43 ms·

I took a job at Amazon, only to leave after 10 months

• monster_group 5y ago
  FTA - "I was assigned to had an engineer who had never done web development (didn’t know HTTP, HTML, CSS or Javascript)" But hey, you bet he knows topological sort and dynamic programming.
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
    The article writer said he was in the Devices org so I would bet there are a huge number of hardware engineers there. That engineer could be very proficient with C and firmware and might have not touched web stuff since college, even if that was covered then. Really telling of an organization that your personal skills don't matter when they just need bodies.
    • benadam11 5y ago
      Nailed it ... they were experts in firmware and systems programming and had never really done web development before (that said, they were working very hard to do a good job, just unfortunate that they were set up for failure in a lot of ways).
  • faangiq 5y ago
    And reporting to a management chain that doesn’t know any of it!
• CountDrewku 5y ago
  How long before admitting for a FAANG has the same notoriety as saying you work for Walmart, McDonald's or Target?
• erehweb 5y ago
  "It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains." - this also blows my mind, given how many problems there are with Excel (e.g. formatting).
  • deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  • jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
    Business moves at the speed of now.
    • jjoonathan 5y ago
      This sounds like a '90s marketing meme -- do I have that right? I didn't enter the industry until after.
      • hhpindia 5y ago
      • jsiaajdsdaa 5y ago
        It probably is but I mean that excel and email solve problems right now, despite having flaws
      • lotsofpulp 5y ago
        It sounded like I had heard that in a commercial when I was a kid, but all I could find was “move at the speed of business”. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ijaz9OaCo7Y https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ijaz9OaCo7Y
  • lloydatkinson 5y ago
    And also considering how much in house software development there is...
    • 5y ago
• kentonv 5y ago
  Please consider increasing the contrast on your text. As is (light-gray-on-lighter-gray) I cannot read it as it literally hurts my eyes trying to focus on it. EDIT: It seems this is not intentional, some of the stylesheets are returning 404 for me but not other people... weird. EDIT: Amazingly, it turns out this site is hosted on the platform of which I'm the lead engineer (Cloudflare Workers / Pages) and the problem is in fact our own fault, not Ben's. Wow. We'll... get on that. Sorry. FINAL EDIT (hopefully): Not necessarily a bug so much as classic cache skew... explanation here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29814868
  • dymk 5y ago
    The page presents as an almost pure black background, and almost 100% white text to me - about as high-contrast as you can get. Maybe this is a light/dark mode issue?
    • ollien 5y ago
      Yeah - on my phone it's WoB but on my desktop (which is dark mode) it's BoW
    • jacobsenscott 5y ago
      I think it is because the font is so thin it looks gray, even if the thin lines are made up of 100% white pixels. FireFox reader mode makes it readable though.
    • kentonv 5y ago
      I don't have dark mode enabled. What I see seems to be the default style, and is consistent across multiple browsers for me.
      • dymk 5y ago
        Very interesting. This is what I see - https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png https://i.imgur.com/eV4yDd0.png
• teg4n_ 5y ago
  The idea of leaving before the year mark at a company that does signing bonuses stresses me the fuck out. Don't you have to pay back the bonus? When I got an Amazon offer that was the case
  • ddlutz 5y ago
    Interesting, I had two amazon offers and no signing bonus was like that. They essentially just prorated it out over the first two years as extra monthly income to be equivalent to the stock you would get in the later two years.
  • dymk 5y ago
    It depends. Companies can ask for (or demand) the signing bonus back. But some won't. I've heard of it going either way - it's luck of the draw.
  • fermentation 5y ago
    Amazon gives their signing bonus out monthly over the course of the year to offset the lack of equity in the first few years, so I don't think you'd have to pay it back in this case.
  • Matthias247 5y ago
    At Amazon sign on bonuses are paid over the first 24month, so there is no need to pay back anything.
    • willcipriano 5y ago
      Is that a signing bonus or a agreement to get paid less in two years?
      • dragonwriter 5y ago
        Is there a meaningful difference?
        • 5y ago
• bowmessage 5y ago
  Depending on OP's exact start date, the value of their RSU grant may be lower than when it was originally granted, making it easier to jump ship: https://finance.google.com/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y https://finance.google.com/quote/AMZN:NASDAQ?window=1Y
• masterof0 5y ago
  Ex-Amazonian here, I agree with almost everything OP say. I have a few things to add in case HR is reading this: - RSUs vesting schedule sucks, fix it.(5% - first year, 15% - second , then 5% each quarter, i think...) - Internal tooling is pretty bad (frameworks, pipelines, ....) and the documentation is non-existent, and when it exists , is not very helpful. - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why? - Make it easier to switch teams
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > in case HR is reading this If they cared, they would have done something about this long ago.
  • chrsig 5y ago
    > - Amazon has the least amount of holidays of all FAANG, why? probably too focused on frugality to consider retention
    • klodolph 5y ago
      They do consider retention, make no mistake.
      • oblio 5y ago
        Could you expand on this, please?
        • chrsig 5y ago
          I believe the commenter was implying that their policy takes retention into account, and amazon simply doesn't value retaining employees
          • tablespoon 5y ago
            > I believe the commenter was implying that their policy takes retention into account, and amazon simply doesn't value retaining employees I think there's some Bezos quote about people being lazy and it being easier to extract labor from fresh hires trying to prove themselves.
• sharkweek 5y ago
  Hey congrats on making it 10 months! "Urgent to not block progress, but also ironic that they are asking a person who has no clue what they are doing to deliver critical work" Friend of mine started a role there (this was 4-5 years ago) and was fired (sorry... more or less asked to leave, being told he could keep his signing bonus if he just left) within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work. Truly, he recapped it for me, the expectations were absolutely incredible and I'd consider him a hard worker who has found a ton of success in his current role. I bag on Amazon a lot on here (which if I were to review with my therapist is likely because I had an absolutely HORRENDOUS experience in an interview loop with them my first step out of college that still makes me nervous in interviews, even 15 years later). But living in Seattle, a notable chunk of my social circle works there. I'd say a few enjoy the scale of things they get to work on or perhaps the brand name, but overall none of them ever talk about liking the work environment/balance/culture. One friend, at a director level, just quit on a whim because he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out. He told his VP to fuck off, left, and is now on sabbatical. I've never seen him so happy.
