybe it's changed, but the signing bonuses I saw were essentially increased salary until your stock starts vesting seriously. It gets paid out and vests every paycheck so there isn't anything you need to pay back.
  • hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago
    I think it depends on the size of the signing bonus. Smaller ones are paid upfront as a lump sum, larger ones are paid out over time. The latter of course is just an abuse of language by Amazon to disguise the fact that they're cutting your salary in year 3/4 in exchange for stock.
    • kmonsen 6y ago
      I don't think that is a fair way up putting it when they are very upfront about it and don't call it salary. On the other hand at the end of year 2 when you have gotten used to the monthly payments I guess the we told you so is it bit harder to agree with.
      • hooloovoo_zoo 6y ago
        To be clear, I don't think they're abusing employees. I just think calling it a 'signing bonus' is a ridiculous linguistic contortion.
  • lowiqengineer 6y ago
    > 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs). Customer Obsession is "do no evil".
• Thaxll 6y ago
  I used to be like that and then one day I realized it's just a CS job, I'm not doing open heart surgery so I shouldn't stress about it. Since then my life has been much better.
• rdiddly 6y ago
  "If paged, you have 15 minutes to get online and respond to the page. If you don’t, your manager is paged. You do NOT want this to happen." I want it to happen. I'd like a word.
  • ignoramous 6y ago
    > I want it to happen. I'd like a word. You could be shown the door in no-time. Amazon has forced attrition and the manager decides who gets the cull. They may make a mountain out of a mole to further their objectives.
    • cbanek 6y ago
      As someone who came from a similar environment (MSFT during the stack ranking days), the forced attrition and manager's arbitrarily blackballing employees are the ingredients of the toxic stew. If a manager hates your guts, there's really nothing you can do, even if you are great at your job.
      • zamalek 6y ago
        Does your manager love your guts? Are you good at your job? Hopefully that paycheck can bleach the guilt of your colleagues losing their jobs because you are good at yours. That toxicity could also be because they are either selecting or creating people who are okay with this.
        • cbanek 6y ago
          Yes, yes, and thankfully I left that environment. Now I work in the public sector, I guess you could say. Mostly because of the gas-lighting of reviews and performance "feedback." I've been on both sides of it, and seeing that I'm the same person, it really made it obvious how arbitrary it is. I feel like it's common wisdom now that forced culling is not a great strategy and has lots of perverse incentives, but still not universal.
    • dudul 6y ago
• Barrin92 6y ago
  The on call stuff sounds outright dystopian to me, it's not even legal in my country. More places should think about adopting something akin to France's El Khomri law's (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect) and ensure that every citizen has enough time to recuperate from work and isn't pestered by their employer 24/7.
  • filoleg 6y ago
    How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? If a big selling point of your system is the ability to be on 24/7, on-call is inevitable. But it definitely can be way less gruesome than it currently is at Amazon for a lot of teams right now. For example, my on-call schedule is extremely relaxed and low-stress, it is never a worry I actually have or something I dread ahead of time. But getting rid of it completely is simply impossible for a lot of "always online" services.
    • Barrin92 6y ago
      >How are you proposing to run a complex system that essentially powers a big chunk of the entire internet and can go down any second without on-call? hire more people?
      • filoleg 6y ago
        Hire more people to do what? Be on-call? Hiring more people is a great idea for making on-call less stressful, because it allows for much sparser on-call shifts (e.g., one week every 8 months vs. one week every 2 months). But I don't see how hiring more people gets rid of on-call completely. Someone will always have to be on-call. You cannot just hire people who do on-call-only duties and nothing else, you have to be very closely familiar with the code and features being written in order to resolve issues effectively. Which usually means that you need to be someone who actually worked on those things, not just some glorified extra-fancy customer-support worker.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• diehunde 6y ago
  I would read a book by this guy.
  • valbaca 6y ago
    amznymous here Thanks :)
• WalterBright 6y ago
  > Revisit your bonus/relocation payback strategy ... if that's what you need to keep employees, that's fucked. The reason for it isn't employee retention. It's to stop people from accepting a job from Amazon just so someone will pay for their move to Seattle and give them a free bonus. Would people do this? Yes. I've seen them try. It also discourages people who aren't serious about the job.
