What this means is that in four years, despite glowing reviews every year and a promotion, I never got a meaningful raise/bonus/stock grant, because the stock was doing so well. My W2 income went up, but it was completely unrelated to my performance -- I could have done just enough to not get fired and would have made essentially the same amount. People who performed worse than me were regularly given larger stock grants.
It was super demoralizing to figure that out. Big part of the reason I left.
Equity vesting was low for the first year, but they gave me a (cash) signing bonus that made up for it. Pretty much one-to-one based on the starting value of the equity, and it paid out monthly instead of waiting until the end of the year.
The cafes were awesome and the prices there were decent. I was paid more than enough to buy my own lunch. Catered food is a cute perk, but it's hardly critical.
I don't drink soda, but they had free coffee and tea. Tea is my drink of choice, so I was happy. Soda is bad for you anyway. ;)
They did have free "snacks" if you count breakfast cereal. Which many people would grab a cup full of as a snack (there were no bowls, oddly enough). There were a mountain of breakfast cereal boxes on every floor near the kitchen. But yes, they also had paid snack machines.
The oncall routines were terrible, though, I agree. Luckily I was in a strange situation and was able to avoid them.
Our team was far better, technically speaking, than what you describe. Everyone was a pretty awesome developer, including my manager, who was really awesome overall. Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop. We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
And I think the latter really makes the difference. There are 20,000 people working at Amazon, according to the article. When you scale that big, some corners of the org are going to suck, and some will be better.
I may someday return to Amazon, now that they have an office near me in Colorado. But I'm still working on the game that I put on hold while I worked at Amazon, and I need to finish it before I reattach the golden handcuffs.
I've been in many teams and I can agree there are many strong developers.
> Developers went home at night; no one was being driven as if in a sweatshop.
Maybe not like sweatshops, but I've met many tenths of people that left because of the constant pressure to deliver combined with the oncall duties. Once I witnessed a whole team disappearing in a short time.
> We had game nights and played board games. Periodic team dinners (that were awesome!). It was a blast.
We too, but phrased like this makes it sounds like Amazon is a relaxed and laid-back company. Far from it.
Amazon is strict about a lot of things, but as far as workload -- well, I'm quite a fast developer, and I almost always was way ahead of the curve in getting things done. Very low stress for me.
Big reason I quit is that I was bored, in fact. Despite asking for more work. Despite taking on random extra team projects to create tooling to improve source control processes. And writing tools that were used elsewhere in the company. Etc. etc.
I would think that Amazon of all places would automate anything they could.
I have repeatedly heard these stories about Amazon -- it is one of the known-bad places to work, unless you have found a truly special situation.
Keep in mind this is only compared to other tech employers. It's fine compared to games companies, non-tech companies that won't value your work, and most jobs if you're not privileged enough to be a software developer.
Being a software developer isn't a privilege, it's a choice.
* Access to educational opportunities as a child (the "easy" path to developing the right brain structures software engineers need)
* Lacking the first point, the extreme amount of time and the tolerance for the effort involved in "learning how to think" as an adult.
* The free time to learn to become a software engineer.
* Ideally the money to get a CS degree or equivalent.
* Raw aptitude. Some people are genuinely not cut out for it.
No doubt the path to career success is easier for those with parents who made an a collection of smart decisions, as well having made past smart choices.
If I must accept this definition of 'privilege', then we can simply call all outcomes in our life to be a direct result of the amount of 'privilege' we have.
Personally I reject this broad definition of privilege as it strips away peoples need to accept the fact that at the end of the day, they have the ability to make their own choices and develop their own self discipline.
There are world class developers who have arisen from 3rd world country level educations, there are elite athletes in third world countries who have self-coached their way to olympic level performance. Class mobility exists, and stripping away personal responsibility via the process of redefining language does not help anyone except for those who wish to just continue their life without critical introspection.
At the core, this is a political argument hidden under the shroud of being a linguistics argument.
You can accept this definition without reducing your entire life to a preordained path. There’s middle ground where you can accept that some portion of your life was your choice, but the rest of it was due to circumstances you were raised in or had no choice in. Nobody is suggesting you didn’t work hard to get where you are, but it’d also be crazy to pretend that the white child born to rich engineers has the same path as a poor person of color who had to help work at a young age to support their single mother and siblings.
It is all automated. To the point of paging you when an alarm goes off. But when the alarms go off, someone has to figure out how to fix the problem. Apparently some newer developers dug into the problem, they were able to fix it so that things were Much More Sane.
