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Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recr

Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume. I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants. Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

FactoryReboot 2y ago
No. Choose the other FAANG offer
htrp 2y ago
Money.
- iosguyryan 2y ago
  Easily more elsewhere with less BS
  - htrp 2y ago
    I expect eventually people will demand a premium for the BS?
    - tantalor 2y ago
      More like, put in less effort than they would have.
    - relaxing 2y ago
      I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.
harshaw 2y ago
Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.
- SoftTalker 2y ago
  I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available. If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
  - irrational 2y ago
    I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
    - bboygravity 2y ago
      It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work). This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time). It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates. But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
      - tuna74 2y ago
        So if you walk to work you should get more pay than your neighbor that bikes to work if you work at the same location?
tdeck 2y ago
If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).
- Klonoar 2y ago
  Apple has a very small office here too.
  - steelframe 2y ago
    If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah. But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
    - Klonoar 2y ago
      Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
- angmarsbane 2y ago
  Or Oracle!
  - dylan604 2y ago
    But then you work at Oracle.
- aurizon 2y ago
  A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...
toddmorey 2y ago
There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.
neofrommatrix 2y ago
It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there. Adding on thoughts: One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there). I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable. Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical). Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right) Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
  - trallnag 2y ago
Xeronate 2y ago
i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice. i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.
- BeetleB 2y ago
  How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave. [1] 10 days for the first year
  - Xeronate 2y ago
    not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was - 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus - 6 "personal" days - in Seattle at least, 3 sick days Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible. Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
    - BeetleB 2y ago
      Ah, not so bad then. Still a bit worse than where I'm at, though. For me, 4 weeks is too good to lose. I'd go to Amazon only if I can't find another company to give me at least as much immediately.
packetlost 2y ago
It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value. Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.
- John23832 2y ago
  Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  > Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix. Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
  - packetlost 2y ago
    Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.
throwawayFanta 2y ago
It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp. In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.
- hadlock 2y ago
  > roblox (why?) might have offered better, but Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
  - simoncion 2y ago
    > I don't see the value proposition. Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up. Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.
strivingtobe 2y ago
Money, mostly. But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch. Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- BryantD 2y ago
  I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.
- mmcconnell1618 2y ago
  Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.
colmmacc 2y ago
I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at. But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs. If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.
- xtracto 2y ago
  I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico). A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that. Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
  - red-iron-pine 2y ago
    heard similar things about challenges getting a lot of near-shoring tech (chip fabs, etc) set up in MX
matrix87 2y ago
> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others? People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture
- alienthrowaway 2y ago
  Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.
- eitally 2y ago
  I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft. Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
  - VirusNewbie 2y ago
    MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT? When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!
tourmalinetaco 2y ago
Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.
- elevatedastalt 2y ago
  > Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.
  - hypothesis 2y ago
    Until they don’t. “The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.” https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/ https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/
    - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
      Looking for another set of statistics (ATF specifically, as they also love killing animals) led me to this website: https://www.puppycidedb.com/ https://www.puppycidedb.com/ It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
- stackedinserter 2y ago
  Gosh, I work like a dog and pretty much own the whole company codebase, but probably for 30% of AMZN money.
steelframe 2y ago
> What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.
oneepic 2y ago
For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.
rvz 2y ago
Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers). Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following: 1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon. 2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas. 3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff. They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.
darthapple76 2y ago
In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.
- mathverse 2y ago
  Never heard of this? Where? What location?
  - Macha 2y ago
    Sounds like Dublin. Amazon were crazy aggressive for hiring right until 2022, and are now less aggressive but still hiring pretty actively. Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring because they churn through people is a different question.
    - darthapple76 2y ago
      afaik they don't pay great in Dublin. Look to Amsterdam and Berlin.
  - darthapple76 2y ago
    Berlin, bruh
- trallnag 2y ago
  Actual "tech" or sales?
  - darthapple76 2y ago
    I'm talking about tech
ranman 2y ago
You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS. That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough. What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results. This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM. There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry. Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential. MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap. AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap. It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.
captainkrtek 2y ago
Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.
- minkles 2y ago
  Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
- goostavos 2y ago
  >empire building I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project." The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
  - blindhippo 2y ago
    Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died. I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.
varelse 2y ago
[dead]
karmasimida 2y ago
Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.
- jarjoura 2y ago
  Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.
  - karmasimida 2y ago
    I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture. Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.
hintymad 2y ago
L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)
- trevor-e 2y ago
  Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
  - hintymad 2y ago
    Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.
notinmykernel 2y ago
100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the contrary. Amazon is a very abusive workplace.
- Root_Denied 2y ago
  The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable. Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels. I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.
qingcharles 2y ago
I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.
- naijaboiler 2y ago
  >>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that. that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.
100pctremote 2y ago
It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.
01100011 2y ago
Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.
- andirk 2y ago
  > Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon. Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?
  - 01100011 2y ago
    Yes, better than Amazon but still a valley job.
bmitc 2y ago
I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.
llm_trw 2y ago
>Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.
sbaidon94 2y ago
Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion. I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org. Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked. But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it. As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches. I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there. The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense). Some other random things I miss not in any particular order: - Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively - smithy - While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later. - Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype. - Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.
- heavyset_go 2y ago
  > But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it. This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights. Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
  - Olreich 2y ago
    Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product. I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.
ghaff 2y ago
I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?
varispeed 2y ago
Ask how much they pay and the itch will be gone in no time.
eranation 2y ago
Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance. The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.
- shermantanktop 2y ago
  K = Kilometrage? Kilometers-per-liter?
  - eranation 2y ago
    Yep. The rest-of-the-world version of YMMV :)
Der_Einzige 2y ago
Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist. I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.
scarface_74 2y ago
None at all for most software engineers. For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career. Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health
aceshades 2y ago
speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though. 1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise. Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  You don’t get yearly refreshers?
  - Barracoon 2y ago
    Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration. Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT. If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay. If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT. Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
  - Root_Denied 2y ago
    This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band. I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.
stackedinserter 2y ago
Money.
weezin 2y ago
> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others? It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.