  • lotophage 5y ago
    > within about six weeks because he wasn't immediately delivering on some insane amounts of work I've heard that, because of the stack ranking, if managers want to keep their current team unchanged, they sometimes hire someone new just so that they can turn around and fire them.
  • brazzledazzle 5y ago
    >he came back from parental leave and his direct reports had all been put on a PIP while he was out Wow. It’s really difficult to imagine a likely scenario where that’s justified.
    • pc86 5y ago
      They had a quota to fill, and they didn't know or didn't like anyone on that team. Not that that is a justification, but it's almost certainly the reason.
• pram 5y ago
  A couple years ago I turned down an offer at AWS as a Solutions Architect. The same day I did that, the hiring managers director requested that I speak with him. He was basically selling the job and saying what a mistake it was to turn it down. It felt really high pressure! I’ve literally never had that happen in my life. Most companies just immediately ghost me if I turn down an offer. This isn’t covert bragging about being some kind of superstar either, it just felt like they were desperate. I know all the horror stories about people getting PIPs, it kinda started feeling like some kind of trap lol
  • pinewurst 5y ago
    I had that happen once - not at Amazon - where the startup CEO kept calling me leaving increasingly angry messages for not talking with him post my rejection. Shudder...
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    > it just felt like they were desperate That's what it sounds like. I had a guy from my past (somebody I had worked for years ago, but didn't know that well) call me up out of the blue once, basically begging me to come work for him. I was flattered, and looking forward to (finally) being treated like a human being instead of a replaceable cog for once in my programming career, so I took the job. Good lord, what a mistake. The reason he was begging was because he was a totally abusive asshole and couldn't keep anybody for any amount of money. You would think that watching people come and go would make these people re-evaluate their approach, but in their minds, it's always the "peons" that are wrong.
  • cwkoss 5y ago
    Should have seen how much they'd be willing to increase the offer.
  • alexitosrv 5y ago
    I just started an application with them also for a Solutions Architect role, I even have a scheduled technical interview in a couple of weeks. Wondering if I should go through. Really don't like what I am finding here, but not sure if it's just a biased thread where people which love their jobs are not here defending AWS or if it's truly a dysfunctional org in that area, or too team dependent (which is a lottery then). Is it anything good of working at AWS?
• donretag 5y ago
  Cases like these happen at companies at all levels. Massive companies such as Amazon and especially at startups, where roles are not as defined. After only two months at my current role, I was ready to leave. Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for. Management agrees that I am getting short-changed, but is unwilling to let me change organizations. Sadly, I continue to stay here, after over a year, due to the COVID closures affecting my plans.
  • Hadriel 5y ago
    Yeah it's the same exact thing at Meta/FB lol
  • oblio 5y ago
    The funky thing is the different stigma attached to equivalent situations. You embellish your CV as an individual and you overdo it = possible catastrophe. Companies constantly embellishing job postings = just a regular Tuesday. I'm having a really hard time remembering a job where the job descriptions really matched the day to day activities, and I've worked for ~10 companies, big and small, from Asia, Europe, America.
  • behohippy 5y ago
    > Was catfished into a role which was not what I interviewed for Why does Amazon do this? I've bailed out 3 times on interviews with them now because somehow the role they sold me on end up being completely different by the time you talk to the team members doing the actual job. It's a huge time waster for everyone involved.
    • spike021 5y ago
      Heh something similar happened to me. Recruiter reached out, insisted role was on a special new team in SFO. I did the full interview cycle (on-site in Seattle, which I later learned is what they do if the role is in SEA..). It was for an awesome team and org, really up and coming. I get the congrats message that I’ll be getting an offer. Then find out it’s only for SEA. This is after the recruiter insisted it would be SFO because I didn’t want to relocate for various reasons. Ah so that’s why they flew me to Seattle.. lol. Ended up being passed around a few orgs recruiters and took a role in sfo that I finally left after 20 months. Sigh.
• encryptluks2 5y ago
  I finally started just marking their recruiter emails as spam. I still get a couple a month despite asking them to stop. I interviewed for them a few years back and it was clear then that they are looking for people that are technically smart but total pushovers. If you are the type of person that are susceptible to abusive relationships then you'd fit right in. The sad part is many of their employees prob feel lucky to be in that situation. If you know your own worth you would not work for them and if you believe in treating humans with respect and dignity you'd definitely not work for them. I got a sense of a complete lack of ethics.
  • delecti 5y ago
    What filter rules do you use for that? As a frequent Amazon customer I wouldn't want to accidentally filter things I want to receive. My recruiter strategy has just been to reply with a direct "Hi <name>, No thank you." that doesn't leave room for foot-in-the-door.
    • encryptluks2 5y ago
      I just routinely do a cursory glance of my spam folder, but so far no issues. I am guessing it doesn't do much but I like to think if enough people flag them as spam that they then get marked as spam throughout Gmail.
  • nostrebored 5y ago
    This is explicitly the opposite of what the interviews look for. If you are a pushover you will not have the disagree and commit, dive deep, and ownership lp stories you need. I’ve done quite a few interviews for Amazon and the debrief was never ‘this person has strong opinions, not inclined’. If you’re not interested in getting the data to prove or disprove your opinions then that will count against you.
    • encryptluks2 5y ago
      Okay, just because a rat works hard to get out of a maze doesn't mean it knows it is in one. When your interviewer asks to video record you, then proceeds to ask questions while refusing to look at you and pounding away on their laptop keyboard saying they are taking notes. Mind you this goes on for about 4 hours with multiple people that appear to be performing some sort of unethical psychological experiment to see if you're a good fit for their cult.
• mynameisash 5y ago
  I also left Amazon after ~10mo. I've written about this elsewhere, but the short version is: * New manager who was a nice guy but didn't help me or other folks onboard * A skip-level (who I expected would be my direct) manager who was about as hands-off as could be and seemed interested in building his own empire. * SDE3 who was nominally my mentor but was less than useless. I asked him to whiteboard our services, and he said he "didn't know" what we owned. I asked him for help configuring a monitor for a service, and he said he couldn't figure it out while literally backing away from my desk slowly. * A culture within our team in which no one was willing or able to help others out. It was very much every man for himself. I GTFO of there and have been happy across the lake since. Paying back my signing bonus was well worth the significant reduction in stress and quality of life.