• majormajor 6y ago
  > Remember when I mentioned Amazon's moving and signing bonus? Little caveat on that, if you leave or are fired within 2 years, you have to pay it back. Paying back a signing bonus if they fire you seems super rough. Is this common elsewhere? 2 years also seems high - the time I got a signing bonus, it was "pay back if you leave voluntarily in 1 year" which was much nicer than the described. Unfortunately, much of this seems pretty common, especially months-of-crunch-time. Being able to figure out projects to avoid (if you're at a big corp like this where such things are possible), and being able to avoid them is a very good career skill to cultivate. On-call can work quite well if the team has sufficient ownership to improve the underlying issues, not just keep the lights on. I've done this with good success. I'm often disappointed by how many managers and companies I've seen who don't get that aspect. Believing too much in mantras like "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" can be dangerous, too, though. How well it works depends on the manager and the person scoping and planning the work. Another critical skill to develop to escape being the person doing the grunt work.
  • lowiqengineer 6y ago
    > Paying back a signing bonus if they fire you seems super rough. Is this common elsewhere? 2 years also seems high - the time I got a signing bonus, it was "pay back if you leave voluntarily in 1 year" which was much nicer than the described. I actually don't think this is true. My understanding is if you're PIPed they don't really care. The signing bonus is paid out monthly the 2nd year (and for people hired at SDE2+ its first year too) so you don't have to pay it back after the first year. Disclaimer: Amazon L4
  • ng12 6y ago
    I've heard that companies rarely enforce these clauses unless you really burned a bridge. If anything they won't give you severance if you quit within the first year.
  • myalphabet 6y ago
    I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to have caused him undue stress. I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation. I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you get to keep the other $10k.
• throwaway24857 6y ago
  > After being on the team for a couple of months, I was put on the on-call rotation I don't work at Amazon but the situation is very similar to my job. On-call can be brutal, even if there are no incidents during your week (which is rare.) Just the fact that you have to be 24/7 _ready_ during a whole week sucks, especially when you have a family. During my on-call week, I can't go get groceries, I can't take my kid to her hockey practice, we can't go out for lunch over the weekend, etc. It takes a toll, for sure.
  • grecy 6y ago
    At my last position they tried to offer me a "promotion". More responsibility, more accountability, mentoring juniors AND on call, all for the grand pay raise of $0. "on call" was super, super vague and I pushed back hard on it. If they require me to work outside something reasonable like 6am-6pm, they will pay me at least double for it. No exceptions. I wish everyone would push back that hard, and that on-call was an official opt-in "extra pay" scenario. Needless to say I turned down their "promotion" even after months of them trying to make me take it. Note: I am NOT saying I'll work 12 hour days. I'm just saying if I have to come in early for a meeting for 6am, or stay until 6pm sometimes, that's fine. If I'm expected to come in or be on call at 2am, that's a different story.
  • dudul 6y ago
    The 1st time I worked at a company with "on call" we had this concern while trying to define the policy/rotation/etc. It was always "well, yeah I can be on call sure, but this specific Tuesday at 7pm I have this thing". We solved it in 5 minutes: just have a primary and a secondary that gets the page after 10 minutes. Solved. Go get your groceries, if it's bad luck and the page happens during the 45 minutes where you're out, your buddy will get it.
    • dfinninger 6y ago
      Yep. This was the solution for us. The secondary is the next-in-line for primary. Secondary is also first in line for helping out during incidents. This means communication with other teams, a second incident popping up (rare, but has happened), etc. I’ve found that just having someone else to commiserate with at midnight, if needed, really helps the mental state of on-call.
• balladeer 6y ago
  > During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way Then next: > are you willing to work nights and/or weekends To be fair I'd say this is mention enough. If someone is willing to (or has to) look the other way at the time of hiring when something like this was explicitly said, then even a "hey, we have on-call here, you fine with that?" would be okay.
  • txcwpalpha 6y ago
    I think it goes both ways (in fact, most of this post seems to go both ways in that Amazon sounds brutal but OP could have taken actions to mitigate it). If your team is going to be requiring on-call, you should say that during the interview process. "Are you willing to work nights and/or weekends" is indicative, but is still too vague. Some might interpret that as just "sometimes you might have to work late if you are on a tight deadline", not as an on-call situation. However on the interviewee's side, if you see something in a job description that asks if you're willing to work nights and weekends, that should be an immediate indicator to you that you should ask why you possibly would have to work nights/weekends and in what capacity. It's the interviewee's responsibility to ask questions like this even if the employer isn't immediately forthcoming.