FactoryReboot 2y ago

No. Choose the other FAANG offer

htrp 2y ago

Money.

iosguyryan 2y ago
Easily more elsewhere with less BS
- htrp 2y ago
  I expect eventually people will demand a premium for the BS?
  - tantalor 2y ago
    More like, put in less effort than they would have.
  - relaxing 2y ago
    I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.

harshaw 2y ago

Money, but that has diminishing value. The quality of life I would lose by going into the office 5 days a week is too high.

SoftTalker 2y ago
I mean this is all completely relative to the other options available. If all/most employers start mandating a return to office then we'll find out where people really stand on the issue. Will they suck it up and work from the office to keep their generous paychecks? Will they stand on principle and try to find another employer who will let them work remote and who they like working for in other respects? Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms? Have they already saved FU money and will just retire?
- irrational 2y ago
  I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.
  - bboygravity 2y ago
    It's also crazy that any office worker needs to go to an office (and waste time in traffic and pollute, unpaid, for work). This could all be fixed within 1 day if government would mandate companies to pay you for the duration you're away from home for work (including travel time). It would fix pollution, traffic jams, housing shortages, fake employee shortages, mental/stress issues and potentially even declining birth rates. But I guess "because boss says so" is a more important argument to not fix all of those things.
    - tuna74 2y ago
      So if you walk to work you should get more pay than your neighbor that bikes to work if you work at the same location?

tdeck 2y ago

If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).

Klonoar 2y ago
Apple has a very small office here too.
- steelframe 2y ago
  If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah. But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.
  - Klonoar 2y ago
    Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.
angmarsbane 2y ago
Or Oracle!
- dylan604 2y ago
  But then you work at Oracle.
aurizon 2y ago
A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...

toddmorey 2y ago

There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.

neofrommatrix 2y ago

It's not worth working there as a L5/L6 level engineer. The money is absolutely not worth it. Unless, your team is working on an absolutely new product. The only engineers,IMO, that like it there are those adept at finding new bootstrapped teams and designing and writing the product from scratch and releasing the MVP. They then hand over the crappy MVP to other engineers to support and move on to other new products. On-call is absolutely brutal because of exactly that.