  • strikelaserclaw 5y ago
    was the sde3 just faking ignorance so he didn't have to help you out?
    • rjbwork 5y ago
      Possibly making sure that GP was at the bottom of the stack rank and looking out for his own neck.
      • mynameisash 5y ago
        That's what I assume his motives were.
      • analognoise 5y ago
        Oof that sounds super devious.
        • rjbwork 5y ago
          Not really. It's just a human responding to the incentives they're given. When management creates poor incentive structures, they get poor behavior, which drives poor outcomes. As they say - the problem with incentives is that they work.
• uncomputation 5y ago
  > It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. Enterprise work summed up in one sentence. Impressive. While I agree with Andreessen’s “software is eating the world,” it might be more apt to say “Excel is eating the world.”
• mchaynes 5y ago
  I left amazon after just under 2 years and I agree with everything you wrote here. You’re asked to move fast but constantly delayed by every team or system you have to interact with. Duct tape abounds and that duct tape is usually “go file a ticket and wait 3 days”. This made scoping your project really difficult. Add 2 weeks of back and forth for each team you had to talk with. On a more positive note, the reason I stayed was because of my incredible manager and team. My manager was of the best people I’ve ever worked with
  • spike021 5y ago
    Huge plus one here, same situation. Except opposite situation with my team/manager unfortunately.
• wiremine 5y ago
  This is really insightful. Makes me wonder how this compares to other FAANG companies. Are there other essays that capture the on-the-ground experiences so well?
  • nostrebored 5y ago
    I would tell you you’re going to get the same problem regardless: this isn’t representative and due to scale can never capture the on the ground experience. Amazon is the best and worst place I’ve worked.
• ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
  > (It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases) I worked for a Japanese company, and they used Excel for everything. GANTT Charts were done in Excel (not Project), documentation was written in Excel (not Word), etc. They had these monster 3,000-row excel punchlists for QC. If even one test failed, the whole shooting match was scrapped.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
    Oh, I forgot to mention. Slideshows were done in Excel (not PP).
    • selimthegrim 5y ago
      This sounds like that Simpsons episode where Burns and Smithers go to a Moroccan bazaar and everything is made of drugs including the money.
  • lazyant 5y ago
    I had server shell output from one of the "Big 4" consulting companies being sent as a screenshot of the terminal embedded as a pic in an Excel spreadsheet.
• hackerlytest 5y ago
  As someone who's preparing for a job interview, this post was revealing.
• matsemann 5y ago
  > When I read through they offer they were pushing aggressively for a start date (2 weeks from the offer). Huh, in Norway the normal resignation period is 3 months. Maybe long, but goes both ways, so you always know your job isn't swept away from under your feet one day.
  • MattGaiser 5y ago
    3 months? So if you accept an offer today, it would be customary to stay until April? That's incredible. How are job tenures in Norway? Where I am, lots of people stay 14 + or - 4 months typically.
    • matsemann 5y ago
      Yeah, you would start your new job at May 1st if you sent in your resignation during January. It's a bit long I feel, when I first resigned last year (in January, even), I mentally started to check out towards the end. A month or two is fine to wrap things up. But 3 months + what's left of the current month was a bit much. But as I said, it goes both ways, and it's almost impossible to get fired here, so it's worth it for the peace of mind knowing you'll always get paid next week, month etc. Where I worked before the avg employee had worked there for about 3-4 years, and that number was heavily influenced by the new hires not having had the opportunity to work that long yet, even. I feel that's true for many of my friends as well, those having switched a few jobs since graduating have stayed avg ~3 years.
    • oblio 5y ago
      In many places in Europe it's 1 month for regular roles and 2 months for leadership. And it's 3 or 6 months for being fired.
    • ithinkso 5y ago
      Poland also has 3 months (on the most popular type of job contract). If you just joined you are on a 'test period' of sorts where the notice is 2 weeks and after that ends (3 months as well I think, but maybe this may vary) you have the 3 months notice. Note that if both parties agree it can end sooner, they can also fire you straight up and forbid you working if they don't want you to but they still need to pay your salary for the entire notice period.
• tyronehed 5y ago
• spike021 5y ago
  This is like my situation. I just left after being there for 20 months. Various reasons on the team side. Imposter syndrome is a bad excuse but it contributed. Tried switching but other teams insisted on a full interview loop before I could even see it that team would be a better fit.
  • dpark 5y ago
    > Tried switching but other teams insisted on a full interview loop before I could even see it that team would be a better fit. That’s because they have no consistency in their hiring bar. I know multiple people who were contacted immediately by Amazon recruiters after failing an interview loop. “Hey, that other team says you suck but I bet you’re perfect for our team.” When you know other teams are happy to take your reject candidates, you can’t trust internal candidates any more than external ones. In fairness, Microsoft has a bit of this. The further across the company you want to move, the more likely you’ll need to interview. But it seems within Amazon that there is no attempt at consistency.
    • spike021 5y ago
      I definitely can understand that. But if I’m a mid level engineer I kind of have desires in what kind of team I’d like to join. I’d really hope a hiring manager can entertain that and let me speak with one or two people on the team before I have to agree to a loop. That’s just me though.
      • dpark 5y ago
        You’re definitely right. You should be able to do that. We call that an “informational” at Microsoft. You just chat with the hiring manager or someone else on the team with no guarantee of an interview (from either side). It’s still an evaluation from both sides, but a loose one.
    • treis 5y ago
      > I know multiple people who were contacted immediately by Amazon recruiters after failing an interview loop. “Hey, that other team says you suck but I bet you’re perfect for our team.” When you know other teams are happy to take your reject candidates, you can’t trust internal candidates any more than external ones. That happened to me too but I chalked it up to incompetence. They told me at the beginning of the process that I'd have to wait a year to re-apply if I wasn't successful the first go around.