• trynewideas 6y ago
  > I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors My only advice to this person is: - talk to someone who does customer-facing tech support in your own company - never take a job in customer-facing tech support
  • chiyc 6y ago
    I'm not sure where they got the notion that emergency services are the only other field where people go on-call. Plenty of industries operate 24/7. I worked in high volume manufacturing where process engineers could be on-call 24/7-365 unless you explicitly asked a backup to cover you during a vacation or weekend. Depending on the part of the process you owned, that might mean a middle-of-the-night call a couple times a month or several times a week. No human lives on the line, just lots of money.
• aripickar 6y ago
  I have had a different experience with working at AWS. I've heard really terrible things working in retail, but AWS has been a pretty good place to work, with normal 9-5 hours. I can go more into detail about how my experience has been different from the article if people want.
  • jkingsbery 6y ago
    I'm a software engineer at Amazon in Retail. (This is just my opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity, etc.) Different software products have different severity levels. For my team, the oncall burden is not so bad. We have an internally facing tool. When we do get paged, it's usually requires acknowledging a ticket, a few minutes to validate something, sending an email out, and that's it. For teams with more externally visible products, a particular page can be stressful, but my understanding is they also spend a lot of time in ensuring system robustness in order to limit the number of pages. The "15 minute" response time the post referred to is generally to acknowledgement - the expected time to resolution can be quite variable. The working hours are generally pretty good as well. The general expectation is that you're not working crazy hours. I've ran into "project crunch time" at Amazon, but the experience at Amazon was like everywhere else I've worked. This also will vary by team: teams that need to make changes to support Black Friday obviously have a pretty hard deadline. Or if your team is getting ready for a re:invent announcement, there's no way to work around that. But from what I've heard, teams that have such a hard deadline also have a corresponding quiet period in December or January. Most people I know within Amazon that get burned out on one team and feel like there's no resolution within that team (or just feel like they've had enough with one area) solve that by switching teams. This is generally pretty easy, since most teams are hiring at any time, and they would rather take an internal transfer than an outside hire. Amazon has a pretty good system around having a senior individual contributor track (I haven't worked for any of the other big tech companies, my understanding is that they're similar). Part of the benefit of this system is that SDE1's/SDE2's have someone to reach out to for helping navigate management. Anyone at Amazon who reads this who is experiencing something similar to the OP should feel free to reach out to one of the senior engineers for help. Overall, I don't doubt that the post in the original article is that person's experience, but it has not been my experience.
  • 6y ago
• bambataa 6y ago
  Anyone working over their contracted hours needs to realise they're being exploited by their employer. Sometimes this is justified: we pay more than the going rate because we expect you to step up occasionally. Maybe it's kind of expected with Amazon in particular. But when it descends into perma death march and your manager flings you "a few" days holiday in recompense... does that make up for it? If it doesn't, to whom has the profit gone?
  • teej 6y ago
    These employees do not have employment contracts and do not have hours that are set by a contract.
    • bambataa 6y ago
      Wait, you're saying Amazon SDEs don't have a contract?
      • dudul 6y ago
        It's most likely a standard "at will" employment yes.
      • ncallaway 6y ago
        They have a contract, but the contract will specify them as "exempt salaried" employees. That's pretty standard across the board in the tech world (as well as many other professional roles). Exempt salaried employees aren't paid by the hour, and don't have a set number of hours they are expected to work. There is no overtime, but there's also no (contractual) penalty for working fewer than 40 hours in a week.
• thrr23434 6y ago
  Amazon seems to be an annoying company to work for, even overseas. 1-datapoint (@India): Their interviewers have uniformly managed to be both obnoxious, and somehow simultaneously also quite insipid.
• endlessmike89 6y ago
  >Be upfront and as precise as possible with what a position entails. "Working alongside smart and passionate people" is lazy hiring. I understand that this person was coming straight out of school, but the onus is on the applicant to figure out more about the job during the interview process.
  • sidlls 6y ago
    Interviewers, if they're coached properly by the organization, will lie. "Sell the candidate on the company" is a thing. Human beings aren't conditioned to have their skepticism alarms ramped up to 100% constantly in every interaction. At some point a certain level of trust to be honest with one another is required for society to have any cohesion. In my view businesses, especially software/tech companies, are quite poor at this on a good day and frequently work in ways that undermine it.
• pkamb 6y ago
  I've never understood how their Apple TV apps (Amazon Prime Video, Twitch, etc.) are so bad. If the Prime TV app was better I'd honestly probably cancel Netflix. But as-is I avoid using it completely. Then I interviewed for a mobile position at Amazon. Now I understand. A Facebook iOS recruiter laughed at my experience.
