throwaway981211

Can’t see the article (paywall), but this isn’t a surprise. You have Democrat candidates open to or advocating for the notion of increasing taxes on the elite classes. For the rich, it’s a tiny investment to support the opposing candidate... not to mention the poor and uneducated classes who are convinced democrats only want to take their freedom and turn America into Venezuela.

On a personal note - with money supposedly being free speech, it’s absolutely critical we increase estate taxes, especially for billionaires. Personally I don’t want to live in a world where our opinions and politics are shaped by dynasties, whether that’s the Trumps, the Clintons, or anyone else.

I’m highly paid ($300K+), so before anyone says - I’m not trying to steal from anyone. But having a billionaire class that laws don’t apply to or that can essentially do whatever it wants makes no sense to me. It’s a bigger threat to democracy and freedom than any terrorist or religious extremists.

Is this the right way to hire? Not saying it’s wrong but I’ve taken a different approach which has generally worked out.

Even if I was hiring for a specific role (front end), I care less about familiarity with specific bundlers or frameworks and something more like - “Can this person problem solve and deal with varying levels of ambiguity? Do they seem capable of figuring something out without a ton of direction?”

I’m not sure what’s the point of your comment. As an American I’m also lucky that my country isn’t facing the issues innocent people in Syria, Iraq, etc face being caught in a civil war. I’m lucky we have vaccines, clean water, contracts, courts, cops, etc etc.

None of that excuses Boeing’s gross negligence and lack of accountability.

I’ve dumped them from my portfolio although I still - unfortunately - have exposure since they’re in the SP500.

At some point, I’m hoping heads roll at Boeing.

Using personal time to work for my employer instead of investing it in myself.

Recommendation systems.

At Google or FB you’d earn upwards of 300-400K in a senior role. I don’t think being on the shiny stuff t your previous company will help unless you’re known in the industry, as in you’re brought out as a Distinguished engineer or similar VP/ equivalent IC role - source: I interview at a FANG.

Somewhere between $150-160K.

My salary is $160K (that’s the max your salary can be at Amazon). The rest of my compensation (remaining ~$160k) is in restricted stock unit vests. I save 100% of that $160K after taxes. I max out my 401K from my salary. I also save 30-40% of each paycheck.

My husband and I don’t eat out 11 months of the year. The 12 month is a vacation where we travel within the US for a week vacation. Even then, we don’t go to expensive restaurants and will look for good deals... I mean my husband will open the McDonalds app on his phone to get a buy 1 get 1 Big Mac coupon. We don’t spend eating out... it is unhealthy and a bad habit.

We don’t have a car - so living in downtown Seattle, no expensive car tabs or parking. Also no fuel costs or car insurance payments. We paid off student loans and so there’s no debt. We pay for that with high rent ($2400/month excluding utilities).

Our only splurge is we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and we might get Disney’s new service. Our apartment is upscale (by our standard). Our furniture is nicer.

You called yourself a poor person - I’m sure you know this, but income is not a measure of wealth. We’ve built up some investments and liquid savings over the years, but I know coworkers from previous teams and other friends who earn just as much or more than us but also have $15K/month mortgages and are house broke or have expensive drinking or general spending habits where they end up saving practically nothing.

These numbers are self reported so I wouldn’t index on them that much - most numbers I see there for Amazon are on the higher end and give the appearance the higher end of the scale is the median... which is inaccurate given that some of the pay bands are pretty wide.

$320K at Amazon this year. I’m 32 and have been here 7 years.

You just wrote that I’m abusing customers and then say it’s not an attack.

S3 is blob storage. Dynamo is a key value store with support for additional indexes. Neither technologies are particularly novel today or provide specific features that would lock you in. You could use comparable technologies on Azure or Google Cloud. Like I said before, you can’t blame Amazon or any cloud provider for poor design/architecting on your end.

Your questions are written as sarcastic personal attacks, which you write instead of posting something of more substance. It seems like you’re just trying to incite a response from me aka trolling. I won’t engage with you anymore. Good luck.

Salaries are capped at $160 but salaries are a part of your total comp. Most of my compensation comes from stock not salary, and my salary is maxed.

You didn’t answer my question and deflected, only responding with personal attacks. Nice.

I still think that your notion of intentional vendor lock in is misinformed at best and poor design and architecting from your side (at worst). I do happen to work at Amazon but my post history will show you how critical I am of the company.

But nothing you’re saying is valid, and I don’t see any parallel here with the migration from Oracle. If you’ve used Oracle DB or have familiarity with its one off special “features”, there’s no parallel between that and using something like RDS or Dynamo. RDS is replaceable. Dynamo is a key value store first and foremost.

There are also enough third party abstractions that let provide you their own configuration and syntax for spinning up resources on AWS, Azure, GCP, etc or mix and match.

Amazons internal organizations all have slightly different culture, although there’s a core set of company values (Leadership Principles) that keep us bounded together.

Within Amazon, some places will absolutely grind engineers with nightmare on call rotations, untenable deadlines or deliverable dates, etc. but these things are part of any job depending on your company. What really sets Amazon apart is the brutal honesty - if you’re not performing or meeting someone’s expectation, regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it is - you will get called out, sometimes in front of colleagues.

Over time, you learn there’s ways of influencing people or motivating them to be at their best. One such way is running a cut throat organization where people end up blaming others to save themselves - sometimes because it is the other person who dropped the ball - other times because that’s how you preserve yourself.

As a business model, this actually works. Running a cut throat organization where people are terrified to go out of line out of fear of losing their jobs - it has worked at Amazon at scale.