• ryanianian 5y ago
  > The churn I experienced was significant One thing I don't see mentioned enough is the forced PIP policy. Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. It also disincentivizes helping team-members in deep ways and incentivizes back-stabbing politics. Of course every org/VP has some latitude, but this is a common principle adopted by many VPs to appease the "bar raiser" standards as well as giving enough motivation to axe employees with considerable equity despite how good they may be on an absolute scale. This was the policy at a number of orgs when I was there 5 years ago, and I have heard similar stories as recently as 2019 pre-covid.
  • the_snooze 5y ago
    >Basically every manager is forced to stack-rank their entire team, and the bottom N percent is put on a PIP. So even if your entire team is comprised of very top-notch engineers you will see forced attrition. That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team.
    • qqtt 5y ago
      > That sounds like a huge disincentive to mentoring and developing your team. I've heard there are huge communication issues within teams, thanks to policies like this. You have to look out for yourself first and foremost, otherwise you are up next for the stack ranking. Better to sabotage your team mate's onboarding than risk being next in line for the firing squad. It's actually worse, because it's actually a "unregretted attrition" (URA) quota - which Amazon HR has spent decades developing into a sinister fear-based culture. They have a secret "FOCUS list" (used to be called devlist) which managers don't even tell their directs they are on. A secret list which if employees leave while they are on it (and remember, they don't even know they are on it), they are marked as URA and cannot be re-hired. HR directs managers explicitly not to tell employees they are on this list. Many employees only find out once they try to switch teams and are blocked due to being on these secret lists. It fosters a culture of fear, uncertainty, and doubt - combine that with overly political managers fighting for their own lives, and Amazon can be a brutal place to work. The best teams are those that shield you from all these politics, but when push comes to shove managers are forced to make these URA decisions constantly. Bezos believed his employees were inherently lazy and needed these types of mechanisms to scare them into doing their best work. Now that Amazon is the size it is, you can find crazy and absurd anecdotes of these policies being twisted into some truly bizarre Kafkaesque situations - like managers hiring individuals solely to fill the URA quota, and team members sabotaging onboarding on new members to try to avoid the firing squads themselves.
• CottonMcKnight 5y ago
  I wouldn't wish the byzantine nightmare that is Cognito on my worst enemy.
  • tech_tuna 5y ago
    Cognito is one of the worst. Try the CloudHSM sometime if you're not feeling suicidal. The whole Amplify/AppSync stack is another massive tire fire.
    • frx 5y ago
      Do you have any recommendations for authentication services? I agree Cognito is not a good tool. However, it does integrate well with other AWS services (ex: Api gateway). If there is a 3rd party service or tool that we can use instead of Cognito and if it also works well with other AWS services (Amplify, Api gateway) that would be awesome.
      • tech_tuna 5y ago
        Auth0 or Okta and yes, neither is AWS native but they are much better authentication services. Okta acquired Auth0 about a year ago so I expect some consolidation of features at some point but as far as I know that has not happened yet.
• emptybottle 5y ago
  It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work. My own experiences, the horror stories I've read, the broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession. It didn't use to be like this. There was a time not long ago when individual personality and skills mattered. Workloads could be negotiated, interviews were conversational. But now it seems that a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines, and thousands of other companies follow suit almost blindly. I'd love to see a job aggregator for anti-FAANGs. Does such a thing exist?
  • deltaonefour 5y ago
    Is this the norm? I thought this was mostly just amazon. If it is the norm I blame it on the over supply of software engineers. The salaries stay high but the churn is now higher because with that high of a salary they will burn through as many engineers as possible to get the perfect person.
  • voakbasda 5y ago
    I'd use it, but only if it excluded fads too. I don't want to be near Web 3, cryptocurrencies, or generally any new tech stack released within the last five years. If you don't like this idea, get of my lawn. ;)
  • pkaye 5y ago
    Seems like you just need an job aggregator that skips particular companies you dislike.
  • unoti 5y ago
    > It's really a shame what many of the "FAANG" companies (and the companies who admire/adopt their practices) are doing to tech work. > broken/horrible interview trivia loops, the nonstop crunches, the nonstop on-call escalations, the difficult ethical positions that come with working at some companies, etc. have me feeling worse than ever about this profession. > a few companies have eliminated all that wasteful "toil" of interacting with human beings by instead treating them like machines... I agree that these things are happening, but this is not happening everywhere. In particular, Microsoft is not true for any of the above over the last 5+ years since Satya came onboard. In my experience, every one of the above is not true at Microsoft, with one notable exception: the interview loop is indeed hard. But other than that, it's a much better situation at Microsoft. There are no difficult ethical positions (ethics and trust are first class core values there). Individuals matter, and allowances are made for different people's strengths and weaknesses. Workloads and deadlines can indeed be negotiated. It's far more "human" there than other places like Amazon, Facebook, Uber, and other places.
• MattGaiser 5y ago
  I have been told by multiple ex-Amazon people that if you are moving for a job there, not to rent a place for the full year as there is a decent chance you will not need it. Everyone I know says it is worth working there, but mostly as a grab and go for the resume.
• ajkjk 5y ago
  > I can’t think of a single internal tool at Amazon that is better than a commercial counterpart. I haven't worked at Amazon in 6 years, but when I was last there, these tools were leaps-and-bounds above publicly-available equivalents: * Pipelines (CI/CD tool. Still better than all alternatives IMO, including the AWS offering for some reason) * Igraph (Amazingly good, wipes the floor with Grafana which I have used since) * TT (ticket tracker) * SIM? the new issue-management system they added to replace Jira. Soooo much better than Jira. But it was pretty new when I left so I don't know what it has become.
  • jeffe 5y ago
    I see the value in a lot of these, but I also have to say one common thread across almost all tooling is bad interfaces clearly designed by backend/generalist engineers doing their own ad-hoc form of design. Having worked with an org that transitioned from bitbucket -> gitlab I also found the development/issues at Amazon to have some big headscratchers on missing features like crux diffs following some unintuitive ruleset, and countless smaller inconveniences.
  • qvrjuec 5y ago
    Agreed with everything above, with the addition of brazil. It was pretty fantastic to work with
    • deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  • cmckn 5y ago
    The first time I did a CR on multiple packages at once...that's good shit.
