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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 on

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
  When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal documentation or the public one?
  - strivingtobe 2y ago
    Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.
    - hughesjj 2y ago
      ^ exactly, thanks for taking the answer perfectly. It's basically panel 2 from this: https://xkcd.com/568/ https://xkcd.com/568/ Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides. Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
    - heap_perms 2y ago
      This is Bezos talking about this: https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64 https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64
    - JonChesterfield 2y ago
      That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.
darth_avocado 2y ago
You forgot the PIP culture.
zzzbra 2y ago
This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.
HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago
NGL, that sounds like my ideal work environment. Except for the in-office part.
karmasimida 2y ago
Right, this is accurate. You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc. Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.
jp57 2y ago
My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues. When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets. During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win. Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.
- hypeatei 2y ago
  > We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy" What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.
  - goostavos 2y ago
    Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo. It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where everyone is left confused.
    - kevinventullo 2y ago
      Yet here we are talking about the person… they sound pretty influential to me. (I’m only half-joking)
  - jp57 2y ago
    Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business. And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?" My answer was, "All our stuff is working."
MuffinFlavored 2y ago
I've never worked at a company where total compensation for engineers was more than $250k To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...
- NBJack 2y ago
  It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around. Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then! Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate. And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great. FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
- ipaddr 2y ago
  The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills. It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
  - runamuck 2y ago
    "When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad." Thanks for this gem, this captures the culture in a nutshell.
wubrr 2y ago
> 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. So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.
amw-zero 2y ago
Levels.fyi puts L6 at Amazon at over $400k. That’s not worth it?
- notinmykernel 2y ago
  No
  - amw-zero 2y ago
    And why is that?
    - notinmykernel 2y ago
      For many, many people, (majority of programmers, really) morals don't have a price tag. That number could be anything. When you make a programmer choose between some number and customer damage, it becomes increasingly harder to damage the end-customer. This is known as "prioritizing customer obsession" over business function (which is what we're supposed to do). Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
      - scarface_74 2y ago
        This is definitely not true. If most programmers had morals, no one would work for Google, Meta or any of the pay to win game companies.
      - amw-zero 2y ago
        I thought they meant that it just wasn’t enough money. Of course there are more important factors to a job than just compensation.
    - TheKarateKid 2y ago
      For software engineering, I have heard stories from all around about the PIP culture due to an 8-12% mandatory URA quota. This results in gaslighting and forced firings to engineers that have a history of performing well. I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to. Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all. The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish." In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away. The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.
leetcrew 2y ago
eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs. if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means. I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.
- neofrommatrix 2y ago
  It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.

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
When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal documentation or the public one?
- strivingtobe 2y ago
  Neither, they're talking about the culture of writing documents as a form of sharing ideas. Where other companies might use powerpoint presentations or unstructured meetings to brainstorm on ideas, Amazon instead encourages people to write a document summarizing their thoughts, and then there is a meeting where people silently read and comment on the document, and then afterwards discuss it.
  - hughesjj 2y ago
    ^ exactly, thanks for taking the answer perfectly. It's basically panel 2 from this: https://xkcd.com/568/ https://xkcd.com/568/ Beyond the initial publication of the doc, the peer review process is much more sane than trying to review a bunch of power point slides. Similarly, it's much much easier to refer to a well written document when it comes time to implement or reevaluate an idea than going over some power point slides and maybe an associated recording, to say nothing about searchability, discoverability, and maintainability of an actual written document vs PowerPoint slides. Also, idle side speculation: I wonder how much (if any) one of the underappreciated early employees @ Amazon had a hand in proselytizing this, given she (MacKenzie) is an author.
  - heap_perms 2y ago
    This is Bezos talking about this: https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64 https://youtu.be/e47wAgIhZ7o?si=LKZxoabqrCSCQ1ki&t=64
  - JonChesterfield 2y ago
    That's an extremely sensible idea in multiple dimensions. It prioritises clarity of thought over rambling discussion in conference calls. I wonder if there's a feasible path to gradually steer an existing organisational structure in that direction.

darth_avocado 2y ago

You forgot the PIP culture.

zzzbra 2y ago

This sounds exactly like the team/culture that launched Marcus at Goldman Sachs. A lot of people went to Amazon from that team and seemed to indicate it was very much the same type of deal.

HeyLaughingBoy 2y ago

NGL, that sounds like my ideal work environment. Except for the in-office part.

karmasimida 2y ago

Right, this is accurate. You can't have a mentality of working on something forever in AWS, unless it is S3/RDS/EC2, those forever systems. People are fighting to create new codenames for new products, PRFAQ all the time, etc. Does this approach work? Maybe, but definitely at a cost. It creates many half-assed products that one acknowledgement away from turning off its life support. And many grifters and land grabbing attempts to create some glue services just to back on the hot new trends. Yes, I am talking about the AI stuff. It is embarrassing how little Amazon has to show for, while spending billions, all because the in fighting and internal sabotaging kills its chance before it can see the light of the day. Epic level failure if you ask me.

