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Current AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not
by awscurrentdev 5y ago
Current AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not clear to me if it's endemic, these are big orgs with teams run very differently.
That being said, the on-call sucks. It's really awful, and something I've never seen before. It's also typically the primary cause of team churn for people in my org. This varies, as I've seen other teams stacked with L6 engineers with very little churn (4-8 years of tenure each). This is very much a pit of despair of our own making, but I still haven't figured out how teams like mine get out of it. My own view is that normalization of deviance means that engineers who've only worked at AWS just accept that getting paged many times in a week at awful hours for false positives is OK.
There's certainly a view that the only way to get promoted (which is incredibly difficult) is to create new features or products. You read this of many orgs though, not just AWS. I'm not convinced it's fair to single out AWS. It can be endemic in some teams, and I've certainly worked with engineers who are clearly only focused on shining for promotion.
The worst I've seen was a team go from 8 engineers with > 2+ yrs tenure down to 4 people with < 6 months, over the course of a couple of months. This was for an enormous product. That team had a very tough 4th quarter.
AWS does handle operations failure incredibly well. If you've hopped on a LSE call before, the execution to identify, mitigate and review correction of error (COE) is world class. Doc / design review is also very thorough.
There's ample opportunity to learn a lot during your time at AWS, and many engineers have carved out incredible careers in this place. Just go in with your eyes wide open.
- laegooose 5y agoWhat is LSE?
- imwillofficial 5y agoI’m sorry you’re having a rough time. Hang in there, and if you move on, good luck!
- imwillofficial 5y agoI’m genuinely curious how saying good luck gets down voted. Fuck the HN crowd for this shit.
- xref 5y agoComments like “good luck!”, “me too”, and “hi James” will get downvoted because they don’t contribute to the conversation
- imwillofficial 5y agoWhen somebody is clearly in crisis, we stop sprerging for a moment and offer empathy and support. It’s called being a human.
- sundarurfriend 5y ago> we stop sprerging for a moment Yeah, a lot of empathy leaking out of your comment there. "It's called being human" ironic.
- dang 5y agoThat's not appropriate, as pg made clear back at the beginning: Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling. https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=%22Empty%20comments%20can%20be%20ok%20if%20they%27re%20positive%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
- dang 5y ago
- vr46 5y agoSorry to hear about your awful job, is this only in engineering or does it affect professional services like solutions architects etc too?
- awsthro00945 5y agoProServe and SAs have little-to-no on-call responsibilities, but the general workload issues and mindsets affect those teams as well. Just as an example, resource management (aka staffing) and project scoping are things that AWS Sales is absolutely fucking awful at, and are things in particular that other consulting companies have figured out decades ago, but AWS does nothing to improve the shitty staffing processes because they have essentially just thrown up their hands and think the inefficient, inaccurate, and incredibly stress-inducing process is normal.
- vr46 5y agoOf course, I guess there's no perfect isolation. A friend at Amazon set me up a video call last year with an SA at AWS (Seattle/NW) so I could inquire about working there. It sounded pretty cool but I wasn't sure. I didn't think that AWS consulting was much of a thing, since my experience client-side has been that AWS will advise but not build. Anyway, irrelevant to this thread. Not sure consulting is much better away from AWS as in my world, it's 90% dependent on the client you're with and boy have I had some awful projects.
- awsthro00945 5y agoBased on my experience working on different teams and interfacing with the SA teams (but not actually working as an SA, mind you), being an SA at AWS seems to be one of the better positions in terms of workload, limited on-call responsibilities, etc, but you do need to be very comfortable with constant customer-facing responsibilities (which can sometimes be better than on-call, and sometimes can be worse than on-call) and the team is still dragged down by the general Amazon/AWS culture.
- doktorhladnjak 5y ago> pit of despair of our own making, but I still haven't figured out how teams like mine get out of it. I’ve only seen two ways out: 1. Team implodes when everybody leaves, reorg follows making it some other team’s problem 2. Management recognizes it’s a problem, takes it seriously by staffing the team with enough people to sustainably address the tech debt/operational load AND build new features
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]