    • qvrjuec 5y ago
      Ah damn also forgot CRUX. Anyone know tools out there that would allow for review across multiple repos/packages?
  • 5y ago
• batmaniam 5y ago
  The article mentions aggressive delivery dates, conflicting goals between different departments that get in the way of career progression, and massive amounts of stress as being 'normal' at Amazon. And we already know that Amazon exploits and over-exerts their employees in other divisions, like warehouse. At what point do we say enough is enough? Amazon warehouse employees are already pushing for better working conditions through Unions. When will we finally realize that Amazon is equally over-working everyone and join that solidarity effort so that everyone's working environment becomes better? Quitting doesn't change anything, we can see they just rehire and perpetuate bad culture. Even the author of the article says just that; he was hired to replace someone. If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it.
  • atlasunshrugged 5y ago
    By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually? How many people who read this article and the likely scores more or bothered to look at glassdoor will bother to apply or accept a recruiter call? Eventually something breaks internally and the company is destroyed (albeit likely a very slow death) or it gets fixed. I don't worry a ton about HQ people, most of those can get other jobs but the warehouse workers in small towns without other opportunities, that's a tougher one and I hope that they are able to unionize or get some sort of strengthened protections themselves or through the gov.
    • tablespoon 5y ago
      >> If nothing changes, your friends and colleagues (and your future children if they do engineering) will all still suffer at the hands of Amazon. And believe me, their work culture will bleed out to other companies. I've seen it. > By that logic won't the company just destroy itself from the inside out eventually? Yes, but it usually takes an unacceptably long time for something like that to happen, and in the mean time a lot of people get hurt. As they say "in the long run, we're all dead": it doesn't do us much good if letting the problems work themselves out means we'll never live to see the solution.
• strgcmc 5y ago
  I see a lot of these comments have taken to a kind of Amazon-bashing and venting their own experiences, where the author actually... didn't? I thought the author was incredibly fair/objective, and at least the way I read it, it wasn't so much that he had such a miserable experience or could only stomach 10 months of pain/abuse (in fact if you actually read to the end, he praises his manager, his teammates, etc.), and more so that it only took him 10 months to realize that the company culture and way-of-working was not aligned with his personal preferences. He does have legitimate complaints about parts of his experience, and makes some keen observations about the consequences and tradeoffs of Amazon choosing to adopt the culture that it does (though I also think he's wrong about a few things too), but overall it's less of a "Amazon == bad" piece and more of a "this is why it wasn't to my taste" reflection. Frankly, I would congratulate the author, and think of this as a success-story. Paraphrasing his own words, he learned a lot, met some good people, found some good practices that he's going to carry forward with him... isn't that a successful outcome (minus the annoyance of another round of job hunting, but hey in this market, another job hop is probably just an opportunity to level up comp, rather than an existential threat that you might be unemployed and starve)? Obviously the team/org he was in is suffering major attribution problems, and that's obviously a bad thing, but that's not his problem either. Note: in case it wasn't clear, I do work within Amazon, but these opinions are my own, not representing my employer, blah blah
  • benadam11 5y ago
    Really glad it came across that way (that was definitely my intent).
  • tucaz 5y ago
    People on this forum are usually too good to find problems within. With folks here, usually the other party is always at fault.
    • draw_down 5y ago
    • Ostrogodsky 5y ago
• deleted 5y ago
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• 5cott0 5y ago
  I got an email from an Amazon recruiter the other day. I thought it was an invite to a phone screen but it was actually a link to my dev plan.
  • oblio 5y ago
    Dev plan?
  • commandlinefan 5y ago
    I got a linkedin ping from an Amazon recruiter which I politely declined. He replied: "Great! The next step in our recruiting process is a short phone screen. Call me to set it up!"
• EGreg 5y ago
  I thought you said 10 minutes! Given today's turnover rates, this isn't even a sensation.
• peakaboo 5y ago
  I glanced through the leadership principles and laughed a bit. I feel sorry for the people who think they have to put up with that bullshit. It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible, that's the single reason those principles exist. To make specially young and clueless employees forget it's just a job, because hey, it must be an obsession! If you are young, this may seem normal i guess but I would never ever touch amazon.
  • faangiq 5y ago
    They’re actually good principles just not followed at all by management.
  • munchler 5y ago
    As another old guy: Amen. I love being productive, but hate being pressured. All these FAANG jobs sound like the opposite. No thanks.
  • NotVerstappen 5y ago
    Leadership principles feature in normal employee life in exactly two circumstances: when you are doing interview loops, and when you need to win an argument, eg with some jobsworth sales person who wants you to over-promise to a customer.
  • jkingsbery 5y ago
    Current Amazon employee here. > It all boils down to making the employees working as hard as possible This has not been my experience. The way I've looked at it as, these are more explicit ground rules for how decisions are made. At most other places I've worked, the mechanisms for making decisions was often quite arbitrary, and boiling down to whatever the most senior person in the room wants. When the Leadership Principles are done well, you'll see there are checks and balances built in. For example: yes, we have "customer obsession," and we try to work hard for customers, but if my boss told me to work unreasonable hours, he would fail in the "Earn Trust" area, and he would be in danger of losing his team. I've found my work-life balance at Amazon to be pretty reasonable, and much better than pretty much any where else I've worked.
• franczesko 5y ago
  Ex-Amazon. Lasted 2 years. I'll just repeat the comment I posted the other day: There are only two instances when you're happy at Amazon - when you start and when you quit. Doing the latter was the best decision I made, perhaps, in my entire career. I can honestly tell that those RSUs and bonuses weren't worth it. Avoid at all costs. You've been warned.
  • tech_tuna 5y ago
    What's interesting to me is that a few of the people I know how were AWS "long haulers" are massive assholes. It's almost like the kind of person who makes it there is not the kind of person I want as a colleague.
    • anonporridge 5y ago
      We call them 'Amholes'.
      • krallja 5y ago
        not Aws-holes?
  • deleted 5y ago
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  • bogomipz 5y ago
    I'm curious was it consistently bad for those two years or more of a see-sawing of highs and lows? I ask because two years seems like a long time given the bleakness of your summary. I'm guessing this might also explain why they tend backload the RSUs grants towards the last 2 years of 4 year vesting period?