hughesjj 2y ago
Worked there for 7 years (left in 2021) and this is an accurate summary of my experience there. Adding on thoughts: One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there). I will add that I learned a TON from AWS, and got to practice much of it too. It's the best boot camp one could ask for regarding general skill development imo (not particular frameworks etc but like, the theory and practice). There's also some things I miss like the weekly ops review and the general engineering culture, especially when it came to explicitly listing service limits, API specs, and cost up front in your design. Oh, and I honestly miss the docs culture. Quip wasn't as good as Google docs but the actual docs themselves and process of authoring them were SUPER valuable. Coding wise, CDK was so much better than terraform (once we moved to CDK from lpt+cfn, which was way worse imo). Smithy and open API are neato too (@smithy externally everyone uses thrift it seems, but the overlap of functionality/use cases isn't identical). Probably the biggest thing I miss was bones (kind of successor to octane), which is kind of like yeoman or create react app but would include so so much of the excellent internal tooling of ci/CD approval actions. I don't know of a real external equivalent, but would love to have one. If you ever see a Breland Miley or Ian Mosher apply to your company, HIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. (There was another really solid guy on that team but their name escapes me at the moment, and here's hoping I got the spelling right) Oh, also isengard is still easier to use than okta or AWS organizations to manage accounts imo.
- trallnag 2y ago

Xeronate 2y ago

i worked there for a couple years. wasn’t terrible, money was fair, and people i meet always seem impressed when i mention i used to work at amazon music which is kind of nice. i’ve got recruiters saying i can go back without a real interview because i left less than a year ago and i might go back. it’s really not any different than any other programming job i’ve had.

BeetleB 2y ago
How did you like their benefits? For me, PTO is the main reason I avoid Amazon. I get 20 days a year, not counting sick days. I think Amazon is still stuck at 15 days[1], and almost no sick leave. [1] 10 days for the first year
- Xeronate 2y ago
  not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was - 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus - 6 "personal" days - in Seattle at least, 3 sick days Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible. Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.
  - BeetleB 2y ago
    Ah, not so bad then. Still a bit worse than where I'm at, though. For me, 4 weeks is too good to lose. I'd go to Amazon only if I can't find another company to give me at least as much immediately.

packetlost 2y ago

It's for those for whom want a guaranteed good amount of money and work their ass off for it. They're competing with startups where you work your ass off for mediocre pay instead and a moonshot at equity with a ton of value. Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix.

John23832 2y ago
Oh you will work your ass of at Netflix, and the keeper test is just an artificial ceiling to keep the ranks small.
red-iron-pine 2y ago
> Every other FAANG is going to have their problems, with the only one that I haven't really been able to identify serious downsides being Netflix. Justify your existence every quarter or catch a pinkslip. Wicked good payouts, though -- roommate in college ended up there and was straight up cash. He loved it until he didn't and vanished promptly.
- packetlost 2y ago
  Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.

throwawayFanta 2y ago

It's mostly money. If you are good at your job, amazon pays much better than most companies. I tried looking for a new job last year, and the only ones increasing my current comp were HFT and pre-ipo startups. Google wouldn't even match my current comp. In terms of the rest, only Netflix, meta, snowflake and roblox (why?) might have offered better, but the wlb in the first two is similar to amzn, and i didn't like the outlook of the latter two.

hadlock 2y ago
> roblox (why?) might have offered better, but Every time I talk to a roblox recruiter it's something about how they have 70mm monthly recurring users and they're "building the platform to build games on" or something, but they're a total ghost in the mainstream media. I don't see the value proposition. Maybe they're the next "it" social media company as the users turn 16-21. Whatever they're doing, they pay full price for talent, allegedly.
- simoncion 2y ago
  > I don't see the value proposition. Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up. Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.

strivingtobe 2y ago

Money, mostly. But also: working at AWS is genuinely really interesting at a technical level. Very few companies operate at the scale that AWS does, and being able to have technical documentation about the underlying workings of EC2 or IAM at your fingertips, or even just listen in on root cause discussions or technical analysis of incidents, or read the technical details of a new design in a service that saves hundreds of millions of dollars per month or day, is something that really scratches my engineer itch. Amazon and AWS really have the potential to be a great place to work, but leadership just squanders it. That's what makes announcements like this even more painful.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
BryantD 2y ago
I'll second this. You will learn a lot about operating at scale at Amazon. You'll learn many of the same things at another FAANG/hyperscale company, mind you, but they've all got their problems.
kccqzy 2y ago
Everything you said applies to Google as well. Genuinely interesting at a technical level, but terrible leadership that squanders it.
mmcconnell1618 2y ago
Both Amazon and Google are in their post-founder CEO phases. Microsoft went through the Balmer phase and found footing with Satya Nadella. Balmer probably set the stage for Nadella to succeed but sometimes changing the face is enough to reset culture a bit. Right now, Jassy and Pichai will never be seen in the same light as Bezos or Page & Brin. It might take another CEO at both Amazon and Google to unlock potential.

