> Lambda School to Launch New Backend Engineering Program, Jointly Developed with Amazon
https://lambdaschool.com/the-commons/lambda-school-launches-...
> Inspiration for the new backend program came from Amazon Technical Academy, which trains current, non-technical Amazon employees for software development engineering roles within the company. Amazon Technical Academy’s curriculum is based on the critical knowledge, skills, and attributes required to succeed as a software development engineer at Amazon, which Lambda’s program will cover in their entirety. Amazon Technical Academy is part of Amazon’s commitment to upskill 100,000 of its own employees by 2025.
Getting expensive to move to Seattle though
"Oh but they can just google the solution. Welcome aboard."
Amazon fails to understand that it is currently a worker’s market in software engineering so they are the ones who have to convince engineers to work there.
I get pinged by Amazon recruiters almost every week right now, and once I discovered the assessment was 2.5 hours during my last job search, I had trouble finding the time and energy to fit it in amongst all the other job search requirements I had to do.
Ended up getting so far along the process with 6 other companies that I just didn't bother to take it. Still ended up with a job offer with a 60% bump in pay and what seems like a better environment than Amazon would have been, without any threats to force me back into the office or needing to relocate.
Lots of equivalent paying companies in Canada now, yet alone USA.
None of this is a reflection of the value of unions from the employees' perspective. But it's important to realize that unions are one of the instances where the employees' and employers' interests are not aligned. So, emailing a recruiter and mentioning unions has only one possible outcome - none.
The interview was, and I hate to use this word, followed a template clearly put together by an MBA who went into middle management without any work experience, The two people to whom I talked showed the enthusiasm of a dead wet beaver while asking the questions. This was for a storage position that I've been doing for 20+ years at some of the biggest accounts all over the planet.
During the 2 hours, I got asked two very basic questions. Then a bunch of weird generic scenarios - what have you done that fits this scenario and how did you handle it.
About half way through the second interview I decided there's not enough money in the world, and decided to have fun with it. I tells ya what - I made up some of the most ridiculous obviously fake <and then vanilla ice walked into the meeting> stories ever. They sent me a rejection letter, just to ask me to interview for a similar position two months later. I asked their recruiter to read their employee reviews and only contact me again if they offer 7 figures. Been a year now - nothing. Maybe they got the hint.
Sorry about your bad experience though.
well, let me correct myself. for this sr position in storage, i was asked one question about storage. "what is the difference between object storage and file storage."
imagine you are interviewing to work as a mathematician. a sr level one, you walk in, and the ask you no math questions, except "what is the difference between multiplication and derivatives."
here is the issue i take with this completely undeveloped script: it tells you zero about someone's technical skills or abilities. this means the hiring criteria, for highly technical roles, might as well be what color car I drive. if this is what leadership uses to determine who is good during an interview, they're going to have useless, illogical, and bogus criteria for performance. and this means the job will be frustrating and will wear me out. oh look - that's what all the tech employees are saying about amazon on glassdoor.
"This interview has a simple three step format. There's no gotchas or narrow trivia here. I'll start by asking you technical questions about the work you say you did until I've gotten the information I need about that. Then there will be a few social questions. Lastly, I'll open it up for you to ask me anything you want about working here."
Doing this seems to help the people with social anxiety and/or autism. Setting specific concrete expectations right up front and then sticking to it really comforts people.
That part was particularly frustrating; often I couldn't think of anything relevant to the specific wording. At least you got a rejection letter, though. Multiple interviews over >1 day and I had to log in to the Amazon Jobs account to see my application's status had changed to "no longer under consideration".
Jeff Bezos recently stepped down as CEO. Google tells me that happened July 5th of this year, a few months ago.
He founded the company. It's essentially under new management for the first time ever.
I don't think you can infer much from this incident. There are too many unusual factors at play and we don't have an established track record for what the "new normal" (post Bezos) will be for Amazon.