On our particular team, the server guys had just set too many alarms without really:
a) Documenting exactly why a particular alarm was potentially bad
b) Documenting what to do when a particular alarm went off
c) Really thinking about alarm thresholds -- frequently alarms were going off just because a client was using the product
The hell of oncall for our team was that we were the client team. We knew nothing about the server side. So if someone on our team was oncall and got paged, they'd basically have to call someone on the server team at 3am or whenever anyway because WTF is this stupid alarm?!
I had the Weirdest Commute Ever [1], though, and was as a side effect exempt.
[1] I live in Colorado. Amazon send me an offer to be an employee that allowed me to work from home ... but not in Colorado, because sales tax. So I rented a house on the edge of Kansas (3 hour drive), worked M-W, 12 hours/day, and drove home for the weekends. I couldn't do any work in Colorado or Amazon would risk having to pay sales tax on all purchases from Colorado. So QED I couldn't be oncall. Amazon has offices here now, so I could work for them without the weird commute. But as I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, I'm currently obsessing over finishing a game.
the conspirator in me thinks maybe he figured out its better to hire lots and fire lots churn/burn em out. amazon is always having those hire-events where you go like cattle to get filtered for a likely bad job b/c you won't appear all that selective to them.
Principal, maybe, but SDE3 is a position you can be easily hired into with enough experience. As a promo it's a bitch, though, and absolutely not worth it. Jump ships for something level equivalent at a company with better comp and get promoted there.
I say this having stuck it out at Amazon for SDE3 before jumping ship. My only regret is that I stayed too long.
When I say I should've left sooner it's because for all the effort put into it I ended up taking a substantial pay raise and a level drop when I finally did leave five months later (and went through a much lighter weight promo process shortly after joining my new gig that I would've been able to pursue regardless). It's possible the promo put me in a better negotiating position, but given that I didn't disclose my current compensation during negotiation I can't say that with any confidence.
> - Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
I haven no equity in my company or opportunity to get any.
> - Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
I don't think my company offers any relocation packages (I could be wrong on that) but even so this policy doesn't strike me as completely crazy.
> - 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
My vesting schedule only vests after 6 years (with 20 percent vesting every year after the first). It's not great but on average it's not the worst AFAICT.
> - No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself
> - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
Both of these... We have nothing like it at all, I'd kill for a "shitty cafe". We have coffee and that's about it. This comment comes of as extremely spoiled to me.
> - Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
My job doesn't include being on call but I work with people who are, I don't fully understand what this bit is talking about. Are you woken up just to be told your "shift" is starting or is this just referencing being woken up because there is a problem? Cause that's kind of the definition of being on call....
Maybe I'm just naive and stupid to think my job is good (every job could be better of course) but from where I'm sitting 90% of your comment comes off as entitled and spoiled and it colors the rest of it.
To answer your question about being woke up in the middle of the night, there is no such thing as a "shift". Most of us are expected to work at the very least 60 hour work weeks (no additional pay, everyone is salaried), with many jobs beings 'always on', extending our work into nights and weekends with take home laptops. A typical (though not universal) day at Amazon is like follows:
- Wake up and open laptop to check emails and get some work in.
- Shower, eat, etc. before going into work.
- Work until around 7-8pm.
- Come home and eat, then open up laptop to work (maybe with the tv on in the background) up until going to bed.
Waking hours are pretty much consumed by work, and on weekends a lot of people will do a couple hours here and there and between other things, to stay current with issues.
If people in SV look like they're asking for a lot or getting upset over petty things, it's because of the sheer soul sucking amount of work that's being imposed on them. Small conveniences like a catered cafe makes the difference in helping them work through it.
When you say "check emails", can you describe the typical task that would be assigned to employee?
I ask because it all seems very vague as to what the employees actually do. Are they all software engineers? Customer service? Which ones are overworked?
You can work less than 60 hours, but it will show in your output, as deadlines are aggressive and set tops down.
Examples of the kind of thing someone is answering emails in the early morning for is bugs discovered in your code, a regression that's failing, or something found that's blocking another coworkers' progress (since they were working late into the night as well).
Without specifics it's much harder to get a grasp of the issue and nearly impossible for someone who already isn't a part of that culture/workforce.
> these types of statements have cost people their jobs in the past
I'm able to appreciate that, but this is why we're on the internet, and anonymity should be theirs and your personal responsibility and no one elses.
It's not so much the type of work, but other factors like volume, availability and perceived engagement. Even if you were capable of getting done in 20 hours what takes 60 hours for someone else you'd be expected to be available to help the team or respond to issues. Often times, in these types of environments you'll be expected to reply to issues quickly, respond to managers/leads if there's a question and these will arise at any moment within those 60 work hours, because even though you finished "your tasks" the team is still working to finish theirs and you're expected to be around "adding value".
