amzn-throw

12 ms·

61.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
I've worked at Amazon for 10 years on 3 AWS teams and 1 Retail team. The most I ever worked was on a project a couple of months before re:invent when I did 60 hour weeks. The rest of the time, it was mostly about 45-50 hours/week.
62.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
You said a lot of things in your first 2 paragraphs but at no point did you say "And then we hired women at a lower bar than we hired men" "Women would fail interviews and be passed to the next stages anyway." sounds lik
63.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Goals != Quotas. This is frequently misunderstood by people outside these companies (and frequently by people inside them too without integrity). You're supposed to meet goals without compromising on integrity or quality. e.g. you can&
64.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Do you really think that all it takes to operate an elasticsearch instance is to white-label an equivalent ec2 instance and execute some shell scripts on it? If that were true, people wouldn't pay for it...
65.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
Usually services like this start with one 2-pizza team. Then, as the scale increases, and the number of features increase, so do the number of teams. Lambda and CloudWatch are both a couple hundred people which wouldn't be surprising o
66.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> Well, a team of amazing engineers in Romania did. I have no personal insight into the matter, but it seems like they operate relatively independently from the AWS profit machine. Amazon and AWS is a massive multinational corporation wi
67.
by amzn-throw 5y ago
> they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could. I know this is a popular narrative, but as someone who works on AWS, I think you would be shocked by how small the individual dev teams are that build
68.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
The Borg thing is pure marketing. Amazon also has been running internally on containers for years before ECS. But workloads for massive FAANG companies designed by FAANG engineers turn out to be quite different than most AWS/GCP custom
69.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
Yes, and so their "staff" engineers stay Sr. Engineers. Isn't that the same point I made?
70.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
alv is a role model to so many inside Amazon, because 1) His internal tech talks are fun, peculiar, and make complex concepts easy to understand 2) His contributions go far beyond "Just S3" - though that would be enough. His low l
71.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
Principals at Amazon are 1.8% of the SDE population, so no, the comparison to "Staff" engineer is unfounded.
72.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
Amazon asks senior engineers MORE leadership/behavioural questions. But no, you don't need to memorize the leadership principles themselves, and your individual stories can't highlight ALL the leadership principles. Some of t
73.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
You should read the descriptions[1] of those leadership principles, not just the titles. They're not what you think. Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit is specifically about NOT being a jerk who digs his heels in, and sabotages project
74.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
This was developed internally by the Orchestration organization - that builds Step Functions and maintains AWS Simple Workflow [1], or have you forgotten the original AWS workflow system :) I don't think of Glue as a generic workflow s
75.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
From reading Blind, total comp ranges for a Sr. SDE (~10-15% of the company) is 250-400k In what world is that "just ok"?
76.
by amzn-throw 6y ago
I'm not going to be popular by saying this, but Amazon and AWS thrive at every single one of these. The only one that I know is not universal is "Healthy oncall".
77.
by amzn-throw 7y ago
Why do you think Amazon has stopped shipping everything but essentials? It's not because they don't think people don't want all these things stuck at home.. Its because the entire warehouse process has been turned inside out
78.
by amzn-throw 7y ago
AWS here. This varies wildly by team and doesn't match my experience at all. I've been on 3 teams over 6 years in 3 locations (though none in US so maybe this is why? #AmericaNo) on aws and retail. I don't know anyone that wo
79.
by amzn-throw 8y ago
Depends on what you mean by mostly. Almost all code runs on EC2. All object storage is in S3. Almost all service asynchronous interactions are decoupled via SQS. Almost all notifications are shared via SNS. Yes, most legacy systems use Sabl
80.
by amzn-throw 8y ago
There is a comment above you from an Amazon Principal Engineer: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=jcrites His profile says "Architect and cofounder of Simple Email Service. Creator of Cloud Desktop, a cloud-based de
81.
by amzn-throw 8y ago
> backed by a team surely comprised of at least hundreds of top Amazon engineers, was so slow and inaccurate. You'd be surprised. Many many AWS services are launched by a single 2-pizza team (8-10 developers). It's in Amazon&#x
82.
by amzn-throw 9y ago
It sounds like you're not happy in your org. Which is unfortunate, but a lot of what you said doesn't resonate with me. * The hiring freeze is nothing unusual - ask any yellow (>5 years) or red (>10 years) badge - We grow fa
83.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
They are.
84.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Also Amazon SDE for 4 years in 3 different offices. Nothing but great things to say. The recent HackerNews Amazon hate-train has been a huge bummer and mostly does not reflect reality.
85.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
We'll have to agree to disagree. I think implement a string builder is a GREAT interview question. The point is to have a discussion. Why? What are the benefits of a string builder? When is it necessary? What performance characteristic
86.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Sure. But I've been on 3 different Amazon teams in 3 different offices. I've never experienced this (though I have experienced a bad manager, micromanagent was not their issue)
87.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Yes to all that, internal pressure from the SDE community. Except the onsites for interns - Interns in the US sometimes get only multiple phone screens - it's been like that for a while. I think they had some issues with cheating which
88.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Many are doing it - see the rest of this thread. Anyways the difference here is HR/recruitment was too "ambitious". The SDEs have found out and we have put a stop to it.
89.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
They pay them what the market dictates. Unfortunately these jobs are less than a decade away from being completely automated away. This is sad but is not Amazons fault. The people of the western world need to demand Universal Basic Income.
90.
by amzn-throw 10y ago
Amazon SDE. I know this was not the primary point of your post but I need to respond to "It seems too corporate and too micromanaged a place to work". There are many legitimate criticisms of Amazon work culture. It is aggressive.

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