colmmacc 2y ago

I've worked at Amazon (and AWS) for over 16 years and have made many friends, and it's how I met my wife. What's always kept me here is that it's been fun the whole time, with meaningful problems and opportunities that move the needle for so many customers. So many modern experiences that are built into our improved quality of lives; apps on phones that can know my tastes and preferences, hailing a cab virtually, a bonkers level of selection of goods to all consumers, low friction same-day delivery, far greater access to online services including education and financing, just wouldn't exist (or at least not as quickly) if weren't able to cut down so many old-school structures and replace them with much more efficient and available alternatives. Getting to create a transformation in digital infrastructure and logistics at that level is just nuts. And there's still plenty to do. The money is great too; a far better result for me financially than the startups I worked at. But all that said; Amazon isn't for everyone. It's probably not for most people. I don't mean that in the "Amazon only hires the best" sense. That's true, but so do the other big tech companies. It's more that you have to be a particular combination of driven and outcome focused with a relentless tolerance or even insatiable need for urgency, hard work, and trade-offs. If that resonated, and you have an opportunity to join Amazon towards the middle or advanced stages of your career; definitely try to do it. I interviewed several times at Amazon to get in. But if you are at the earlier stages of your career; choose your team and manager very carefully and care a bit less about the company you join. That will make a bigger difference.

xtracto 2y ago
I've heard from people working there that Amazon tech is full of Indian managers. And the "hearsay" here in Mexico is that Indian work "ethic" is terrible. That they are terrible bosses (same with TCS and HCL who also have lots of positions here in Mexico). A Mex programmers subredddit r/taquerosprogramadores has plenty of stories about that. Maybe it's just the structure AZ has established for Mexico. No idea.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago
  heard similar things about challenges getting a lot of near-shoring tech (chip fabs, etc) set up in MX

matrix87 2y ago

> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others? People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture

alienthrowaway 2y ago
Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.
VirusNewbie 2y ago
I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.
eitally 2y ago
I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft. Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.
- VirusNewbie 2y ago
  MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT? When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!

tourmalinetaco 2y ago

Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. My wife worked as a WHS specialist, and really enjoyed her team starting out. However over time they all got weary of the workload and left. Insolent managers, incapable and sometimes even unintelligible workers (it got so bad they started posting signs in two languages), and a mounting focus on speed over safety completely burnt out their facility’s entire safety team. Only one remains from her OG team, and she‘s looking for her chance to jump ship too. Now my wife is much happier working in an insurance field, even despite the pay cut.

elevatedastalt 2y ago
> Amazon pays well, but will work you like a dog. Ironically dogs live pretty royal lives in America.
- hypothesis 2y ago
  Until they don’t. “The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.” https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/ https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/
  - tourmalinetaco 2y ago
    Looking for another set of statistics (ATF specifically, as they also love killing animals) led me to this website: https://www.puppycidedb.com/ https://www.puppycidedb.com/ It’s sad enough that we’ve armed, trained, and funded a militant force with no care for the wellbeing of the people they are meant to protect, regularly abusing their power to harm people for their sick pleasure. The fact that we’ve also trained this near-terrorist organization to kill dogs for the sport of it is even more disappointing. I’m all for the existence of a police, of course, but we need a serious mass-firing and restructure.
stackedinserter 2y ago
Gosh, I work like a dog and pretty much own the whole company codebase, but probably for 30% of AMZN money.

steelframe 2y ago

> What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.

oneepic 2y ago

For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.

rvz 2y ago

Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers). Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following: 1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon. 2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas. 3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff. They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.

darthapple76 2y ago

In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.