As regards to the "checks emails", the task can literally be anything: a question regarding code, a response to an inquiry, a prompt for a decision on some topic, or a request for information that's needed ASAP. I've seen organizations that track the time taken to get a reply to these emails and they keep track in Excel sheets the average response time from individuals and their number of responses.
For example, I've also seen people get reported to management for taking a nap during their lunch break, even though they had finished their assigned task. The details of the tasks become irrelevant in those types of toxic environments.
Why be offended by an offer? It's just an offer. Counter or just say "no".
Being offended is a waste of time.
I am curious how they can retain people to manage all of their operations. Those terms sound terrible and not competitive. I would take those terms, but I am desperate. Why would others.
Interested to know if you(others) took terms out of naivete, need, broken promises/misrepresentation, career or skill boost, ect.
Tl;dr seems like a lot of good engineers work there, but many recount horrific exp.
They retain people because not every team is like what you read in the news. There are teams with completely normal on-calls who love their life and job and are far from upset with anything that has to do with work. Free food isn't a deal breaker when you make what companies like Amazon pay.
It's not a scientific study but I don't need scientific accuracy in order to get a pretty clear idea where I would or would not want to work.
If that was the sum of it, you'd expect to hear just as much bad stuff about Microsoft, Google, Apple, and so forth. That doesn't seem to be happening at the moment.
People also don't particularly want to read a story from a happy engineer at a big company either.
Additionally, the unhappy person who has an axe to grind is likely to go out of his way to publicize it, talk to reporters about it or write comments on the Internet about it. Happy employees are less likely to go out of their way to comment on the experience, and what they have to say is less notable on average.
Also, where do you get a 50% of engineers leave before 2y?
I'm on a team I like, work with people I get along with and have hours that are good (<=40) except around launches.
2 years after college, I make enough (~160k total comp, a bit over 100k salary) for money to not really be a motivating factor.
When I first got to amazon, I fully expected to jump ship within 6 months and move somewhere else. I stayed because I liked the people and the work was fine. If my team culture changes and I don't like it, I'll look external and internal then leave.
I've never personally seen any of the horrorshow stuff I hear about Amazon. I've worked with people who have, and mostly they just moved to other parts of the company. It's a big place.
I stay because I like it. I've turned down offers for more money in order to remain, because my job is satisfying, challenging, and balanced with my non-work life. I go home at 5 PM every day, get paged only occasionally, have a mandate to automate and stabilize my services that is at LEAST as high-priority as features or launches.
In short, the opposite of some of these complaints.
It's almost like there's nuance to be found here!
> You may find that you got extremely lucky in where you first landed.
I have 3 other teams with previous coworkers who are currently having good experiences that I can go to if this one goes south.
Yes there are a lot of teams that burn people out. I'm not blind. But there are also a number of us that have resisted the amazon way and try to actually be human.
This last sentence was such a stark contrast with the rest of your comments above, that it almost feels like a slip or a that meme with a guy blinking an S-O-S signal with his eyes.
The company is trying to change the culture and frankly, have done some mind blowing things. No one would have ever though paternity leave would be a thing 5 years ago. Or that part time work would ever be discussed. But there is a long, long way to go and a lot of senior peoples attitudes need to be changed before I'd call the culture here awesome.
But that's the thing though. Your team is not being discussed, but the entire company is. And if it feels to you that it's your team that's swimming against the current, then maybe there's a lot of truth to the general perception of the whole company.
That's sad that people work there. How many billions does Jeff have again? Oh yeah, $61.7 billion dollars.
I only know that for most of the devs, it is fine. It's not perfect, I'm not even sure I'd tell people that it's great. But for people that have a good team? It's fine and the quality of people makes up for it. If I didn't like my team I would have left a long time ago.
I decided to not go back, but in the end having Amazon on my resume (even as an internship, as I'm relatively young) was basically a free pass to interview anywhere else I wanted. I'd say it was a shitty experience while I was there, but net positive in the long run if only because of Amazon's klout.
"clout" :)
How do you know? Based on what they sell through AWS? This is not super evident - they might have duct taped bunch of shitty stuff and rely on people on-call 24x7 to keep system running.
On the plus side, hiring people out of there after a year is usually pretty easy.
Citation needed.
I think it depends on what part of Amazon you're working for. From what I understand, Amazon.com is not run on AWS.
Is this weird? I only know of one or two coworkers who knows how to write bash scripts..
Despite almost knowing no bash, I was hired as an SDE1 at Amazon so your story adds up though!
I would be very surprised if an engineer working primarily in windows couldn't write a .bat/powershell script
Never had to write a script, whatever for?
If I need to automate something, I use a GNU Makefile, or Python. That way it works on Unix as well as on Windows...
