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 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.