    • franczesko 5y ago
      It was consistently bad. During the first year or so I was motivated and focused on trying to solve the problems of my department. The writings were on the wall everywhere, but it didn't discourage me and I turned a blind eye on many of the issues. I would lie, if I would say that at the time money wasn't a factor. Most importantly, Amazon's culture is toxic. Poor leadership (shouting and swearing during meetings) leading to bad hires. It's a cut-throat working environment with high staff rotation. I struggled to cope with the fact how people were treated (planned attrition and PIPs). I was working under 5 different managers during this time, being bullied by the last one. HR did nothing, so I voted with my feet. When this occurred, I was close to reaching a 2yr tenure, so it was easy money for me on the table.
• mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
  I worked at a large, brand name, older company and there are parallels. I think past some size of an organization, it turns into a bureaucracy to get anything done. - Internal tooling was poor and most teams DIY. Any centrally managed thing was horrible and either home-grown and poorly documented or some VP picked it and poorly documented - The companies needs superseded your career goals to the point that very specific trainings were basically forced even if it had nothing to do with what you do (six sigma) - To get anything done required 3-5 other teams to do anything and took forever. Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks. One thing that was different was attrition. This was before remote working and when the nobody in town was hiring you really were stuck. I like working in smaller organizations where you can have an impact. I only think one of the FAANG would be worthy of me putting up with working in a large bureaucracy again - the other A - and only because I haven't heard horror stories - if you have them, share them.
  • B1FF_PSUVM 5y ago
    > the other A - and only because I haven't heard horror stories Not even the horror stories leak ...
  • raiflip 5y ago
    "Turn around time to get a server spun up was ~6-8 weeks." -> ok this one threw me for a loop. I can literally get an EC2 server spun up within minutes inside Amazon. But as others have stated org quality varies a lot. If you are dealing with an org that requires you to say at the beginning of the year exactly what budget you need, I could see that.
    • mattbrewsbytes 5y ago
      This was years ago with their own data centers and yes budgets with server allocations at the beginning of the year or twice a year.
  • tandymodel100 5y ago
• antihero 5y ago
  Ah, at least there wasn't a CCTV camera by your desk that docked your pay for scratching your arse :)
• swyx 5y ago
  this actually turned out a lot more evenhanded than i was expecting from the title. i took a job at AWS myself, and left after 8 months. partly it was pull factor to a more exciting offer, but i wont deny some push factors. Amazon hires generally very smart people, but the bureaucracy and legacy is just stifling for someone used to a faster pace in tech. After a while I identified the 4 things I felt that we had to ship in order to be a competitive product, and having determined that we'd take years to do it, left in good conscience hoping that whoever stayed would carry on the good fight. I didn't know it but my manager would leave 2 months after I did, lol. good times, decent pay but it is clearly no longer Day 1 in many parts of AWS. If I were Adam Selipsky this would be job #1 IMO. AWS can only coast on past reputation so long.
  • benadam11 5y ago
    I actually loved the "Day 1" philosophy but you are 100% right, it is no longer Day 1.
    • i_dursun 5y ago
      Always Day 1 of 90s
  • faangiq 5y ago
    Lol. Current CEO and his predecessor were sales dudes. They don’t give a shit what code monkey peons think or do.
• deleted 5y ago
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• dubeye 5y ago
  According to a half remembered article , average retention is about 10 months, so when I saw the headline I assumed this was the topic. Amazon turn over more than their total workforce, every year. This includes all staff yes, but still shocking. If true.
  • SwiftyBug 5y ago
    This is crazy. At some point they will have hired / let go virtually every employable person. What then?
    • CRConrad 5y ago
      Then they start over.
• clvx 5y ago
  This makes me wonder how much complexity can they grow until it's not sustainable by the culture? At what point smart talent would say enough is enough and start hiring average joe's? How would that be reflected to customers?
• throwawayboise 5y ago
  "Everything is Urgent (but takes forever)" Sounds like my first job out of college (it was early 1990s, big consulting shop). There was a ton of pressure to arrive early, stay late, 55-60 hour weeks were normal, continually document progress on your tasks, but the project overall was well behind schedule and what had been completed didn't really work. We got paid straight overtime after 40 hours, and I didn't have much else to do with my time, so it wasn't all bad. I only did it for about a year. It was a good reference for my next job. Young people can afford a few years in the salt mines to get some perspective.
  • RandallBrown 5y ago
    I worked on a big team at Microsoft about 8 years ago. The overall project was behind so they started buying us dinner every night until we could stay late and get back on schedule. The sub team that I worked on wasn't behind at all so I just went home like normal every day. After a few days of this my manager pulled me aside saying that some of the higher ups had noticed I wasn't staying late with the rest of the team. Of course I wasn't. I didn't have any work to do. I started showing up to the team dinners, but it seems the damage was done. My next review went poorly and I immediately started looking for a new job because I didn't want to deal with that bullshit anymore. Coincidentally, I believe that was the last review Microsoft did with their infamous stack ranking so maybe the next one would have gone better.
• AtlasBarfed 5y ago
  "How manual most of the processes were" - manual processes are more durable to turnover "Documentation is very important at Amazon" - helps alleviate the impact of constant turnover "Teams are fragile" - um, because of turnover? "Everything is urgent" - indirectly because of turnover, because if you don't nag people to enable your deliverables, you get fired. "Everything is built in house" - helps make you harder to fire, gives you bully power over other new hires since you know it top to bottom, protects you from the organization that is trying to constantly turn over people
• trts 5y ago
  > In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level. This is put succinctly. Seeing Amazon from within was an absolute shock. It is hard to be hyperbolic about the company's technical achievements: Prime, AWS, 2-hour Delivery, Alexa, Prime Video, Amazon Go ... absolutely incredible, world-changing stuff. But the experience of working there felt like the place was on fire. People transferring teams in droves, joining in droves from outside, entire teams doing duplicate or triplicate work, managers of managers of managers of managers. And yet the speed at which they launch successful products at global scale is unrivaled. I'm glad I got to be a part of it but there's almost nothing that could entice me to go back.