Jeff accepted it like, "Oh well." You could tell he couldn't care less.
But Andy Jassy looked ashen. I think his becoming CEO was the reason Amazon changed course. If Jeff had stayed, he would have let HR decide the policy for the entire company, and it would have been disastrous for AWS.
I am just envious at how developed your tech scene is.
It isn't being picky, it is employees having actual worth and choice. Employees can "pick" the pay, conditions, and benefits that suite them best: In this case moving out of one of the highest housing cost areas in the country.
Turns out sometimes not only is the grass greener but it's much better tasting as well.
Ironically the place I left announced a "developers can work from home forever" policy a couple of months ago (after they'd lost 7 out of 9 senior devs off their 9 teams - the attrition rate wasn't much lower for non-seniors).
They are so fucked it's not even funny - literally decades of accumulated domain/business knowledge walked out the door.
This is not possible everywhere.
I realize a fair number of people can't do that or, commonly in my experience, feel that they can't do that but it's not actually impossible if that's what you prioritize.
To be explicit, there's nothing being sacrificed. People leaving their jobs because they don't want to go to an office are finding new jobs that pay the same amount or even more. They're not giving up anything.
Europeans work to live. Americas live to work.
So you may as well come over and get a share of the spoils
The recruiter was great, super nice, got me all organized for a full-day loop. They gave me some things to prepare, so I did. Admittedly, I was under-qualified for the job as a fresh grad but was assured that'd be fine.
Still, the entire team made it abundantly clear how much I was apparently wasting their time even being in the room with each of them as they took turns throughout the day talking to me.
Felt so unbelievably toxic, and even though this was in the early 00s, I have never even considered working there since.
I contrast that with another FAANG interview I had, where you had lunch on campus and they tried to leave a positive impression.
- 4 straight hours inside a room
- every hour the interviewer changed
- got asked the same questions over and over again
I was quite upset that I didn't pass... couple weeks later I was not, what a shitty experience it was.
- every hour the interviewer changed
- got asked the same questions over and over again"
It's the same in UK, at least they standardised it!
All that is moot now because of covid.
The current job I'm at was like 5-6h of interviews, it was hard to pass, but it didn't feel like the interviewers were trying to play "good cop, bad cop"
They blitzed him with leadership questions and were “not inclined”. Incredibly dumb given their current situation. He’s not even bad on those dimensions, they just can’t get pretty off topic imo.
A recruiter call doesn't mean a company has interest in a candidate. It just means the Amazon job description and your resume both included the word JAVA.
And considering their current controversies, my opinion on working for them has not changed.
If they ever contacted me again, I'd probably just laugh.
He even suggested that it would be totally okay if I was one of those people that wanted to study for a month or two before interviewing. Study?! For a job interview?
It was a weird experience. I normally shun recruiters, but I was just curious enough to hear what this guy had to say. His LinkedIn profile didn't indicate any past involvement with recruiting, so I wanted to know why a senior manager would spend time recruiting random people -- he must spend every waking hour on these calls.
My Facebook interview was weird also, but the people were super nice and the coding problems were fairly easy. I failed on distributed systems architecture, oddly enough, as it was an area I had no experience in for a senior hire (but I got an offer from Google the same day I was rejected from Facebook, so I didn't have much time to be sad about it).
But managers recruiting random people, just seems weird to me. If they wanted me for my specific skill set, that would be great! But if they were just looking for general hires, they must have lost a bet or something.
Neither of us get any attention from “good” companies whatsoever, but we both at least got a handful of messages from Amazon recruiters. They seem desperate. I didn’t bother pursuing as a little research showed they wouldn’t offer enough for me to relocate anyway. I’m not a fan of the FAANG hiring/placement and would probably not engage Amazon on that unless they could offer me a particularly enticing role, at least not now. Am I missing out on money? yeah probably.