  • Austin_Conlon 6y ago
    Is Facebook iOS engineering supposed to be impressive for laughing you off? I don't understand how they let slip crashing any app that used their iOS SDK: https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1374 https://github.com/facebook/facebook-ios-sdk/issues/1374.
    • dfinninger 6y ago
      I think the parent means that in a Facebook interview they shared a laugh at how terrible the Amazon interview was.
      • hckr_news 6y ago
        Makes sense. They probably meant to say “...laughed at my story”.
• qeternity 6y ago
  > I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors Uh, not even close. I used to get up at 4am EST to trade European markets for a hedge fund. I was on call 24/7/365. I had my laptop and Bloomberg fingerprint scanner with me on any trip I took. And this is just my experience. I have had many friends in engineering, management consulting, fin tech, etc who have similar demands made of them. I’m not saying it’s right, but it is part of the rules of the game that we all sign up to. There’s a reason all of the aforementioned jobs pay so well.
  • sa46 6y ago
    In the military, we had a 2 hour recall for a large chunk of our battalion, about 200 people for a few months at a time. If you got a call, you were expected to be ready to go in less than 2 hours. Social norms meant the expectation was closer to 45 minutes than 2 hours. I think oncall is a common requirement for anything involving large sums of money, treatment of high risk injuries, or geopolitical power struggles.
    • qeternity 6y ago
      One I hadn’t even considered (typical stereotype here: no friends who are in the armed forces). But yeah I imagine loads of others (military, EMT, police) are in a similar situation.
• DethNinja 6y ago
  Kinda unrelated to topic at hand but I always wanted to ask this to other programmers: Author mentions that he traded sleep for code, and I hear this from so many people but I really cannot understand how well they manage to pull this off. I simply cannot code productively if I get less than 7 hours of sleep or code for more than 8 hours straight, and caffeine doesn’t help me. So how do you people manage to pull this off? I’m really envious that people can code all day long but does it really provide good code? Doesn’t that increase the bug count of the code?
  • latencyloser 6y ago
    Easy, most of the code we write is pretty mindless. Boilerplate tying together of various internal libraries to make it play nice that you've done too many times to count. Following someone else's wiki page instructions on how to implement some "best practice" that needs to be done for a production system. Writing CRUD operations and such. Writing unit tests for all these things. Sure mistakes happen when you're exhausted but the stuff is hard from mentally demanding given the bar that they're supposedly hiring for. I don't say that disparagingly, this is 90% of my day to day life as a mid-level engineer at a FAANG. The other 10% I might get to do something "neat" that I can justify somehow. It depends on the team of course, but I find the Author's experience believable.
  • julianlam 6y ago
    He (or she) didn't say they coded well on limited sleep, so there's the trade-off.
  • valbaca 6y ago
    amznymous here Don't do it :) Please don't be envious It didn't produce good code, but to be fair, the project didn't need to have great code, just working code. It absolutely increased the bug count. Again, in hindsight and with a calmed mind, it's obvious.
• lowiqengineer 6y ago
  A 5 year old gist from 1 employee (out of the current ~70k SWE's employed at the company + all that have come and gone in the last 5 years) just to shit on the quality of Amazon engineering? And folks wonder why I have depression -it's not because i'm burnt out, it's because the HN crowd thinks I'm some sort of cognitive defective for working at Amazon.
  • starpilot 6y ago
    This post convinced me to apply to Amazon. At the end, he says working there overall is pretty good. The pay, the impact. "Burned out" here doesn't mean he quit, he just scaled back his workload.
  • hckr_news 6y ago
    I will add to that, I have a friend at Amazon. I visited him in Seattle this previous winter and he had to work on Christmas Eve while most other top companies do Two-day holidays over Christmas.
  • ikRwS3Nb6Y 6y ago
    Fellow happy Amazon SDE - hopefully you're not being literal saying you have depression from HN type crowds displaying their typical amount of empathy. just in case you are, take this as a friendly reminder that you're not the only person with that experience and it's easy to just stop reading the nonsense
    • lowiqengineer 6y ago
      Yeah, I know. But even when talking to friends at top companies it's like a stream of microaggressions when I've worked just as hard as they have to be where I am.
• Datsundere 6y ago
  Really glad I got a chance to work on a team that values personal time. Overtime is basically non existent for me.
• preordained 6y ago
  A part of me feels bad sometimes cause I doubt I'm good enough for some FAANG company...then I read stuff like this and I think, yah, ability or no, I don't think I'm type of person who would want to partake in this culture.
• ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
  Ex Amazon here. > SDE II basically means a software developer with at least 2–3 years of industry experience If this is true, the hiring bar has been lowered incredibly.
