I friend of mine who works at Amazon told me that it is pretty normal for a manager to say that this week / month is a “crunch time”. And it is not just his team, the other team also knows this terms which tells me it is on a company level. Is that true? Do you guys work for free on evenings and weekends on a regular basis? My experience: more than 12 years of work experience, worked at Google, Microsoft, different countries, never had it. One company once offered to work on holidays with the double pay. Some people came, some didn’t, it was your choice. I am considering Amazon, very interesting company for me, but it scared the shit out of me. Please share your experience.
Sounds like region build in AWS
I live in an apartment building near Amazon. Many Amazon employees live in this building. I see them coming home, with their amazon badges on and wearing their amazon backpacks, late at night and on weekends. This happens pretty much consistently throughout the year.
True. It really depends on if your team has a deadline or not. Some may say that good engineers should plan ahead, be upfront about schedule and push back, but that’s bullshit. Amazon is day 1000 now. A lot of decisions come from the top “leadership”. Pushing back won’t do you any good.
For a company like Amazon, those people are often right, many a times crunch time happens simply because engineering team (especially sdms and senior/lead engineers) failed to set right expectations of the amount of work involved and how long it can be reasonably completed by. So instead of admitting they were wrong and suffering what comes from that, they force everyone to plow through to hide their mistake.
Perhaps the CEO isn't the best with the ladies... I guess I could agree with that
^ probably thought he was hot shit and didn't listen to his manager or play nicely with his team
You went from Google to Microsoft and now considering Amazon? Why’d you leave Google? And why leave Microsoft now? Serious question.
While it's correct to push back on deadlines that are not realitistic, sometimes you just have to hustle and get things out of the door. I know that this can be hard, so a good team will keep this to a minimal. For retail, it's probably once every q3, for AWS it's probably before reInvent. It's pretty much part of the deliver results culture in the company, and i think also part of the reason why we are so good at delivering lots of stuff. We may not always deliver the best stuff (tension with insist on the highest standards here), but we can't over index the other way too.
For AWS it’s also every new region, which is many times a year.
This is exactly how they get overtime out of you: they set you up with crunch time based on completely fabricated deadlines, knowing you’ll likely miss it. And when you do it affects your job review.
Don’t take my word for it: ask your manager what exactly causes crunch time. You’ll did more often than not they don’t have an answer. And they won’t because the deadline isn’t real.
Sounds like the kind of thing that would result from having a junior manager that doesn't know when to tell higher management when their deadlines are underwater.