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I don’t get this. In this market, if you’re good, why take a job with any on-call work? It’s thankless, shitty work. If you can deliver features, that’s good en

I don’t get this. In this market, if you’re good, why take a job with any on-call work? It’s thankless, shitty work. If you can deliver features, that’s good enough to get paid extremely well at other Amazon-scale companies with dedicated SRE teams. What’s making you stay?

awsthro00945 5y ago
Because changing jobs is really fucking difficult. I'm probably one of the biggest proponents of "quit your job, you deserve better" that you'll ever find, but even I have to admit that finding a new job is ridiculously hard. Even in "this market", even if you're a top engineer, it's still ridiculously hard to even get an interview, let alone get hired. There is only a limited amount of companies that will pay at the same level as Amazon, and those companies often have months-long interview processes with ridiculous requirements that, even if you are a top engineer, still require a lot of time and effort be set aside to prepare for the specific interview processes that the new company is looking for. And that's to say nothing of the nebulous "culture fit" that is just as likely to prevent you from getting an offer and is completely unaffected by how "good" of an engineer you are. Almost everyone I know at AWS is interested in switching jobs/companies, but it really is not just something you wake up one morning and decide to do. It's a long, perpetual process that can take up a huge amount of time and effort (stuff you don't have a lot of when you're working on-call at AWS anyway), not to mention has huge implications if you are relying on your job for something like a work visa.
- tolbish 5y ago
  It sounds like the real reason is that the money is worth it.
  - awsthro00945 5y ago
    The money is probably the thing that keeps most people in the job, but it's not like willingness to take a pay cut magically makes jobs fall into your lap, either. It expands the pool of companies you could possibly work for, sure, but everything else above that I said still applies. There's also rarely a guarantee that the new company you're trying to join is significantly better, and companies intentionally make it difficult to get the inside scoop on work-life balance/on-call responsibilities until after you're hired. Personally, I would love to find a new company to join... but my experience interviewing is that it takes months of effort for a potential pay cut and no guarantee that I won't just end up in another shitty situation and paid less, so I struggle deciding if it's actually worth it.
- pkaye 5y ago
  > not to mention has huge implications if you are relying on your job for something like a work visa. Isn't it just apply for a new job and as part of the hiring process they handle the paperwork? I know people on work visas that have jumped jobs every two years.
- wly_cdgr 5y ago
  There are many, many companies that will pay at the same level as Amazon and hire you after less than ten hours total of interviews, as long as you think of compensation the correct way: in hourly terms
rejectedandsad 5y ago
The answer is 1) many people at Amazon like me have inferior intellects and everyone knows it, so it’s harder to get a better job and 2) there are many services that don’t have dozens of sev2s per day because ultimately you do own what you build. It’s a big reason why Lambda is used to heavily internally now - we cut out a class of operational scaling issues out by design.
ab_testing 5y ago
Also about a third of Amazon's engineers are on a visa. You can transfer jobs but it is never smooth sailing and full of gotchas.

awsthro00945 5y ago

Because changing jobs is really fucking difficult. I'm probably one of the biggest proponents of "quit your job, you deserve better" that you'll ever find, but even I have to admit that finding a new job is ridiculously hard. Even in "this market", even if you're a top engineer, it's still ridiculously hard to even get an interview, let alone get hired. There is only a limited amount of companies that will pay at the same level as Amazon, and those companies often have months-long interview processes with ridiculous requirements that, even if you are a top engineer, still require a lot of time and effort be set aside to prepare for the specific interview processes that the new company is looking for. And that's to say nothing of the nebulous "culture fit" that is just as likely to prevent you from getting an offer and is completely unaffected by how "good" of an engineer you are. Almost everyone I know at AWS is interested in switching jobs/companies, but it really is not just something you wake up one morning and decide to do. It's a long, perpetual process that can take up a huge amount of time and effort (stuff you don't have a lot of when you're working on-call at AWS anyway), not to mention has huge implications if you are relying on your job for something like a work visa.

tolbish 5y ago
It sounds like the real reason is that the money is worth it.
- awsthro00945 5y ago
  The money is probably the thing that keeps most people in the job, but it's not like willingness to take a pay cut magically makes jobs fall into your lap, either. It expands the pool of companies you could possibly work for, sure, but everything else above that I said still applies. There's also rarely a guarantee that the new company you're trying to join is significantly better, and companies intentionally make it difficult to get the inside scoop on work-life balance/on-call responsibilities until after you're hired. Personally, I would love to find a new company to join... but my experience interviewing is that it takes months of effort for a potential pay cut and no guarantee that I won't just end up in another shitty situation and paid less, so I struggle deciding if it's actually worth it.
pkaye 5y ago
> not to mention has huge implications if you are relying on your job for something like a work visa. Isn't it just apply for a new job and as part of the hiring process they handle the paperwork? I know people on work visas that have jumped jobs every two years.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
There are many, many companies that will pay at the same level as Amazon and hire you after less than ten hours total of interviews, as long as you think of compensation the correct way: in hourly terms

rejectedandsad 5y ago

The answer is 1) many people at Amazon like me have inferior intellects and everyone knows it, so it’s harder to get a better job and 2) there are many services that don’t have dozens of sev2s per day because ultimately you do own what you build. It’s a big reason why Lambda is used to heavily internally now - we cut out a class of operational scaling issues out by design.

ab_testing 5y ago

Also about a third of Amazon's engineers are on a visa. You can transfer jobs but it is never smooth sailing and full of gotchas.