2 Years at Amazon, 0 Achievement. How to Handle Interviews?
I joined Amazon 2 years ago fresh out of college as an SDE-1. Unfortunately, I am not a good fit. My skills (both technical and soft skills) were just not up to par, and only 3 months in the job I already had a gut feeling that I wouldn't succeed at Amazon. I was constantly filled with fear of getting fired. However, this is my first full-time job, and I was also concerned about my visa issues so I had no other option but to work harder and improve. I managed to drag out this experience to 2 years with the help of my manager who gave me chance after chance. However, for the past 2 years I have achieved 0 in my job. I know I deserve to be fired, and I am trying to prepare for interviews now. For the past 2 years, I have not delivered any meaningful project at all. Now I have nothing to list on my résumé, and I don't know what to say in behavioral interviews. I was never assigned any meaningful project. All I have done in my job is some trivial ops work -- renewing SSL certs, repurposing hosts, security patching, etc... , and don't think I can list them in my résumé, nor can I tell them in an interview. Now I feel like a huge fraud, having 2 years experience at Amazon but with 0 actual achievement. Can anyone offer me advice on what to do?
If your manager doesn’t trust you it might be part of why you didn’t get meaningful work. To keep in mind next time. You’re still in a good spot. Interview and put on the spin - also a skill - and you’ll be fine.
It's not that my manager doesn't trust me. It's me failing at earning his trust. I've built myself a poor track record of delivery.
The fact that you can even acknowledge that, is a great thing. Now try to be more critical, why did you build that poor track record? Are your peers performing better? If so, why? Why are you failing to deliver? Is it your technical knowledge? If it is then you should work on that, I’m sure Amazon provide some sort of e-learning for their engineers?
Join a startup. Fortunately for me I had 5 YOE before joining Amazon. I was surprised realizing many of the guys who came straight out of college to Amazon know very little about fundamental principles, patterns, and design. Amazon makes SDEs really good at doing SRE work.
thanks for sharing. how would joining a start up help? why not join another big company like google, fb?
You work on what’s necessary in a startup. Everyone is working on vital components. You also use the latest and greatest technology. At a behemoth like Amazon there’s a ton of fluff so you could spend your entire career in an ancillary team.
Keep cashing those Checks bro.
You definitely have meaningful work you've done in the past two years. You just have to do some thinking about the impact of your contributions, and articulate that impact to your interviewer. Just because you don't think you achieved much at Amazon, doesn't mean other employers will have the same opinion. If you're not able to salvage your career at Amazon (either by clean slate on a new team, or by understanding where your gaps are on your current team and taking steps towards improvement), I would focus heavily on LeetCode and constructing narratives of the work you did at Amazon so that behavioral questions are not a problem.
Dude that’s the story of most engineers. I am sure most Sde’s feel same. I too feel the same. But guess what ? Leet your way out. I jumped 🚢 with not much on my resume and now after jumping feel the same thing. So don’t worry, and try to add in value to the work you are doing. Think how has it helped your product as a whole. If you had not done that security patch then what would have happened. Try to qualify that and do some sugar coating. !! You will breeze through. For really system design stuff do grokking 😬
Did you write any tools? Any QA work? Any automation? Bug fixing? Bug investigation? You probably have a good understanding of AWS so that's something to work with. A software dev with a good understanding of operations is pretty useful. 2 years out of college is still pretty new. You've got tons of years left to figure out where you fit.
I actually have never used AWS, despite having worked here for 2 years. I know this is one of my main issues -- lack of interest in our own product. I've heard of EC2, S3 because my teammates have talked about them. That's about it! I have never even spun up a virtual machine on AWS.
🤦♂️EC2 is a VM...oh boy.
Oh look at this. An engineer that is self aware and doesnt blame the system for everything going wrong at work!
So if you say you achieved 0 in your job but then you list “All I have done in my job is some trivial ops work -- renewing SSL certs, repurposing hosts, security patching, etc...” t So why can’t you list them on you resume? Why can’t you tell someone in an interview what you did? Need to take a step back and take a moment to reflect. Then list out everything you have learned on the job. Next list out what you do on the job. When I say lost what you do, I really mean every little detail. No matter how stupid/useless this may seem. Ask yourself how many hosts was your team responsible for? Now the hard part, categorize your list of what you do and learned on the job. Stay high level. Renewing SSL certs list as “Managed SSL certs” etc. Will take effort but you aren’t as hopeless as you think.
Ask for intern mentorship, I actually felt I learnt a lot while helping the young interns, they have a different perspective.
Mentoring a poor intern who's desperate to do anything to get a return offer? No, this is not fair.
More than mentoring, the hardest part is convincing the bar raiser to hire the intern, it's as if all the intern's efforts boil down to that one meeting
You just described 50% of SDEs in the retail org, except that they won't admit it like you do.
I'm actually in AWS 😁
probably 80% of junior engineers at Amazon are in this situation?