mathverse 2y ago
Never heard of this? Where? What location?
- Macha 2y ago
  Sounds like Dublin. Amazon were crazy aggressive for hiring right until 2022, and are now less aggressive but still hiring pretty actively. Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring because they churn through people is a different question.
  - darthapple76 2y ago
    afaik they don't pay great in Dublin. Look to Amsterdam and Berlin.
- darthapple76 2y ago
  Berlin, bruh
trallnag 2y ago
Actual "tech" or sales?
- darthapple76 2y ago
  I'm talking about tech

ranman 2y ago

You get a scale at AWS that is hard to find elsewhere. There are still a huge number of very smart people there. You can learn a lot. I loved my time at AWS. That said there are a ton of cons. There's an entrenched management class that is disconnected from reality. There are a number of ~L8-L10 folks who don't believe or understand how they're falling behind the cloudflares and other providers. There is a bizarre arrogance in Seattle that masquerades as "willing to be misunderstood for long periods of time". People aren't afraid enough. What AWS will struggle with over the next few years is verifying the results of the narratives they tell themselves. At some point along their evolution a disconnect between narrative and reality happened and someone needs to bring everything back to a baseline of reality. Leaders tell a story of their success (that I'm sure they themselves believe) and no one follows through to actually verify the results. This issue of lack of narrative/reality baseline, to me, is a cancer at the heart of AWS and if it can be addressed then I think they can recover and shine. Otherwise they'll fall into the same trap as MSFT back in the 90s/2000s where they think everything is going just fine while the floor falls out from under them.

hughesjj 2y ago
Happened to MSFT, happened to Google, happened to Sears, happened to GE, happneed to Boeing, happened to IBM. There's definitely been some rot in AWS, which has been holding off the collapse in most other areas. Honestly it seems the more top down leadership, no matter who, gets their hands involved in thr sausage making process, thats when things start to go awry. Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture. Amazon has some of the besr in class. Keep the accountability that many other top tier companies lack, but otherwise imo get out of the way and let the ICs do their job.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential. MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap. AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap. It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.

captainkrtek 2y ago

Worked for AWS for 7ish years, from L4 to L6. Just my own experience, but I saw the company shift heavily from building high quality services to chasing sales/marketing hype and launching a plethora of “services” that did not match the quality of existing services. Also saw lots of empire building across organizations, many layers of management, more bureaucracy, etc. Can’t say its all bad or that I know better, but it felt like a slow culture shift from “it’s still day 1”, to that becoming an inside joke.

minkles 2y ago
Sounds about right. A couple of the things we rely on appear to be run by two guys in a trailer somewhere who can't even get basic fixes out without a 6 month lead.
goostavos 2y ago
>empire building I've been here about the same amount of time. Also L4-L6. I'll echo your "empire building" comment. That, above all else, seems to be the root of the evil. Managers need "scope" to get promoted. They get scope by building an empire. That leads to programs and initiatives and new processes without any connection to customer value. They only exist to be a line item on a promo doc. It is a topic of endless and open complaint that ICs get sucked up into some manager's "promo project." The big shift seems to be that only a subset of people are talking about producing value. The majority are talking about being seen as producing value.
- blindhippo 2y ago
  Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died. I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.

varelse 2y ago

[dead]

karmasimida 2y ago

Comparing to other FANNGs, I think Meta seems like a drop-in upgrade, it is more cutthroat, same level of boringness, but more money. Google seems a little laid back, at least it is used to be that way, but money potential is less, as well as promotions. Apple I don't know. So I think most Amazon people left to Meta as a result. Not the other way around.

jarjoura 2y ago
Can confirm. I saw a flood of ex-Amazonians come to Meta in the late 2010s. Not sure I interpreted their comparisons of Meta being more cut-throat, but it did seem like Amazon had way more intense politics with opaque decision making that hurt morale. Kind of seemed like they paid less for the same amount of stress but from different reasons.
- karmasimida 2y ago
  I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture. Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.