  • thor24 6y ago
    Most of the campus hires that I know or have seen in the last 5 years became SDE2 is 1.5/2 years.
    • ex_amazon_sde 6y ago
      It's quite shocking compared to how it was 10 years ago.
• holler 6y ago
  When my Uncle found out how much the average entry-level Amazon software developer at Amazon makes, he was completely shocked, because it's higher than his salary as a physician in practice for many years. So all things considered, when it's mentioned how doctors are the only other profession where the employees are on-call 24/7, most FANG devs are making more than the average doctor.
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    Where does your uncle live? Does he have to pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom rent?
    • deminature 6y ago
      $3000 for 1bd in NYC is pretty common, it can extend to >= $4000 for 5-10 minute walking distance to work. Tech salary can seem much less impressive servicing that kind of recurring cost.
      • aaomidi 6y ago
        Yeah definitely. I was specifically talking about the Seattle market for housing since I also live here. Comparing base compensation without taking into consideration the city the person lives in is useless.
    • starpilot 6y ago
      Seriously, my dad made $150k as a physician... in suburban, central Virginia (not NoVA). This would be what, $400k in the Bay Area? We lived on 6 acres with a barn in a 3 story house with a pool, surrounded by forest.
      • aaomidi 6y ago
        Yep, it's crazy when doctors like this look at tech and they even complain that we're overpaid. You can make a ton of money as a doctor nearly anywhere in the United States. Software engineers don't get that freedom. Maybe now with more WFH being common place. However, now to get to the point of being a physical you need to go under a ton of debt. That wasn't the case for our parents and grandparents.
• azuriten 6y ago
  GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.
  • nordsieck 6y ago
    > GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd. IMO it's the lowest effort blogging platform (for people who already know how to use git). You don't have to go to a webpage - just write some text in the editor of your choice. You don't even need to use something like Hugo since Github will render markdown files properly.
    • azuriten 6y ago
      If you're just writing some throwaway content then sure, I guess the low effort is worth it. But if you want to write more than a single post it's probably better to spin up either your own blog or somewhere else.
  • mjayhn 6y ago
    This is actually from Pastebin which I used to really enjoy finding random anonymous stuff on with the trending filter. It was mostly random logs, stack traces or email dumps but occasionally you'd stumble on an interesting anonymous memo like this. https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3 https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3
    • azuriten 6y ago
      Did they get rid of that feature or was it replaced by Public pastes on the right hand side? I've only ever used Pastebin for gaming leaks and I don't think the interface leads itself well for long form posts. Probably just me being picky though.
      • mjayhn 6y ago
        I'm not sure, I quit checking for awhile then went back and it was gone or hidden maybe 3 months ago, I feel like I did find it but maybe it's just the public pastes at the top now. It probably caused a lot of drama.
• dfgdghdf 6y ago
  Based on my experience with the various AWS SDK libraries, I don't think Amazon has very good developers, or perhaps they have good developers but a poor development culture. The architecture is convoluted, heavily OOP and just generally reminds me of Java in the early 2000s.
  • mrep 6y ago
    Well, java is by far the most used language at amazon so that would make sense.
  • lowiqengineer 6y ago
    > Based on my experience with the various AWS SDK libraries, I don't think Amazon has very good developers, or perhaps they have good developers but a poor development culture Dude, have you fucking seen the Android libraries? They're awful! At least the AWS SDK libraries are like that because they're all autogenerated from a spec.
  • openasocket 6y ago
    The SDK? Those are all auto-generated
    • rienbdj 6y ago
      That would explain why it reads like a UML diagram
• diveandfight 6y ago
  >I mention on-call duty because it is “peculiar” in that the only other profession requiring this kind of responsiveness is doctors, literal lifesavers. When you go on-call for the first time, it’s terrifying and tells you “holy crap, this is serious.” ... or literally thousands of people in the military right now, oil rig work, countless other IT help desk jobs, etc.
• TrackerFF 6y ago
  Lots of IT jobs that deal with critical infrastructure have on-call duties. Try working for some IT firm that supports healthcare, utility, defense, or what not, and I can assure you that there's rotation duty where you need to be on-call within xx minutes, 24/7. During college I was interning for IT firm that provided networking for local hospitals, and they had the same rotation. My friend who got me the gig, worked there FT, and he basically had to forego social activities every 3 or 4 week, because he'd be on call 24/7.