  • willheis 5y ago
    I'll accept the logistics management part of Prime and AWS as obviously major achievements, but Alexa, Prime Video and Go? Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier, and every so often tells a child exactly how to electrocute themselves. Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience. And having moved to Seattle recently, I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up.
    • scubbo 5y ago
      You are approaching all of these from the perspective of an engineer and not recognizing that ordinary people don't see products and systems the way you do (a mistake I also often make). > Alexa is a spy machine that makes already easy tasks marginally easier For the average person who isn't super-bothered about privacy, the voice-activated functionality is genuinely novel and delightful. > Prime Video is a 2nd or even 3rd rate video service in my experience "2nd best to Netflix" is no slouch at all. > I tried out Amazon Go a couple times and it just sucks? The selection is super tiny and honestly, I just prefer a self checkout with tap payments. I found myself constantly worrying if their camera system would correctly ring me up. So - an intentionally-small-selection store has a small selection, your personal preferences don't line up with the (you must admit, extremely friction-free) checkout system, and you worried about a bug that (from the fact that you phrased it that way) didn't actually happen? Sounds like it's working extremely well for how it's designed! (Disclaimer - I'm an Amazon employee, though I don't work on any of the discussed products, and frankly am pretty critical of them all both internally and externally too. But to claim that they're not successes _at the criteria that they are aiming for_ is mistaken)
• llimos 5y ago
  Is Ben Adam your real name? Or are you referencing the Hebrew for "human being"?
  • benadam11 5y ago
    It's my real name :) (I had thought it translated to "Son of man" which is kind of a beautiful way to say human being)
• throwJan22 5y ago
  Are there any good FANG size companies? Amazon sucks, Facebook is unethical as most Social Media and ad selling. Crypto is a scam. It seems everyone is hiring but I struggle to find a good company to work for. Google perhaps?
  • tandymodel100 5y ago
• ultrasounder 5y ago
  Worked there from 2011-2012 at the then LAB126(Cupertino) on the kindle Fire and project. Was a total dumpster fire filled with Ex Apple folks who liked to throw their egos adound(this was when Jobs was still alive). Because I was in the devices teams traveled to china 4 times within the year, got burnt out by my next level managers and his managers and finally quit after taking in my singnon bonus. Took me a decade to get over that experience and now I am back to the races this time interviewing for Level5 software engineering roles with the MAAGMA(F went meta)companies.
  • e-_pusher 5y ago
    Sounds like just another day in the consumer electronics world … Were you working on electrical systems or mechanical? How did the switch to software engineering go for you / what made you switch?
• anyonecancode 5y ago
  Always interesting to see comments from people who worked at Amazon. I did a stint, and I hated it, but I am always trying to get a read on if I was just unlucky, or if I can fairly draw a broader conclusion about Amazon overall. I was actually working for a company that had been acquired by Amazon several years earlier, and I was working on a non-feature team. So on the one hand, maybe my bad experience was that it wasn't "Amazon proper," or maybe the lesson is "be sure to work on software the visibly provides profit and avoid working on software that merely keeps the company going as a viable venture." OTOH, we were pretty well integrated with Amazon at this point. A lot of people from Amazon proper had transferred here, because it had a reputation as having a much better culture. The vesting schedule was much better, for instance. So maybe I just picked the wrong team -- there's probably something to the "avoid working in a cost-center" lesson. Then again, there's so many stories of people who have had a bad experience, that being "unlucky" seems to happen more often than seems optimal. I did learn a ton. A lot of the most valuable lessons in life generally come from hard experience, and work life is no exception. Still, I can't say I'd recommend actively _seeking out_ such experiences.
• clpm4j 5y ago
  I've had this realization at every company I've worked for, big or small. Not sure why I'm still surprised by it: "The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual the vast majority of processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases."
• peter303 5y ago
  I wonder how Jeff Bezos Leadership Principles competes with Charles Koch's Secrets of Success. At times these have a cult-like following. And both companies are among the largestpublic and private in the world.
• snowgrove 5y ago
  I left Amazon after 11 months as a new college grad in engineering. As others have noted, Amazon’s RSU vesting structure is blatantly designed with the expectation that many (most?) new hires will leave after only 1-2 years. When I was there, the typical plan backloaded the bulk of the vest amount in the third and fourth year of employment. Contrast this with Google or many other tech employers who distribute RSU vesting evenly across the term of the plan. One of many reasons I’m glad I left such an anti-employee company.
• saos 5y ago
  > CRMs, Email Builder, Complex Automations etc, hmm are Amazon in the CRM space?
  • ec109685 5y ago
    They do customer support and have a gigantic sales organization, so they have to have CRM tools (or buy them, which it sounds like they don't do).
• treyfitty 5y ago
  Is AWS terrible to work in as a PM-T? These stories in the comments are pretty somber, but not sure if it’s isolated by role.
• mikesabbagh 5y ago
  Had similar experience with another large enterprise. I always wondered how come those companies can survive with such friction. Building small internal application was costing millions, 500x more that what you can build as a startup. It took me 3 years to quit. Also why do you want to work for Amazon and Google? There are many great people there, you will not be noticed. Work for a smaller company, they will pay you more, appreciate everything you do and you will be much happier!
• crmrc114 5y ago
  As a former amazonian, this one hits close to home. Especially the part about internal tools duct taped together. And most work being simply to stop hemorrhaging and bleeding.