Why is it weird? I've been working with UNIX systems for more than 20 years, somewhat of a Vim expert and I don't think I can write a bash script. Never needed to. Sure I can modify .bash_profile and I can read bash scripts but writing them to do something useful? Nope. I'd use something like Perl or awk instead. The only time I ever wrote any kind of shell script on my memory was a tcsh (csh?) one in the 90s because the box didn't have any scripting languages installed.
I work mostly in node.js these days, and will have others on windows or mac, and deploys to linux. A node script is usually safer for me, and I'm far more proficient... shell.js, mz and babel-cli makes it easier to do task scripts for automation. ymmv though.
It I had to write a bash script without the benefit of google, I'd totally fail.
This seems totally out of place to me. You have to pay for your own food, who cares? That's the way it is for pretty much everybody.
In any case, dragging relocation out over two years feels wrong to me given that relocation is binary. I suppose in effect they are using it as a way to attach strings to a signing bonus.
>>> they're just very much weighted to the employer's beliefs
That's no excuse. Hitting someone weaker than you is not "very much weighted to your beliefs".
They did not make me an offer, which is just as well as I would have declined. I doubt I did a great job of sounding interested past the 15 minute mark, which is really out of character for me.
Now to address some of your points, tech must be a different animal. I'll tell you about my benefits since I really like that HN is a place to really get some transparency, and probably by design, there isn't a lot of Fortune 500, non-tech firm representation here. So you can stop reading if you aren't curious, but for those that are, here goes.
I work in finance tech, but with a large, somewhat oldschool company, not a startup. I recently became a (junior) officer of this company. Comparatively, I don't think Amazon sounds all that bad in terms of the fringe items. For instance:
- I don't even get a free cup of coffee here - the cafeteria is pretty good, but not cheap
- Most people here don't get equity. We do have an employee stock purchase benefit that lets you buy at a discount with a reasonable holding period (90 days or 6 months, can't remember). For those that do have what I'd call retention incentives (either cash or stock), our vesting period starts at 3 years. This is separate from our bonus, which varies by level (and all levels get something), but vests when deposit hits your account
- Our 401k match is comparatively better. We match 1:1 up to 5%, and then I think we kick in roughly the same as a defined contribution, since we no longer offer a pension. So 10% in "free" retirement money each year. I believe matching begins on day 1 and vests immediately
- Tuition reimbursement is a funny thing. I haven't tried our benefit here since I'm done with school. However, I've been around my industry, which is heavily concentrated in the Fortune 500. Most companies offer 5-6k a year, and they all try their best never to pay it. At one company, who I won't name, I was told that my degree was not related to my job, so no benefit. Great, but the policy makes no mention of that, and the recruiter certainly doesn't undersell the benefit
- Oncall sucks. I've avoided it since I manage backend financial/data engineering processes, nothing customer-facing. I've covered myself as much as I've delegated, though, it's only fair
- Relocation was I think a year, and they covered everything - packing, moving, transporting our 3rd car, etc. Package is based on level and some other factors. As an employee now, though, I don't think there's ever any repayment period for internal relocation. They just cover it, and from what I hear, it's pretty comprehensive
I realize I'm not entry level, but the above applies to everyone here, except where noted. I used to think we don't pay Amazon salaries, but a peek at Glassdoor says that Amazon doesn't really pay that well, particularly for the cost of living around the HQ.
- Equity vesting schedule is 5%, 15%, 40%, 40% over 4 years
- Relocation package is prorated for TWO years. If you leave after staying for a full year, you still need to return 50% of it.
- 401K matching only vests after working for 3 years. If you leave within 3 years, no matching for you whatsoever.
- No tuition reimbursement. Want to get a part-time masters in CS? Pay it yourself! - No catered food. No free soda. No free snacks. If you are hungry, you can eat at one of the shltty cafes.
- Obnoxious oncall routines. You are woken up 3:30am waiting for the event to be over. Why not automate things? Because replacing people is cheaper than building great software!
This is Amazon's mindset TOPDOWN. The root of the problem is that the leadership does NOT care about employees or technology. This is a retailer and a powdered Walmart, what do you expect?!
SDE 1 and SDE 2 are simply the slaves working at a sweatshop. Some of my co-workers are hired without onsite interviews. They do some video chat and they are hired at Amazon. They don't even know how to write bash scripts. Our team used to have technical program managers who can't even write a Python script. With simple things like running a command line tool, he cuts a ticket and let the engineers do it.
The managers at Amazon pocket bonuses and don't give a damn. They don't carry pagers and when they do, they just page lower level employees. The only reason people take offers at Amazon is that they can't get better packages from Facebook/Google.
* I worked at AWS for 2 years.