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Current AWS employee. Technical sales side. I don't disagree with what OP was saying. I have friends who experienced this. But my experience is no way closer t

Current AWS employee. Technical sales side. I don't disagree with what OP was saying. I have friends who experienced this. But my experience is no way closer to this. Think of this. The company have million+ people working. It got many companies in it (Acquisitions and independent business units). At least 30% are technical side. Out of it around 50% face this issue who are on development side. Which is still significant. Especially on call. other stuff like URA still applies for everyone. Work life balance is upto manager, team, business unit etc. Can't really generalize. You get to work with great companies and build great experience for your career if you got lucky. If someone doing their job,it's really hard to go things wrong way. Managers are always under hiring pressure and they tend to hire wrong folks most times. The interview process have lot of bias baked in. We miss lot of good folks and hire wrong folks too. But I agree this toxic culture need to change.

ixaxaar 5y ago
Ground reality in all big tech seems to be pretty much the same? Like 1% of the people hoard 99% of the good work? [Technically I imply a heavily skewed exponential distribution, maybe not exact numbers].
throwaway2037 5y ago
"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so. I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).
- amazon_throw 5y ago
  Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.
  - rejectedandsad 5y ago
    I did digging on this a few weeks ago, this is correct if you add up SDE, SDM, TPM, Scientist etc roles.
  - throwaway2037 5y ago
    Thank you for the correction!

ixaxaar 5y ago

Ground reality in all big tech seems to be pretty much the same? Like 1% of the people hoard 99% of the good work? [Technically I imply a heavily skewed exponential distribution, maybe not exact numbers].

throwaway2037 5y ago

"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so. I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).

amazon_throw 5y ago
Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.
- rejectedandsad 5y ago
  I did digging on this a few weeks ago, this is correct if you add up SDE, SDM, TPM, Scientist etc roles.
- throwaway2037 5y ago
  Thank you for the correction!