  • julianlam 6y ago
    Yeah, I also thought the on-call/pager thing was a little overblown. It immediately raised a red flag about how wet behind the ears OP is. Not to say that there aren't toxic on-call rotations and such, only that it's a lot more common than you'd think, and is not limited to just doctors eyeroll Any time a business unit needs to be accountable to another party after-hours, some sort of call schedule is created.
    • sixstringtheory 6y ago
      > During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way other than the usual salaried catch-all "are you willing to work nights and/or weekends." It should be very clear what the actual expectation is, though, instead of a nebulous "we may need you to work extra sometimes." It's a guarantee that you will work extra at a fixed interval, and that extra work happens to be psychologically draining. I ask for quite the premium in salary if I know I'm going to be on call.
      • redredrobot 6y ago
        I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing that you'd be on-call.
• nice_byte 6y ago
  on-call is standard industry practice, there's nothing especially egregious about this. the difference is that some places like google pay extra for it.
  • aaomidi 6y ago
    Maybe we shouldn't allow companies to require on call without extra compensation?
  • preordained 6y ago
    What? Not without extra pay, that's for damn sure...not just "some" companies. That's ridiculous. I got overtime when I worked retail for crying out loud...
• dang 6y ago
  We changed the url from https://gist.github.com/bricker/cb811b3b86d767124801 https://gist.github.com/bricker/cb811b3b86d767124801 to the original source it points to, which also lists its date instead of obscuring it.
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• w0mbat 6y ago
  Amazon's 401k plan is terrible when compared to competing companies. I cancelled my Amazon interview the second I saw the terms of it. I had to find the details for myself because the info packet the recruiter sent me, conveniently left out any details except that there was a 401k plan and some matching. Only 50% match, and the maximum match they will pay is 2% of salary. (Competitors match 1:1, high or no limit). Three years vesting on the match. (Immediate vesting elsewhere, e.g. Google). No match on catch-up contributions. (WTF? Naked age discrimination as policy?) Source: https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us https://www.amazon.jobs/en/landing_pages/benefitsoverview-us
  • sikim 6y ago
    This might be helpful to you http://perks.guide/ http://perks.guide/
    • supersimp 6y ago
      Is this accurate? I definitely do a mega backdoor roth and I'm at Amazon.
      • ikRwS3Nb6Y 6y ago
        It was accurate until this year - Amazon switched 401k providers from Vanguard to Fidelity. I don't remember all the details but after tax contributions (which are required for doing a mega backdoor) are possible now, but weren't before.
  • bougiefever 6y ago
    Yea, that is not very good for such a wealthy company. Other companies match up to the max allowable with no vesting period.
• nanoscopic 6y ago
  I can chime in that a lot of this rings true for me. I was also an SDE-II ( started as one ). I also was loaned out to other teams. I also suffered the idiocy of being locked into 2 years of work or get saddled with a huge amount of money to pay back. Also, I consider that my child is dead because of what happened. See https://amazonandmykid.com https://amazonandmykid.com for the full story.
  • ikRwS3Nb6Y 6y ago
    I'm not sure if you're legally bound not to say certain things by the terms of the NDA you signed, or if you've simply chosen not to share some details. But I read that entire page, and who is in the wrong in that story hinges entirely on the exact events of the day you requested to go home, and exactly what you said that was considered a death threat. The extreme vagueness around those details leaves me with no ability to form an opinion on whether your manager is a whip-cracking sociopath, if you have serious anger management issues and are blaming the consequences of them on anyone but yourself, or somewhere in the middle. Are you willing to give more details?
    • nanoscopic 6y ago
      I wrote a long response to this. Hacker news then presented me with a message "Your comment was too long". Short version: Think what you will. My story serves as a warning to anyone who thinks you can survive the Amazon hell. I may have issues of various sorts, but no one should have to tolerate the "Amazon way" or be subjected to their insanity.
• curiousllama 6y ago
  I don't want to minimize what this guy went through - anything that takes you to the edge is too much - but I can't help but interpret this story as a story of professional & personal growth rather than an example of why Amazon sucks (Sidenote: I happen to agree they suck, just not for this particular reason). How many people in other professions have had similar experiences from the perspective of intensity/amount of work? I-banking is _built_ around this level of intensity for years, and I've heard similar stories from people at other tech companies, plus VC, PE, consulting, medical residencies... My big takeaway here is much less that Amazon sucks than that in a high pressure job, it's critical to know your limits: "I can go so far and no further." The author seems to acknowledge this; why are so many comments implying Amazon is uniquely terrible?
