Joined as a new SDE recently, not sure if that’s how Amazon works in general or is it my team or am being targeted for being new. Unnecessary review comments, highlights, stupid emails etc... Came from another FAANG so quite shocked with this culture. Anybody else having similar experience ?
Have not had that experience, nor one similar to the previous comment.
You must be new. Less than 1 yr I presume
About a year, but work with several 2’s and 3’s that have been around a few years, and they’ve not spoken about these problems. It’s almost like a company the size of amazon offers different experiences. Idk
Same here, was doenleveled and fooled for early promotion
Same here. A team member told me once that you gotta "earn" respect at Amazon and he was dead serious. I almost laughed out loud. Quite a few wannabes here who assess their abilities and value based on Amazon stock prices.
Should respect beyond a certain level be given freely? Should we respect everyone equally even if some contribute more than others?
No, but we should be able to assess what our abilities are independent of our association to an institution. Plus, if things are good for us, we start to believe all is fair, just, and objective. The point of my post was not that I crave respect and was bitter about not getting it (I wasnt) but rather that some people have a misconception that they are better than they actually are just because they have been at Amazon for a few years. It was certainly not a generalization.
Its like this in Amazon. I had pretty bad experience with my first team. I moved to a different team right after I crossed one year mark. I used to count each and every day when 1 year would be over. I had to force myself to go to office, motivation was all time low. My manager was a big a..hole. He had his favorites, all the good work use to go to them. One day, I was carpooling with SDE3 and he mentioned that they need more people to complete ongoing project. Next day I went to my manager that I would like to work on this project, do you think I can work on something. His outrightly said no, and assigned me a low priority bug. All this favorites were ready for SDE2 promotion in first year itself. It was pretty horrible.
One part of the SDM role is to identify and promote talent. What you describe seems normal except your use of the word favorite. How do you know that they are favored unfairly? Do you know their work history, past accomplishments, strengths etc? What makes you better than them and do you have data points for those? Did you deliver a high impact project? Influence other engineers in the right path? Improved operational excellence for the team? Remove blockers and mentor others? Are you doing those things much better than others? A lot of new engineers complain about code review comments. But did you examine why those comments were made? Can you defend your code against the reviewers and make a logical argument without escalation? If you can’t convince peers that those comments are wrong or unnecessary how can you influence other managers, teams, directors, etc.? If you can’t change their mind are you disagreeing and committing?
Had a build engineer that's also an SDE. He rejected all idea he does not like, for whatever reason. Later we discovered he had secretly build something as a surprise for promo so any incompatible idea was rejected in CR.
Yes. Why do you think people leave with that stock price? Had 3 1:1 in two years. The asshole always declined my 1:1. He has favorites. Promoted them over me. Attributed my projects to them. Whenever any one of my project was being a little bit success, I was removed and his fav would get the credit.
Yup, this does not sound out of ordinary for Amazon.
What do you recommend? I just joined. Should I start looking out for again? Also I see even SDEs behaving like shit.