jp57 2y ago

My experience there (15 years ago) was that on-call was terrible because line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues. When I started I lucked into a situation where I was one engineer a "team" of two. We didn't have a manager and were reporting to the director of our department. He only had about an hour a week to meet with us. We spent a lot of time fixing broken stuff that we'd inherited (a task that I actually found kind of fun), and soon our ops load started going down. We eventually got another engineer and a manager who was willing to prioritize fixing the root causes of our on-call tickets. During black-friday-week of my second year there we had essentially no operational issues and spent our time brainstorming future work while we kept an eye our performance dashboards. We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy". Our manager called that a win. Even back then Amazon had the reputation for being a brutal place to work and for burning out engineers, but I rather liked it. I ultimately left because my wife hated living in Seattle.

hypeatei 2y ago
> We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy" What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.
- goostavos 2y ago
  Stuff like that can almost always be traced back to that senior being told to "be visible." Show up! Have opinion on things (loudly)! "Scale yourself!" Other mumbo jumbo. It often leads to these weird misguided drive-bys where everyone is left confused.
  - kevinventullo 2y ago
    Yet here we are talking about the person… they sound pretty influential to me. (I’m only half-joking)
- jp57 2y ago
  Well, he rolled up to the same director and was the most senior engineer under that director, so it was a little bit his business. And, like I said it was only semi scolded: he came to me and quietly said something like, "you guys don't seem very busy", which I took to mean "why are you loudly brainstorming future work when the guys in the next row of cubes over haven't slept in 36 hours?" My answer was, "All our stuff is working."

MuffinFlavored 2y ago

I've never worked at a company where total compensation for engineers was more than $250k To see "it's not worth it to make $420k as an L6 Amazon engineer" is super interesting https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-engineer?country=254 https://www.levels.fyi/companies/amazon/salaries/software-en...

NBJack 2y ago
It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around. Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then! Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate. And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great. FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!
ipaddr 2y ago
The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills. It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.
- runamuck 2y ago
  "When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad." Thanks for this gem, this captures the culture in a nutshell.

wubrr 2y ago

> 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. So fucking true. They also treat their employees like shit generally, and prefer to hire externally for higher level positions - causing existing engineers who are closely familiar with the systems to quit and replacing them with higher-paid new hires, who have no context or familiarity with the service/product in question. I worked there for a few years on some fairly important, foundational services, and it was incredible that they had almost no-one around who initially built these services... 50% of the job was oncall, 40% was reading and trying to understand huge amounts of undocumented code that no one was familiar with... I felt like I was back to working on legacy banking systems.

amw-zero 2y ago

Levels.fyi puts L6 at Amazon at over $400k. That’s not worth it?

notinmykernel 2y ago
No
- amw-zero 2y ago
  And why is that?
  - notinmykernel 2y ago
    For many, many people, (majority of programmers, really) morals don't have a price tag. That number could be anything. When you make a programmer choose between some number and customer damage, it becomes increasingly harder to damage the end-customer. This is known as "prioritizing customer obsession" over business function (which is what we're supposed to do). Please, everyone, if there has to be a choice, save us (civilization) not them (the CEOs). Please. Think critically.
    - scarface_74 2y ago
      This is definitely not true. If most programmers had morals, no one would work for Google, Meta or any of the pay to win game companies.
    - amw-zero 2y ago
      I thought they meant that it just wasn’t enough money. Of course there are more important factors to a job than just compensation.
  - TheKarateKid 2y ago
    For software engineering, I have heard stories from all around about the PIP culture due to an 8-12% mandatory URA quota. This results in gaslighting and forced firings to engineers that have a history of performing well. I personally know a SDM looking to leave now because he said he was basically told to fire one of his reports who was performing fine, or he would be the one fired. I've read stories of "hire to fire" where they hire ICs with the intention of letting them go in 6-12 months so another member of their team doesn't have to. Culture is self-serving, hunger games style. Management is cut-throat and not empathetic at all. The NYTimes did a big expose about the toxic culture of working at Amazon, and Bezos' public response was literally along the lines of "we move fast and know that our competitive culture is not for everyone. Our employees are up for the challenge and we are proud of what we accomplish." In fact, during the hiring boom in 2020-2022 their reputation of SWE ICs was so bad that they were having trouble hiring. Many (myself included) would receive 1-2 emails from different recruiters desperately trying to get us to apply. We all knew to stay away. The sad part is that many of the toxic managers and even ICs have infiltrated much more of FAANG (and big tech) and with the economic recession especially in tech, Amazon's cut-throat management styles like "performance culture" and PIP quotas have been happening in many other places now.

leetcrew 2y ago

eh, big company, many different opinions. working on stuff that's already built can be pretty chill. you spend a lot of time being hard blocked on approvals from external teams. no amount of extra hours can change that, and management generally understands. the downside is that promos are harder to find and there's a greater risk of some VP figuring out that your org doesn't really do anything useful. then it's time for the next round of musical chairs. if you're more ambitious and/or genuinely enjoy building things, new product teams are the place to be. you don't have to deal with approval hell so much, but the dates are more aggressive and managers will do anything to hit them. this is where you learn what "building the plane while flying it" means. I find people exaggerate how bad it is, but you definitely need to be good at reading the room to stick around.

neofrommatrix 2y ago
It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.