1. As with any other big company, it depends on your manager. I've had good managers my whole time at Amazon, so I've been a happy camper. If I continue to have good managers (they do change often), I could see myself staying for a long time. I like working at Amazon. With a good manager, you may never even have to think about the whole 6% thing.
2. If you get bored here, it's your fault. Amazon's active in so, so many disciplines and I've had many otherwise satisfied teammates leave our team because there was another exciting team doing something they'd never touched but wanted to get into. These are the kinds of moves you'd have incredible difficulty making when jumping from one company to another ("you're a game developer? why on earth should we think you'd be good at <pretty unrelated thing>?!"), but inside Amazon, these moves are possible, and the possibilities are pretty exciting.
In my experience the biggest factor in job satisfaction is the manager. A good manager can create a great work environment even with stack ranking. A terrible manager can kill morale regardless of company policy.
I like Amazon culture. Managers are mostly experienced and well-trained.
Startups vary a lot. Could be amazing but also terrible. Some of my startup managers were comically bad. I suspect this was because they were inexperienced. It’s like the difference between parenting your first child versus parenting the third child.
True, there are other companies on par or better than Amazon on many different metrics. Many of them are at least as hard to get into as Amazon though.
If my choices are Amazon, or a bunch of lesser known, less prestigious, or lesser paying companies, I'd take the shot at Amazon and do whatever possible to last at least a year so I could put that Amazon name on my resume for future prospects.
If you're the kind of rockstar ninja wizard that can glean multiple offers from all sorts of top tech companies, then ignore all of the above.
I don't disagree with your assessment, but this illustrates just how broken the software labor market is. If you'd work in a dumpster fire culture as a capable developer just for resume padding to open doors, something is wrong with software labor and hiring (which, there's a lot wrong, this is but one more example of how perverse the market is).
A lesser known, less prestigious, and lower pay position shouldn't effect your future opportunities if the market is really selecting on talent that it claims it is. Now if your lesser known/prestigious location happens to have you doing CRUD work circa 2000, then sure, but that's definitely not the case for a lot of places that simply can't pay the rates Amazon can afford to pay.
Companies that can’t afford to pay FAANG wages, typically don’t have FAANG productivity levels. Productivity in software is closely tied to how effective the technology and processes are. Most of those factors are fairly portable across companies.
So, I would say that an engineer working at a high total comp firm is likely acquiring more valuable human capital. Not always, but it’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If a company can afford to pay engineers $300k, they’re probably doing something right, in a way the company who pays $75k isn't.
I don't know of any theoretical reason that would be true nor see any evidence of that in practice.
Sure, other fangs have similar internal politics nightmares - but Amazon seems to be consistently the worst.
Plus there are lots of smaller companies that are as prestigious within the valley as Amazon. I mean, if you had to hire someone, would you really consider ex-Amazon superior to Uber, Snapchat, Microsoft, some random startup, etc.?
If I were hiring someone I might actually discriminate against Amazon because I'd be afraid of absorbing some of their culture.
But "random startups" that no one knows about? Probably preferable to have Amazon.
I would imagine it isn't common, though I could certainly be wrong.
The FAANG engineers that I know personally all seem to have cracked FAANG with a lot of difficulty, and claim that odds are they would fail if they had to re-interview for the same position.
You gotta chill a bit. Your intelligence doesn't determine your self worth.
- you aren't defined by who your employer is - your intelligence isn't defined by who your employer is - you can't control what other people say or think about you - you're worth a hell of a lot more than what you do or what you make per year (emotionally, intellectually, spiritually) - life is random, do the best you can and don't hurt yourself doing so
At the risk of sounding morbid, we're all just apes on a flying rock trying to figure out what existence means to us. Reach out if you need help, there's nothing wrong with that.
Stay safe my friend.
I would say the bar is pretty much the same for all FANGs. If you were able to pass Amazon you could have passed Facebook or Apple. I see people that apply to multiple FANGS tend to pass some of them. Once you put in the work to learn those exercises (which is a lot, don't get me wrong), failing them or passing them becomes a matter of luck (the right set of exercises, the right interviewer).
As to how this translates to intelligence - I personally don't care if a candidate is able to pass a FANG interview or not (I've seen plenty of bad employees who were FANGs or ex-FANGs and plenty of geniuses as well), but I definitely will think of them as being driven individuals who achieved what they set up to do.
Incidentally the best employees who made a difference in the companies I've worked at were, incidentally, never ex-FANGs, just talented individuals who decided to put in the work.
I don't know, I failed Facebook several times and never got an interview at Apple. Getting an interview at most companies isn't that hard, but with Amazon on the resume I'm out of the game for companies like top trading firms and Stripe, Airbnb etc. I think I simply don't have the intelligence to do so. I'm sure some people have the ability to get offers after doing thousands of leetcode problems but I've never met them - everyone I know that's successful has only done a handful and passed their interviews without any trouble.
I've put in the work, but I've gotten nothing out of it. It's hard not to be discouraged by that.
Amazon is probably a better name to have on your resume than the vast majority of other companies out there. I'd imagine you'd instantly be considered higher at first glance than someone with say, JP Morgan, or Lockheed Martin, or IBM, or any number of no-name startups on their resume.
I don't think this is a helpful stereotype. I know lots of these people and they're quite normal. "Rockstar ninja wizard" makes these jobs sound a lot more unattainable than they really are.
So someone who can get offers from multiple FAANGs is someone that I would seriously consider to be on a whole another level, i.e. a wizard, for lack of a better term.
It's the professional equivalent of "being good at taking multiple choice exams". But just because someone got 100s on every biology exam in high school doesn't mean they are an expert in biology, just that they are a good test taker.
If you want to look up to someone because they are actually a good engineer, then that's great. But don't look up to someone just because they are a good test taker. And don't look down on yourself just because you are a bad test taker. Taking tests has so little relevance to how good you actually are as an engineer. Amazon is chock-full of completely mediocre engineers, and also rejects plenty of actual engineering wizards.
The horror stories here are about folks who were doing just fine for months and months, but then end up with a new manager or their manager has a sudden change of mood, and wham, performance improvement plan.
No one likes to be blindsided. I wish more companies would take an honest approach and come up with mutually beneficial exit-plans with employees that aren't a good fit. I suppose that's not feasible in a company of such size and with such growth?
If management hire the wrong people they will likely fire the wrong people too. In my opinion it is better to keep apparent low performers around since it is so hard to rate programmers in a fair non game-able way. Especially from the managers' viewpoint where they don't work side by side with someone.