hintymad 2y ago

L7+ IC roles are not bad at all. Competitive packages. Tons of responsibility and freedom. I can't stress this enough. an L7+ really has lots of freedom and influence. They get to choose which meetings to go to, how much code they write, what architecture to use, who to work with, and have a serious say on what product features to launch, and which oncall to participate (except the GM escalation oncall). The company's policies and culture ensure that. They will be accountable for the architecture they choose, so of course they have the final say on what architecture to use -- typical freedom and responsibility. Plus, they have veto power of one's rating and promotion, after all. Other benefits include Lots of resources at their disposal. Good opportunity to learn from truly great engineers, at least in AWS. Note I'm not saying that every L7+ is great. All I'm saying that there are many truly great engineers and scientists that one can learn from. Think about the L7+ who built EC2, DDB, EBS, S3, SQS, and etc. Think about the L7+ who are fellows of ACM or NAE, who invented algorithms, built new systems, created new programming languages, and etc. They did not only spearhead the evolution of the underlying distributed systems, but also pushed large-scale application of queuing theories, formal verifications, and etc, as well as helped shape the engineering culture of the company. Oh, one also gets to learn the most elaborate and thorough operational practices. The production readiness review is amazing and is a gem for anyone to learn from.

joshdavham 2y ago
That actually sounds kinda nice! (assuming you make it to L7)
trevor-e 2y ago
Sure, being the top 1% of employees (which I'm assuming L7 principal is) at any company is sure to be great. Very few engineers will ever make that position at a FAANG.
- hintymad 2y ago
  Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.

notinmykernel 2y ago

100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the contrary. Amazon is a very abusive workplace.

Root_Denied 2y ago
The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable. Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels. I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.

qingcharles 2y ago

I had a good friend just leave AWS. The money was amazing, but he said it was an awful place to work. He took another job at a much lower compensation after 3 months. He didn't want to go into details due to his NDA. He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that.

naijaboiler 2y ago
>>He's a very reasonable person and very easy to get along with, so I have no idea what to make of that. that's not the type of person that should work at Amazon. The place is best for people who are driven, works hard, cares little about backstabbing others.

100pctremote 2y ago

It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.

01100011 2y ago

Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.

andirk 2y ago
> Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon. Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?
- 01100011 2y ago
  Yes, better than Amazon but still a valley job.

bmitc 2y ago

I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.

llm_trw 2y ago

>Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.

sbaidon94 2y ago

Spent 5 years there, I definitely know the experience varies wildly between teams and orgs so take all of this as just my personal opinion. I was part of the Amazon Luna team and Devices org. Yes oncall is super rough, yes people are very demanding. Internal documentation sucked. But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it. As long as you could justify the customer value managers and execs were pretty open to experimentation and trying out new approaches. I also was lucky enough to have a very technical oriented manager, he had a great long term vision of where he thought we needed to go and the technical chops to guide us there. The approach is definitely not for everybody nor the only one that can work in a company like Amazon but I think it did fit with my own values (if that makes any sense). Some other random things I miss not in any particular order: - Strong document oriented culture, it is expected of you to dive deep into certain areas while at the same time communicating them effectively - smithy - While CDK started out clunky pretty amazing high level constructs were available later. - Full access to AWS, pretty easy for you to experiment and prototype. - Both internal FF tooling and the AWS options were quite good.

heavyset_go 2y ago
> But overall I had a really great experience, there was a strong sense of “ownership” on the stuff we built due to how teams are expected to be run. We owned all the infrastructure ourselves, costs, QA, deployments, technical decisions, you name it. This is one of those terms that drive me nuts, because actual ownership implies revenue/profit sharing, decision making, and property rights. Sounds like you're getting all the responsibilities of ownership, but none of the tangible benefits.
- Olreich 2y ago
  Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product. I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.

ghaff 2y ago

I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?

varispeed 2y ago

Ask how much they pay and the itch will be gone in no time.

eranation 2y ago

Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance. The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.

shermantanktop 2y ago
K = Kilometrage? Kilometers-per-liter?
- eranation 2y ago
  Yep. The rest-of-the-world version of YMMV :)

Der_Einzige 2y ago

Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist. I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.

scarface_74 2y ago

None at all for most software engineers. For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212 Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career. Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health

aceshades 2y ago

speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though. 1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise. Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.

VirusNewbie 2y ago
You don’t get yearly refreshers?
- Barracoon 2y ago
  Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration. Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT. If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay. If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT. Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.
- Root_Denied 2y ago
  This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band. I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.

stackedinserter 2y ago

Money.

weezin 2y ago

> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others? It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.