Amazon Hiring Ad! Take Risk, Growth or PIP

Saw this Amazon Ad today looking for risk takers! The risk they don’t mention is either you become TT (top talent) or you get the boot via PIP. As a software engineer in AWS for 1 year+ (and previously in Retail), I would strongly advise you to stay away from this company. - If you have job offers from equivalent companies e.g. MSFT, Google, FB, I think it’s a no brainer to reject Amazon. - If you do take Amazon’s offer, remember that your TC is stochastic based on wether they put you on URA (un regretted attrition at 6%) meaning that they fire 6% of the workforce regardless of the situation. This is true even during COVID. Every company has performance management, but here, the manager *has* to get rid of 6 percent (at organization level). So, even if you’re a low performer, your managers incentive is to nitpick you to death with flaws and get rid of you. - I would also recommend taking positions in retail over AWS as: 1. AWS has terrible work life balance especially if you’re on an operationally heavy product (e.g. S3 or some famous product that every one uses). Even for new products, you’ll be doing a lot of coding and be expected to spend after hours working. 2. From my experience, worse managers overall. Managers may be more technically inclined but they have near 0 EQ. I heard a story of a manager who puts a guy on focus and then asks them in the next 1:1 how the employee is doing on a “human level”! 3. In AWS, you would get the better resume booster and people will think that you’re smarter but it’s not actually true. The pay and the intelligence of engineers is consistent throughout the organization. It may seem like AWS does more, but that’s because everyone’s butt is on fire 🔥! 4. One thing I noticed is that the quality of code and design output by Amazon is quite shoddy even for major critical services everyone uses. There’s a constant rush to “be the first” out with a feature and that accrues a TON of technical debt, even in the new AWS products that I’ve worked on. Benefits of AWS: - What you get to do in AWS that you don’t get in retail is exposure to releasing the production code in many regions globally and dealing with larger scale. However, once you go through the process once or twice, it becomes tedious and banal with no new learnings. - Some benefits of Amazon are working with great engineers if you come from mid level company, working on large scale in a pseudo startup like sense of urgency. It also has a good culture of document writing and design (all of this so that you’re easily replaceable). - You get some of the combination (not all) of the benefits above in other major tech companies with less of the terrible management and pip. - Your manager can make or break your career here. If you have a good manager and a good skip, consider yourself extremely lucky and that Amazon is a good place to work for you. If not, it’s a miserable place to be in. You can always switch teams, but your manager can block it with “focus” which is basically preparing you to be fired. I joined Amazon because I didn’t interview anywhere else and thought it would be good resume booster. It was actually good when I was in retail. Moved to AWS, I now have a daily livestream on the massive attrition of senior talent and URA politics. Why did I write this? - I am looking to exit the company. When I joined it wasn’t as obvious how bad the company was. The ship is sinking significantly over my time here. - Also, let’s see if this triggers a HR Sev 1 and they come to delete the post! 🤣 Edit: Blind Tax. TC: 180K (fluctuates with stock) #engineering #software #swe #amazon #aws #new #hired