4 ms·

I'm an individual contributor in product management, so not in people management. Amazon / AWS is a challenging work environment, just like most other tech comp

I'm an individual contributor in product management, so not in people management. Amazon / AWS is a challenging work environment, just like most other tech companies. In my opinion, that is also why so many people want to work for FAANG & Co, as you generally get to work on really interesting but also challenging things. I'd say that bursts of intense working periods are par for the course in FAANG & Co, but it also depends on your own ability to handle our self-service culture (which I find empowering). The culture is certainly peculiar but each large tech company has their own culture that works really well for some and doesn't jive with others. Just speaking for myself here, but I have learned a ton professionally and personally, work(ed) with inspiring people and had the best work-life balance of my career so far. Don't want to sound like a shill here - I'm certainly aware that in a company the size of Amazon there will be good and bad pockets, I just happened to work with good teams so far.

myWindoonn 6y ago
You unfortunately not only sound like a shill, but like a shill who has read Amazon's literature. I have a few questions that are worth reflecting on; I also asked them of myself when I worked at a FAANG: * How many hours/week do you spend at your work machine? * How often is a sprint crunched; how often does the sprint manager exhort sprinters to complete the board? * How many incidents/quarter does your team have? How often does an incident route through you? * How many hours/quarter are you oncall/onduty? * How often do you have anxiety on Sunday night about going to work on Monday? The answers should be at most 40, rarely, 12, 60, and rarely. Ideally, they would be 20, never, 3, 120, and never. Note that we don't require less oncall; we require less stressful oncall.

myWindoonn 6y ago

You unfortunately not only sound like a shill, but like a shill who has read Amazon's literature. I have a few questions that are worth reflecting on; I also asked them of myself when I worked at a FAANG: * How many hours/week do you spend at your work machine? * How often is a sprint crunched; how often does the sprint manager exhort sprinters to complete the board? * How many incidents/quarter does your team have? How often does an incident route through you? * How many hours/quarter are you oncall/onduty? * How often do you have anxiety on Sunday night about going to work on Monday? The answers should be at most 40, rarely, 12, 60, and rarely. Ideally, they would be 20, never, 3, 120, and never. Note that we don't require less oncall; we require less stressful oncall.