I joined Amazon at the begining of this month. I was having a tough time landing a job and finally got Amazon’s offer was so happy for it. I always wanted to work in ML field but I landed in a front end team. As I had never ever worked for any company I didn’t complain about it and took front end as a challenge and began. I have been assigned a mentor who tells me what to do to get me started. I have recently started feeling so under confident that I felt like quiting the job. My mentor insults me for the questions I ask. He says I crack him up sometimes by my questions. Constantly make me feel overwhelmed by all the new things he has to say offcourse I cant digest everything he says and if I cross question I am being insulted. The fact that I cant reply back makes me helpless and make me feel slave as I have to continue working with this guy until I am part of the team. Someone please suggest me what should I do. I am having constant headaches because of all this he tries to put pressure on me by trying to mock me or insult me. He is a SDE2. I cant just quite because I am on OPT visa right now. Someone please help.
Welcome to amazon. If it makes you feel better your mentor hates his life as well.
And he gets same treatment from senior engineer.
This is too relatable.
Don't give in. There will always be such people around you no matter where you go - I'd say talk to your manager about it. You can run away from this problem, but you'll see it in a different form wherever you go. Have faith in yourself - you've earned a degree which I'm sure you worked hard for - this too shall pass.
+1 to what this person is saying. I have came across many such people in my career and now I have learned to ignore anything irrelevant anyone says. My current manager is like your mentor. Whatever he says shouldn’t change my career. I work, get experience, get paid, come back home to work on my dreams and ignore the rest around me.
Take his advice. Listen. Don’t get mad and grow. Don’t let him get to you. Soon you will be above him. Congrats on getting into Amazon.
Reality? Sounds like he can’t interact like a normal human.
Dump that useless mentor
Are you in Bay Area? Do you like to work on distributed systems or backend? DM me. And be honest with your mentor, tell your mentor that it’s your first time and you aren’t feeling good about the work. Use LP and get his ass PIPed. Talk to your manager.
How can I get him piped? I want to do that badly. I would love to work on ML if there are any positions around please let me know. I spoke to my manager but obviously I didn’t complain I just told him I am feeling under-confident under his guidance.
What did your manager say? Start throwing all the issues you find in his code, tickets at him. And SDEs at Amazon do not do a lot of ML. Those who do, do not actually develop Ml models, they either build infrastructure to support ML done by AS or they deploy those models in production. Most of what happens in ML comes from AS (Applied Scientists)
Get out of amzn asap obviously
You are not in a position to negotiate. Try to learn as much as you can and try to switch teams.
Welcome to the reality.