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • valbaca 6y ago
    amznymous here You are absolutely right. As other have pointed out, it's probably 1000x worse to be a doctor saddled with med school debt who is literally operating on people. I will not argue that, ever. But that's also not me and so I told the story I could; mine. I really want this to be more about how vital professional and personal boundaries are. While also highlighting how certain company behaviors make it challenging (on/call, etc.) Before Amazon I had worked at a company that (due to the nature of the work) necessitated a strict 9-5. You literally couldn't work a minute more. Before that, I was in college and had hourly jobs. So you could say this was my first big-boy job with salary-hours, as well as real responsibilities (rent, car, wife, life)
• foo321 6y ago
  Dunno, I read through half of the post and have not figured what actually the problem there? If 15 minutes you have not responded while on "pager duty" your manager get notified? Phew. I mean if you are infrastructure worker, you kinda need to go and fix the infrastructure that is expected by everyone to be efficient and up 24/7. Imagine, your internet goes down once a month, you will be among first to complain how sh... I mean bad, your internet provider is and threaten to switch to other option. Internet goes down often, and there is a person or a group that goes to the affected location and fixes the issue during day/night/rain/snow. Now think about people who's livelihoods depend on AWS to be up, or customers being able to purchase products on amazon.com... business owner, track driver, manufacturing worker, and bunch of people who have work and income because those workers do. If programmer's job was so easy, everyone would be able to do it. Problem with today's society is that we see people's success and desire a piece of it, we do not see work and sweat that was put into achieving that success. Programming not for everyone, if you not used to stare at the screen 16 hours/day, maybe there is different career for u somewhere.
• unbalancedevh 6y ago
  >- Near-Instant Gratification >There is something great about having code you wrote be actually executed by thousands of people every day. So few people get to show their friends and family a site they visit often and say "I did that thing there." Maybe it will wear off eventually, but it's still my favorite. It has never worn off for me! I've worked in automotive for over 20 years, and it feels great every time I see something I worked on drive by.
• samaws93 6y ago
  As a bit of background upfront, I'm a 6+ year AWS employee who went from an intern to full-time SDEI after graduation to relatively recently an SDEIII. All of the below also specifically applies to white-collar tech employees. There are two big issues with a lot of employees at AWS, not knowing their worth and not having backbone. It is not a privilege to work for Amazon. It is a privilege for Amazon that you work for them. In this particular case, this person says that he was an SDE II. That's great. You should be able to pretty easily go get a job at any of the other large tech companies. You're not locked into Amazon. You likely have a CS degree. You've got a couple years of industry experience in a field where most companies can't hire fast enough. That said, don't leave Amazon. Leave your team. Internal transfers are easy and no longer gated on you being on a team for a certain amount of time. Start talking to other people from other teams and find a good fit. Most internal transfers are about culture fit and you likely won't be asked any coding questions. You are not obligated by anything to stay on your team. End of. Amazon is one of the largest companies in the world. Don't feel some sort of personal responsibility to stay on one team. That's just not reasonable. They'll find a way to make do without you and if they can't why do you really care? At some local mom and pop shop, sure you may not want to leaving the owner hanging but Amazon ain't that. Yes, there are rare occurrences where an org may try to block you from leaving. In which case, again, you are a tech employee of Amazon. You should be able to transfer to another large tech company. As far as the loaner situation goes, have backbone. I've been asked to help out another team before. I did some research and decided I didn't want to. I told my manager and that was that. If he really pressed, again, see the prior options. Don't be afraid to escalate. Don't care about politics. Your manager may hate you for trying to escalate on them but what the effect of that in the long run? You only get a 1% pay increase on your 150K annual salary instead of a 5%? You have to go work for Microsoft for 150K instead of Amazon? Rough oncall? Change teams. Oncall but want to go places? Do it anyways. All teams should offer a hot spot. Yes, this probably means you can't go hiking but it doesn't mean you can't go other places. Being oncall doesn't really ever change my habits other than having to bring my laptop with me. Sure, if you're on a team getting paged regularly, that won't work but I'm not sure why you want to be on a team that gets paged regularly after hours. Come on people. If you work for a FAANG company, you are a very highly paid employee in one of, if not the, hottest career field in the world. You are very likely in the top 10% of world wide salaries. (118K+ year according to numbers from US Social Security Admin)
• bougiefever 6y ago
  I was a contractor at a company that announced that developers would have to work through the nights and on weekends at times, and they couldn't take any extra work days off. So, if you had to do an upgrade to production and it took all night, you were still expected to work all day too. Oh, and you didn't get paid any extra for the overtime either. One person asked about work-life balance, and the response from that manager was that when you chose a career as a developer, you signed up for this. This is what happens when this kind of abuse becomes rampant. The managers then declare it comes with the job. Such BS! BTW, that guy quit along with anyone else reasonably competent.