The most interesting thing though, was how robotic the recruiter felt. The messages I got felt more like some mass automated messages than someone reaching out to speak to me about open roles.
They seem to have a lot of recruiters and I'm surprised if this even got you off their "contact every month" list.
People seem to forget that outside of the supermega metro areas the typical downtown/financial districts are basically dead.
Before working in tech I lived in mostly small and medium sized cities. The downtowns were always packed, and usually the artists were local, but as much as I hear "artists and musicians" brought up with respect to a cities value, they don't lure people in. It's just a bonus. What does is good schools, affordable home prices, stable jobs, and a decent economy.
How long ago? If you compare downtown Seattle to downtown Seattle 10 years ago, it was much better back then. Things changed quickly this decade, I wouldn't be surprised if the places you left packed are struggling today.
Seattle in general isn't struggling at all, it grew 25% this decade and the housing market...but downtown has a huge hill to climb in going to back to a fun place to visit on the weekend.
But when I tell my son Seattle center used to have arcades and a roller coaster, he doesn’t believe me. Or when I talk about sending my great aunt and uncle off back to Alaska on the ferry at the water front (the Alaska marine highway used to start at Seattle rather than Bellingham).
If I'm reading it right, the problem you're calling out is that it is unaffordable to live in a downtown metro after it reaches a certain density. People still think they can hack together solutions by subsidizing housing, rent control, applying grants, etc but I'm more of the mind that there's probably a max size to a city, where once you hit a threshold it either takes a nosedive into poverty or becomes so unsustainably expensive that it chases out what desirable things may have existed there in the first place.
I don't know where you got that. Affordability downtown isn't really what is keeping people away (and it is not like rental buildings have lots of vacancies, nor are close to downtown condos, towhomes, and SFHs difficult to sell), but retail and restaurant choices have been decimated over the last decade, it isn't thriving from the point of view of someone going there to do things.
The homeless factor can't be understated in Seattle, especially with all the encampments downtown. I worked at 3rd and Pine McDonalds in the mid-90s, and for as bad as it was back then, it is ten times worse today.
So at least as far as its peers in the PNW, Seattle isn't very much of an outlier. Well, unless we can compare to other Seattle-area cities like Bellevue, which can simply push most of the homeless problem onto Seattle.
The city is trying to move people into housing but there's a lot of mental health and addiction problems that make many people resist the outreach support.
Sounds very dependent on what stage of life you're in. I can see how people who are already looking to start a family would want the things you mentioned, but for those of us who haven't married yet, good options to socialise and meet people are a prerequisite before we even start to think about schools and buying homes.
Just the other day I visited Capitol Hill around 15th Avenue and an entire park is full of tents, and a person defecated in an alley by Kaiser Permanente in broad daylight. Reminded me of Tenderloin district...
Feels like the city is going downhill - especially if you have family I'd stay away
The question really comes down to how much downtown real estate is paid off or under mortgage, which basically depends on how recently it was sold to a new owner.
Anything under a mortgage will be subject to a CMBS that was valued based on the worth of renting out the units in the building. These will have terms setup such that if the owner lowers the rent, they will be required to pay an additional down payment to cover the lost value in the mortgage's collateral (the building) from the now lower rents.
CMBS's will be invested in by multiple investors at different risk levels, creating different incentives on modifying or maintaining the collateral requirements, and anywhere from 50% to 75% of the investors will have to agree to any changes to the loan terms.
In short, some landlords downtown are bound by terms forbidding them from lowering rents without having to pay a huge capital expense for the privilege to do so.
The lack of downtown workers going into offices. Effectively there is no one working near those restaurants.
The folks I know who work there were almost entirely all prepared to quit if the company forced their initial "everyone back in the office" requirement, especially in this current job market.
It feels rare to see Amazon ever make a change to such a publicly stated policy like this, I can only imagine that the groundswell of feedback from employees was quite startling in how much of a problem their retention would be with such a hard rule.