But to be clear - not all of Amazon is like this. I’ve been lucky to bounce between really great teams during my 7 years at this company. I’ve had one bad manager who didn’t know how to manage and honestly wasn’t qualified for his role. I’ve met people who legitimately helped me grow and become a better engineer and mentor to others. I’ve gone through two promotions. I’m paid really well.

401K match is garbage but salaries are decent. I’d say we’ve gotten far more competitive in pay, and that’s not even counting the crazy stock appreciation over the past several years. In terms of overall benefits, we aren’t competitive - which makes sense considering Amazon isn’t a cash printing machine like FB or Google. We genuinely don’t have the money to spend unless Bezos was to deliberately sell $1 billion each year for Amazon corporate benefits. That itself is a fuzzy proposition - how do you give benefits to these corporate badges while squeezing warehouse workers? If you do something, it should benefit everyone.

How so? Op is correct - you shouldn’t be using the console to actively manage your infrastructure. The consoles primary purpose is to let you quickly spin up resources while you explore. If you have a real business use case, all your infrastructure should be defined in configuration and deployed out to AWS. That way, you always know what you need to spin up and it’s exact, specific configuration, all stored in source control.

What’s your problem domain? You shouldn’t be locked into AWS. No offense, but sounds like bad design or more generally, you or your engineers don’t know what they’re doing.

I work at Amazon. Ellisons assessment is trash meant to fool maybe Wall Street analysts, but as an engineer, his claims are laughable. In reality, database migrations are hard. Removing that factor entirely for a moment, engineers don’t want to work on lift and shift projects. They come to Amazon to build interesting shit. Now imagine database migrations are easy and your engineers love this work - well, now it turns out you’ve basically stopped real innovation in your organizations to do this operational work for cost savings.

I could go on... there are so many factors why it took Amazon a while to get off Oracle. Ellison is a heaping pile of dog shit fraudster. Before you dismiss me as being biased, look at my post history. I’m critical enough of Amazon.

You might hate the console or CLI tools, but people at Amazon have real data telling them the CX is good enough and their capital would be better spent investing in other features. Source: I work there. :P

I mean - I haven’t worked at any other large tech company so I don’t have any data point to make that claim.

I’m an engineer now at Amazon. I’ve been here 7 years. 5 years ago, our culture was far more toxic. More recently, some orgs are horrible places to work and others are much better. I don’t think we’re much worse than other companies. Our pay for engineers is less than Google and Facebook, as far as I know, but we beat other companies such as MSFT.

Amazon naturally attracts people who want to accomplish big things. It just happens that many of these folks are assholes.

Is Amazon predatory to its employees? Some organizations are - yeah absolutely. Are we worse than other companies I worked prior to Amazon? No. Does that mean it’s okay? No. I’m just saying there’s a public perception of Amazon being at the deepest level of hell and it’s not true.

We absolutely burn people out. We overwork employees. We don’t promote them when we should. We try to find the tiniest bit pick reasons not to promote. We practice stupidity and call it frugality? You’re an engineer making $200K total comp a year? Your computer doesn’t work and is crashing? Oh too bad - we won’t replace it for you. Yeah I mean that kind of fucking stupidity.

We encourage everyone to automate their role so we can replace those folks with college hires.

Amazon is not a place you can have a long career at. You’ll have to jump teams or orgs every couple years and eventually you’ll get tired enough that you learn to manage upwards yourself and stick with a manager that you can manage.

Can’t see the article (pay wall). Does it speak to artificial sweeteners? How bad are the two splendas I put in my coffee everyday?

I lived in Little Rock for high school and Norman, OK for college. How does KS compare? Shit you could not pay me enough to go back to Oklahoma or Arkansas.

In the grand scheme of things, even $200K is not a lot of money. I made record this year (~$320K), but I end up saving it all. Can I afford to buy a home? Absolutely. Will I buy a home? Absolutely not. Let’s say I purchase an $650K home outside Seattle and commute to work. I still have a huge mortgage weighing on my shoulders and I could get wiped out if my employer let me go. Just not worth the risk.

How does your total comp fare relative to Seattle? I’m living in downtown Seattle now working for Amazon. I’ve been here almost 8 years. My TC is north of $300K, but the mental strain this fucking company has had on me has me constantly on the edge. I’m thinking about leaving to join another FANG company or drop out of big tech all together.

What that article doesn’t capture is how many engineers absolutely burned out working against unreasonable deadlines and cut throat managers.

I’m specifically speaking to Amazon. Why did you turn this into a personal attack?

Throwaway account. I’ve been with Amazon as an engineer for about 7 years now. We call ourselves diverse but really all we have are Asian (Indian and Chinese) devs... in some engineering orgs, white people outside of management are a minority (although it’s not just white managers, there’s tons of Indian managers too).

We have very few black people in engineering roles. I don’t know a single black engineer at this company to be honest and I’ve been here 7 years and interface with lots of other teams.

I don’t think the Indian or Chinese devs get paid less. The one data point I do have (anecdotal) is that every Indian dev I’ve met is generally on a spectrum between unhappy to extremely unhappy, and they’re only in their role because it’s very difficult to find another company that will sponsor you. So you either keep your mouth shut or risk getting let go and have to leave the country:

Amazons work culture is pretty shitty in many orgs - very cut throat. I’ve never seen the more horrific examples from the NYTimes article years ago about people crying at their desks, but I’ve been in enough contentious meetings and have seen people purposely set up to fail by their managers so they could be managed out because politics.