  • hckr_news 6y ago
    That blows. Seems like the company was wholly incompetent and rotten with comments like that. And as a contractor, you should always bill overtime so your unavailable time isn’t abused.
• efdwefwfwerf 6y ago
  Burn out at work? Amazon? Oh c'mon. The original OP's write-up misses the main questions and helpful perspective. Doctors (we have several in the extended family), lawyers (worked with some), entrepreneurs (have been one) all put in very long hours. So do grad students, and undergrad's working on tough assignments. It's not work per se; the issues are larger, and different: - do you enjoy what you do? If you're new, out of school you may not know this without experience. This guy got experience. We are aware that plenty of people make career changes inside and outside their industry right? Because of they realized the enjoyment and fulfillment wasn't there, right? - do you have friends, hobbies, a social life, a wife (husband) and family? Do you do anything with them? If not, why not? Why does one work all the time? - do you have self awareness of your red lines? If no, why not? If yes, why were they repeatedly crossed? Individuals have choice, agency if they are relatively self-aware. - Why would a team put up with so many bugs, and so many late calls? There are a zillion developer teams ... we all have support issues/challenges, and part of the job is reducing outages which feeds into software engineering, quality, management, cross functional management with business people providing requirements, corporate culture, and many other facets. I didn't find this article helpful. I do not cherish or dismiss the trauma reported herein, but something bad X happened at company Y is neither new, insightful, or explanative in any ultimate way that counts.
• xyst 6y ago
  This is why you don't let upper management walk all over you. I would personally love to tell Bezos to "fuck off" if the ask was unreasonable. Worst case scenario, I have to find a new job (which I usually have a few companies/recruiters in my back pocket), or best case scenario I get "respected" and the deadline is pushed to a more reasonable date. Typically massive corporations like this put you on a "performance improvement plan" which can give you few weeks to a few months to find a new job (or "improve"). Also learn to make friends with your teammates in the trenches. Presenting a push back to management in a unified front is much more compelling than a 1:1.
• throwawaypal 6y ago
  Palantir Technologies also beats the fuck out of their coders. Be warned. Same traps.
• chrledntsurf 6y ago
  sample size
• valbaca 6y ago
  Hi there. So, I wrote this. I'm the original author. I'm amznymous (still proud of that username) It's wild to see this pop-up at the top of HackerNews 5 years later, but I'd be more than happy to answer any questions anyone has. I'm still at Amazon and have been on a couple of different teams since then, but this was definitely written at my lowest time at Amazon. I've had low times since then and high ones as well. I'm still an SDE II but on-track to become SDE III soon. I've interviewed elsewhere but was either unimpressed with the company (Facebook) or the company was not impressed enough with me and asked to try again later (Google). Facebook interviewers all looked absolutely exhausted and stressed and lifeless. They zoned out in the interview and just in general left a bad taste. One low point was when I found out (years after 2015) that the whole project that I had brutalized myself over was shutdown. Deleted. Scrapped. All of it. It was devastating and cathartic. I've become a bit more balanced, jaded, and care-free since then. Not totally, but just a bit. It's all just code. It's all just business and sometimes the business fails and everything you did doesn't matter anyway. I'm still glad I wrote the paste, if it helped one person out there. Based on reddit responses, I wasn't the only one going through this. ============================= Since then things that help: 0. Get that "Fuck You Money" I pinched pennies and followed Dave Ramsey's approach to get 100% debt free and thriving to ensure I never was locked in as I felt I was. 1. Being absolute about my sleep schedule. 2. Finding a good team. When you find a good team/manager, stick with it. Manager matters 10x more than the company 3. Therapy. duh 4. "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor E. Frankl 5. "The Depression Cure" by Ilardi. This is NOT A SUBSTITUTE for therapy or medication. ONLY use it as a supplement . The tl;dr is take care of your body or your mind will pay the price. 6. Soft skills: developing skills on how to provide estimates, pushing back on deadlines, and finding compromises between what business wants and what's feasible. It sounds obvious, but sometimes it really is just as easy as saying "that will take 2 weeks, what can be cut?" (Obvs, my opinions are my own and not my employer's)
  • romanovtexas 6y ago
    Was your original team in retail or AWS? Also how do you figure out what team is good/bad when trying to switch teams?
    • 6y ago