The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5. Those different expectations is what caused him to have a very bad experience.
If the company thinks its applications are important enough that it needs people around 24/7 to work on them then the company should hire enough people to have 3 shifts a day.
I didn't move forward to an interview, this was just from a meet-and-greet they did a few months ago (they do it every month IIRC). I have other reasons for not being at all interested in working for Amazon, but I figured it would be interesting to meet with them informally anyway.
There's a huge difference between being responsible for (some level of) ops and literally climbing out of bed when the pager rings. At work, I'm responsible for the operations of the services I develop, which means that I'm doing third level support during normal business hours and I write the playbooks that first/second level support executes. You certainly won't catch me working after 5 PM.
I'm a pretty heavy sleeper, and would go to bed with my phone on silent, set to ring a long time before going to answerphone, and with my Apple Watch on my wrist. If my phone rang then my watch would buzz me awake, eventually. The only snag was if, in my sleep, I knocked the watch out of contact enough that it locked and wouldn’t buzz on calls, but in practice I was lucky enough that I never got a call when that happened.
Not that I was called often. The company had developers around the world so it was only if they needed some specific knowledge or skills. That meant that being on-call was mostly a fee to compensate for being available at short notice and not drinking, etc.
Ultimately they decided they weren’t getting enough calls to justify the cost of paying the on-call fees and scrapped the system, just relying upon whichever developers around the world were working.
I then started wearing headphones to bed so that I would hear the phone ring and not disturb them, but when you're rolling out of bed and hopping on a call at 3AM it's difficult.
What I seriously underestimated was the strain that being on-call can put on a relationship, it's a massive regret.
Yes, these expectations should be made clear from the beginning.
I suspect they don't as they would be even more desperate to hire.
To add to this, in my time there I worked during the weekend 3 times (i don’t count oncall here). My work day included 8 hours at most. I would get in at around 8AM and leave at 4PM. (optimizing the commute)
I started as an SDE 2 by the time I left I was a Principal SDE.
Do good work, be in a good org.
Amazon is not a huge, homogeneous entity. It’s more like hundreds of small companies that are forced to work together, bound together by senior leadership.
Why wouldn't you count it? Do those days not-count somehow?
So, don't you think that, in the context of having to give up nights and weekends, you should mention on-call? Your choice or not, the weekends and nights are affected, in fact isn't it kind of worse when it's not your choice?
i also think there is a huge difference between being oncall and having to respond in case something breaks vs mandatory death marches all day, every day.
to give you an example. the team i was in at amazon had 3000 tickets in the queue when i started. anything except sev2s were basically ignored. lower severity tickets would escalate when shit hit the fan. i advocated for fixing classes of issues instead of myopically focusing on one-offs. by the time i left the queue was tens tickets and mostly feature request or higher level investigations.
to give you another example: i would basically remove all alerting that was not actionable. the worst possible thing that you can do is wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to do anything. i would ask for runbooks and the test was “if i take a developer from another team and put them oncall can they function independently 95% of the time”. i would think about what the experience of being oncall was (ie you don’t take people and throw them in the deep end of the pool and wonder why they drown)
so i guess what i’m saying is that oncall for me wasn’t that bad or stressful. it sucks having to be near a computer but I was rarely paged for stuff that broke or needed to be fixed right NOW. (once stabilized our team had 1 sev2 every other week)
our team had 7 people and at some point we started sharing the oncall load with a sister team (ie you were oncall for the services on both teams), meaning that you would be oncall roughly once every 3 months. not ideal - but not the worst thing in the world.
also, the incentives and their structure play a part in how this unfolds.
It’s also very curious to me that only a certain type of person runs into situations like these: either they don’t know better or they have accepted the conditioning that work is more important than themselves. it’s sad really.
i think it’s really really important to have a good mentor with a strong set of values to help you navigate the corporate landscape.
i also think it’s important to pull a Ghandi (ie be the change you want to see) as often as possible. for example: one think i would inoculate in young devs is that it’s not acceptable to set meetings earlier than 9am or later than 4pm. meetings during lunch were not accepted. i would be pretty vocal about morons that worked over the weekend because they had some free time. i would also push really hard against management that had their sick little practices to extract more work out of the drones. this mostly worked because i got the job done - but again: you have a voice. you are NOT a machine
How many promotions was that? 4? How did you manage to do that in 7 years? That doesn’t sound easy at all.
My friends and I spent most of our lives since grade 9 doing school stuff or stuff to get into school stuff. In my case, couple that with introversion and an aversion to most normal activities and the easiest thing to do is be good at the get into school stuff.
In university, most of my social activities revolved around the startup world, hackathons, or other competition-oriented activities as that is what I was good at. I went to one hackathon a weekend in my final academic year.
So I became good at a lot of these types of things which all revolved around the academic world.
I am not in university anymore, but I can still fill my time with the kinds of competitions and challenges in that world. If I couldn't, I doubt that I would know how to use my time. Even with those, I spend a ton of time commenting online.
Most of the people I know are in the same kind of boat. They were good at one or two things (might be science fair, research, conference organizing, etc) back in university which consumed their time. Then they left and are now left wondering, "now what?"
Like taking up some challenges in life. Besides maintaining physical fitness and getting tired in the process, one thing I like is to create contraptions (does not have to be a "product") that could be useful to you or people you know. An air purifier, a charging station for a phone, a piece of wooden furniture, or anything else. Get some tools and get working.
If you prefer social activity, plan to do the above with a friend.
Then you ssh in and work to fill the hole. Now I don’t even get to see my co-workers.
Very sad when you think about it. Wasted potential.
Eh, you leave the university environment of all its clubs, hackathons, etc, likely to another city where you know far fewer people. You need to wake up the next morning, so gaming until 5AM with your friends no longer works. Someone is also on on-call, so they can't join, so you postpose it further.
The end result is a lot more free time.
Nobody shamed Chopin for spending his life in front of the piano. Some people choose to dedicate their lives to one single thing, and often those are the people who end up contributing the most.
And maybe, just maybe, universally acclaimed musical geniuses are not a good point of comparison for common folk.
The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do.
I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that.
I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I just need to switch to my remote desktop.
I have colleagues and friends who will log in on weekends or evenings out of boredom to do work. No pressure to do it, but they just want something to do.
I fill my time with internet commenting and various online contests, but if they need help at 9PM, I am fine with jumping on the VPN to help and have done that a few times myself.
Amazon still has problems beyond the long hours and the 3AM calls, but there are people ok with those things or at least ok enough with them to not put up a fuss.