• mrtweetyhack 5y ago
• wiggles_uwu 5y ago
  long time lurker, finally qualified to comment on a post. I've been with amazon for 8 years (still an employee) as a software engineer. I've concluded that your experience at amazon - both work life balance and technical - is entirely dependent on your skip manager and your org. I started with Amazon in the bay area. When I joined we were still in the very early days of our project. The work was awesome, and it felt like we were creating great things. Unfortunately, the ops burden (oncall) became way too much for our team to handle and the quality of life plummeted. My existence during those days was pure pain. From there I relocated (through Amazon) to Seattle to work on something else. I did the move with the promise that I'd immediately get to work on a cool project, but I ended up sitting around doing nothing for months. I didn't even have a desk. Once the project finally started though, things become great. Both of these teams had different VPs, and the cultures of each org were very different as well. My experience in the bay area started off very positively, and then become extremely shitty. My experience in Seattle started off extremely shitty, but then it turned into the most fun 2 years of coding I've done. Additionally, different orgs do things differently. AWS does things different from how Alexa/Retail/Music/Movies/etc do things. A good example of this: Twitch isn't fully integrated with all of Amazon's internal systems (see recent news for reference). Some teams don't have oncall rotations, other teams have brutal ones. One of my previous directors used to do bi-weekly (once every two weeks) fireside chats. I haven't even met my current director, and I've been under him for a year and a half. If you're entering the company from the outside, you might very well be walking into a dumpster fire of a team. If you're inside the company, it's really easy to spot which teams are garbage and which ones are not. Below is my guide: Red Flags: - No nearby principals (no tech guidance at the director level) - Too many principals (bureaucratic arm chair engineering hell) - Average tenure of engineers on the team is SDE1 (trash code) - No PRFAQ/BRDs (projects have no north star, scope is all over the place, dumpster fire product team) - Ops burden is too high (you can check a teams ticket queue on SIM, high ticket count = bad oncall) .... and many more .... Doing team switches are pretty straight forward as well (ymmv). Once you're in the door at amazon, do your research and determine whether you need to switch teams ASAP. You can search any engineer's username and look at what code they're contributing. It's pretty easy to investigate the code base you'll be working on in advance of joining the team to determine its health. Regarding tooling, amazon does and doesn't have great tooling. There are things like Pipelines, CR/Crux, Sim/TT, Apollo, iGraph, etc that are actually world class tools and don't really have any rivals out there (yet!). Then there are other things like people wanting to fork bootstrap and react so that they can rebrand it as an amazon version.... In one of my early teams, I saw the SDETs (test engineers) metaphorically go to war with each other to write the best end-to-end integration test framework. There were four frameworks in the end. Regarding the leadership principles. Those are predominately tools to be used during the decision making process. There is this concept called "one way door decisions" which would be any decision that is made such that the amount of effort needed to undo that decision is not feasible. Basically if you take that door, you can't come back out. When faced with a one way door decision, you use the leadership principles to decide. Are you on a fixed timeline because your deliverable is tied to AWS Re:Invent? Then you need to optimize for Bias for Action and Deliver Results. Are you about to create a core platform service that many many teams will build on? Obviously you need to optimize for Insist on the Highest Standards, if not you screw over your org for years. The leadership principles contradict each other, but that generally gives you an idea of what's being gained and lost in the decision making process. For software engineers, I would not exclude amazon as an employer just because you read some stuff online. If you can get in, do it and stick around for a year or two at least. The amount that you learn in such a short amount of time is significant, and you can take that experience with you anywhere. If you're having a bad experience at Amazon, remember that the company is massive. You can switch orgs and it'll feel like you just changed companies (only the tooling is the same). Final thoughts: don't ignore your mental health! I have never had a manager actually ask about my mental well being before. I don't think that culture is actually fostered at all at Amazon. Use your vacation time if you have it, switch teams if you need too, or just straight up quit.
• fajarsiddiq 5y ago
  hey congrats! are you starting some side project?
• rk06 5y ago
  > When you operate at this type of scale, centralization is the enemy of efficiency. This is a paradox. In order to be efficient on a macro level, it requires being (very) inefficient at the micro level. Counterexample: amazon if every team is reinventing square wheels, they are adding a lot of inefficiencies which worsens the situation at macro level.
  • phgn 5y ago
    But if every team has to wait for planning from a centralized decision maker who doesn't have all the context, they won't get any important work done as well. Or they loose the motivation that comes with owning services yourself. A paradox, as the author wrote. Startups are also duplicating the work of each other, and succeed against big companies because this makes them more agile. I always thought that seeing internal orgs as startups was the master stroke of Amazon and the reason for its many product successes -- but it has the downsides described in the article.
• Ansil849 5y ago
  > the Amazon Leadership Principles. Such bullshit. > Strive to be Earth's Best Employer > Leaders work every day to create a safer, more productive, higher performing, more diverse, and more just work environment. They lead with empathy, have fun at work, and make it easy for others to have fun. Leaders ask themselves: Are my fellow employees growing? Are they empowered? Are they ready for what's next? Leaders have a vision for and commitment to their employees' personal success, whether that be at Amazon or elsewhere. "Lead with empathy", by creating conditions in which workers feel they have to urinate in bottles [1]. [1] https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers-pee-in-bottles-here-are-the-pee-bottles https://www.vice.com/en/article/k7amyn/amazon-denies-workers...
• tamaharbor 5y ago
  I am a retired electrical engineer and have worked for various power utilities throughout the years. I have never experienced anything close to this, and have mostly good memories. After reading through the comments here, it sounds like most FAANG companies truly suck. I don’t know how you deal with them.
• fellellor 5y ago
  I’m impressed by your really clean website. Could you please share what stack and backend platforms you’re using for this?
• Simon_O_Rourke 5y ago
  I interviewed with Amazon about 2015, pretty long process but compared where I was coming from (huckster data startup) AMZN seemed ideal. Onboarding was interesting at the general company level, but basically non existent at a team level. I gave it about three months trying to get to grips with the manual tasks underlying their Virtual IP assignment process (was on their networking team). Couldn't make head nor tail of it, had constant problems with the VM running on my laptop and basically started looking around for another job. However, this little FAANG checkbox I now have ticked has opened lots of doors for me since then. I've seen most of my old team at a few tech events in the interim, and taking to them it seems like I got out in time. The team was "traded" to another senior director, and things got very bad, with loads of folks quitting. My last day included an exit interview, which kind of stuck with me ever since. Talking to the HR rep, I said that the role probably wasn't a good fit for me, but maybe sometime in the future I'd wind up back at Amazon. You know, one of those throwaway comments you might say to be polite. The HR rep responded with "Well, you never know, maybe" while unconsciously shaking his head at the same time :)
• aojdwhsd 5y ago
  Speaking of Amazon, does anyone have any insight into working conditions, etc in the AWS cloud support jobs? Interviewing for this soon.