I keep hearing such negativity about Amazon so I want to share my experience with others. The negativity on blind does not fully represent the company and certainly does not represent my personal experience. No I'm not a recruiter or manager. This is not a fake advertisement. I've been in amazon for near 10 years, promoted from SDE1 > SDE3. I'm being put up for principal, no idea how that will go. Been in 4 separate organizations. My WLB has been great. I've had many weeks where I work a solid 10 hours and slack off the rest of the time. Other times I feel motivated and will work the evening, all based on personal choice. At all points of my career I had big scope. I'm now at a point where I choose my own technology, languages and architecture for the team. I love functional object oriented languages so that's the route we've chosen. Lately we've moved to more AWS serverless solutions which have been fun to learn. About 80%+ of the time I am building new stuff. Rarely am I maintaining or integrating with legacy systems. I do tons of designs, design reviews and lots of mentorship. My comp rose from 105k when I started to 460k today. Partial stock growth and consistent high ratings. The people around me have been solid. Fun personalities, lots of drinking and outings. People making jokes left and right. Lots of talent. Many lunch buddies. Made many friends who I've worked with for many years. I once talked to Google and they couldn't match my comp. I considered Facebook but their tech stack didn't sound appealing. Netflix could be in my future, but as the saying goes if it ain't broke don't fix it. I have friends at Google getting stagnant from working on technology that has no clients. And a lazy team who expects people to do the minimum to get by. They are bored, stuck at their level because promos are hard and getting paid a lot less than me. Culture fit is everything. So for those who keep stereotyping amazon, remember you are getting your info from the people in toxic organizations, who don't understand how easy it is to leave these organizations. For those having a shitty time at amazon. Move fucking teams. Its not hard to do and there are many openings. Check tech survey and talk to devs on the team before joining. There are many good ones and few toxic ones. If attrition is high, management does get fired. Vote with your feet and stop complaining.
You’re speaking Blind blasphemy. You’re supposed to hate amazon. Why do you speak of such evil. PS: I have the same experience but every time I mention it I get accused of astroturfing. 🤷♂️
I have the same experience.
Same with me. I’m actually really missing amazon this week and considering going back. The culture definitely isn’t for everyone though so I get the complaints. Highly motivated and slightly aggressive personalities can do well there. I didn’t really consider it an aggressive personality while I was there but now that I’m not there I can definitely see it as aggressive in comparison to other companies. Other companies seem to give everyone a chance (time) to improve things however they think will work with no real repercussions if it’s wrong. At amazon you have to fight that your idea is the correct way to go before being allocated time for it. The result of the former is you have a bunch of low rate technology you’re working on with low operational burden until things go south. The latter means you have some well thought solutions with high ongoing operational burden. Neither is ideal but I’d prefer the latter because the operational burden is easier to fix than some software / service that just can’t scale any further. It also means that you know when things are going to fail and can plan for them well in advance.
Same here, been at amazon for awhile, unlike anything what is portrayed here
It doesn't smoke without fire. When the management has controversial leadership principles in the likes of frugality... a few apples are going to be rotten. Overtime the bad ones are going to proliferate and spoil the lot. These should be guidelines instead of commandments. This is the source of toxic culture. Incompetent managers are going to use this to save their ass. No engineer is bad. At the worst they are average. They are only as good as the manager who is capable.
Frugality is a controversial policy?
Apparently yes. It is the very source of burnout and PIP. https://us.teamblind.com/s/QGLtfVQu If there's one secret sauce for Bezos success it is 'ruthless operational efficiency' which stems from that very LP. And that's why my friend the culture is toxic!
"I love functional object oriented languages so that's the route we've chosen." Were there uh... any other criteria you considered?
Amazon is heavy jvm so choices are limited. Java, Scala or kotlin are really all we can choose in most situations.
Why your friend in google don’t move teams? It should be also easy
Interesting read. @albertoson, since you're a being put up for promotion to Principal, I was wondering whether you could help answer my question on this post about promotion to Principal: https://www.teamblind.com/post/qqzhfEH2
Responded
Why does Amazon has such a terrible reputation on blind? Just curious.
Because it’s not Google. People on Blind idolise Google.
People on Blind live in a bubble in that case and certainly does not represent people who are not in the top companies.
Survivorship Bias much ??
Wow - you haven’t maintained anything you’ve built ? And you picked a language because you “liked” it ?
I consider myself lucky as managers let me float and build critical path systems.
In my experience, SDE3+ will be providing direction through high level design and documentation, and SDE1/2 will be doing the maintenance.
AMA
Yesterday
2121
I have worked at TikTok US core tech for 3 years. AMA.
Tech Industry
Yesterday
2683
I do tech screens at Google. AMA
Cars
5h
282
Is it a good idea to buy BMW from non-BMW Dealers ?
India
7h
2147
Why is it so G*damn difficult to move money out of India
Cars
Yesterday
1410
Cyber truck killer: Chinese version of EV truck
Blue raspberry koolaid the way to go 👍
Take my advice and move teams. You'll thank me later.