I hate working at Amazon/AWS to my core. Been here for two years as L4 dev with absolutely no sign of moving to L5. Moved teams after my first year since previous manager was the worst possible human you can imagine. He was a nano-manager, insulted me in every one on one meeting and called my past projects a joke and nothing more than silly high school projects. He was always high on LP kool-aid. To add to this, the operational load was literally 24x7 wherein I've spent many nights and weekends getting paged and escalating tickets and losing my sleep. I am surprised how many people outside Amazon can't even remotely relate to the ops load inside and think I am exaggerating. The attrition was way too high in this team. My second team is however far better with better people, better culture and better oncall load and schedules. The manager is also really nice. However I am still not happy because of the work. Each day it's more of testing or mending some broken script and tool. And trust me, things break here all the time because all the code is held together with duct tape. The real work in my team is left to the senior devs who have complete monopoly and the work they consider not worth their time comes down to me like writing tests for their patches, manual tests, deploying their code and other non-computer science work. There is a moderate amount of attrition. Looking back I feel I have just wasted two years of my life doing worthless shit and I am truly panicking. I fear I might be put in focus and get PIPed soon because I have nothing to show for. I am still waiting for the opportunity of a real project to have some weight to my resume. Meanwhile my friends at other companies seem happy and moving forward in their lives. They don't understand the situation I am in and think I am just overreacting. I don't know how I'll be able to switch companies without any worthwhile projects for last two years. Who wants to hire someone who has only written some tests or escalated tickets for two years?????? I seriously am not considering FAANG companies because they just seem outta my reach especially N and G. G just makes it impossible to get in with their dynamic programming interviews. I am tired of spending weekends doing endless leetcode. And F and Apple are basically Amazon part two. I have started making a list of other companies that I could apply to. What are the companies (not OCI please) that I can safely apply to and hope for a better work life balance with good technical growth and hope to keep my mental health ? Amazon/AWS USA Summary of answers below 1. Microsoft/Azure - No 2. Linkedin - Yes 3. Adobe - Yes 4. Bloomberg - Yes 5. Salesforce - Maybe, mixed reviews 6. SAP - Maybe #software #swe
Definitely Microsoft. You can't have it all though - don't say you want high TC, WLB, and fast promo.
God help me then , My virtual on-site is in a couple of hours with Amazon for L5
How'd you do?
Bombed the system design interview real bad. Everything else went well. Iโm too big of a moron in Sys design
dude you have the same thoughts as mine
Bloomberg. Great WLB, comparable comp, NYC (if you want).
+1 to this. I was similar to OP. Happy to leave. Bbg actually gave a small raise and I was happy to move to NYC as well
Microsoft salesforce Adobe, fintech has great wlb like visa, mastercard if u Wana consider. The market is full, get out from there
FB ๐
op: you're not crazy and it's not your fault. just in case some shithead comes to this thread to tell you it's not that bad and you just suck. it's not you. it really is this bad.
So you didn't learn a lot like they promised? Anyway I think there's plenty of material for you to embellish your resume with. Really draw from your experience and you'll do well in interviews too. Good luck!
The only reason for Amazon is it should give good learning. Else change even if pay is less. It's not worth it
Sounds like a tough situation. I worked on products that were straight up trash for 2 yrs before FB but made them sound good in the resume. When you're applying, I'd recommend adding some embellishments. Instead of saying "patched sr. eng's code" you can say "found critical issue in sr. eng's code and mitigated by doing xyz, reducing resource usage by 20%" or something like that. You have enough knowledge about what the sr. engs are doing, I'm sure you can speak about at least some parts of their work as if it were your own
Salesforce
Are you serious? Please don't kid me. I am truly seeking help.
Yes, much better wlb, decent TC, better managers and culture, and almost no on-call.