Let me give you some of my experience at both places, I might be biased and you may not be able to relate to these, that’s fine, these are my personal experiences anyways...so.. Amazon: Pros: - Customer obsession is real, this helps you understand business better and keep the priorities straight. Benefits/comp: you get free banana, starbucks coffee, that’s it. Pay is competitive due to stock growth, so unless stock tanks, this won’t be huge issue. Seattle has great restaurants around offices, which is sometimes better than free food that you don’t like. Cons: - Oncall: horrible in most AWS teams, and some retail teams. This takes heavy toll on personal life. I can’t imagine having a family and being oncall. The pager can go off at night (multiple times), and you will have to respond within 5/10 minutes otherwise it escalates upto VP (happens often). - PIP: very real, you see teammates being fired all the time, some for performance reasons other for not getting along with managers. If you put your head down, and are a yes man obeying every command from manager, delivering on time, you would be fine (this was me). - Culture/Politics: - cut throat culture, you will be fine as new grad when you have fewer family responsibilities, but will suck as a family person. - Backstabbing is rampant, people go behind your back all the time. No one is your friend here. If you go around asking help too much, even as new team member, be ready to receive negative feedback. - Work hungry people will be ready to snatch work from you, so need to carefully pick good projects. People who are less vocal will be picked for bad projects. Managers also assign good projects to top performing employees only. - Need to grow thick skin, people criticize very openly, to the extent that design reviews get embarrassing. You will get feedback around spelling, grammar, doc structure, etc. These things are important, but you are judged a lot for these. If your written communication is good, you’re good. - Engineering culture: - Very top down, and focus is on “deliver results” quickly. Unless you’re sde3+, be ready to take orders from seniors. You will have very little say in what projects you can work on, or getting your ideas any traction. - The tools are way behind other companies, they are forcing everyone to migrate to native aws, with some of tools half baked, creates operational hell. - Operational load is very high, due to poor quality of software, typically results in 30-40% of your time. Engineers maintain production systems, and lot of time you are setting up release pipelines, resolving version set conflics, spinning up new aws region, estimating/requesting hardware, productionizing new micro-service etc. ========== Google: Pros: - Wlb: Feel more in control, you can coast or work hard, and will be accordingly compensated. Never feel the pressure to continuously exceeding performance. This is great if you have family/kids responsibilities. - Nice people: - I didn’t realize how harsh people were at Amazon. People care for you, managers actually encourage to take leaves, and carer leaves. Google in general care a lot about people. No one bats an eye when you take mental health day off, take sick leave, go on vacation etc. - Engineering culture: - Nothing comes close in the industry. Very bottom up, heaven for engineers. This can sometimes be frustrating for PMs. - Benefits: - Guaranteed refreshers, great paternity/maternity leaves, free food, 401k match, etc. During covid, there is 12 weeks free leave for parents on top of your vacations. No operational work: SRE are responsible for maintaining prod, and they have created tools to automate most realese/rollout process. They are also responsible for handling customer facing issues before escalating to swe (which rarely happens, most of the time rollback will fix). Cons: - Charity: Too much leeway for coasters, and people get around for long time without doing much, with past reputation (most coasters have worked hard at some point). This sometimes makes you wonder what’s the point of working harder. - Promotion: Promos are tenure based, in addition to impact and functional skills. This can get frustrating, especially if you were down leveled or changed teams. - Lack of accountability: Getting work done cross team is extremely hard. Projects keep getting delayed and put on to next quarter all the time, without much repercussions. - Lack of customer obsession: Making perfectly engineered product is more valued than the customer focused product. This is due to promo driven development. Edit: - Yoe 4 at Amazon, 2.5 at Google TC: Amazon: ~$275k due to stock growth, Google $300k + $50k joining bonus; Now at $365k including refreshers and ~$475k including stock appreciation (will hit cliff after 4 years, even with promo to L5). Edit#2: Got multiple messages for interview prep, there are ton of useful threads on blind here: -Check out this post! "Google L5, Netflix & Twitter offers | AMA (Software Engineering)" https://us.teamblind.com/s/w481kuQh - Check out this post! "THANK YOU Blind! Got offers from everywhere I got to the final rounds for! (Tech Industry)" https://us.teamblind.com/s/dy6B5Eyp - Check out this post! "Google offer | Thank you Blind | AMA (Tech Industry)" https://us.teamblind.com/s/rCUrEZE4
I disagree with the top down part. The whole OP planning forces teams to make their own charter. I have not seen a better ground up approach anywhere. Google might let you work on whatever project you want to but most such projects fail. As for politics, like to hear your perspective. Personally I haven't yet worked in a company or any group of more than 3 ppl where politics didn't exist. It's human nature, people are ambitious or lazy or both and that will always lead to politics. Is it different in Google?
At Amzon, it’s hunger games due to forced pip quota, so you’re incentivized to bring others down. At Google 1-2% people get lowest rating, and even fewer PIPs. Most top performers are blind to these issues, and other things like managers playing favoritism, but is a real challenge for people in bottom half. Amazon is great for certain personalities and top performers, I am guessing you are one. Amazon is not necessarily bad, but definitely a bad culture fit for lot of people.
Top down for mandates like migration to naws, ticket score stuff in retail, pipeline scores, cr scores. Essentially everything in retail is being tracked now and is looked at top down. They have metrics and dashboards on everything.
Very well written. Been here a few months and I can feel all of those pros and cons
stay tuned, lol
added
I didn’t accept an L6 offer from Amazon! Their offer was nowhere close to other FAANGs or what I currently make.
Tbf, L6+ is where it starts getting better 😜
Actually it is L7+. L6 are still screwed. Like the worst position in Amazon are SDE2, SDM, and SDE3s in that order. The worst actually is an internally promoted SDE3 because he's still earning barely 300K TC.
100% agreed
Honestly Amazon is full of incompetent managers. It's a managers' paradise.
Worked at Expedia before. I heard a recruiter became senior director of engineering there in 3-4 years.
Suggestion: write the whole post in a text file tgen when ready publish. I'm sorry you had operational pain in your amazon time. I was in 3 orgs in 5 years and did not feel these. Was interested in your google take but oh well.
added google section
Amazon is a nightmare
I was at Amazon. My manager was the stupidest piece of shit I have ever seen. For any bug/on-call/even new requests, he simply used to tell the devs, you should have anticipated it earlier and gave us no time to develop anything. I mean, it became bad to the extent, that even if an earthquake would happen, he would have ended up saying why couldn't we predict it earlier. The team fucked his connection scores, he was trying to suck up to his own boss to get promo, but his boss got a guy from his past company and gave him promo, and fucked our manager citing poor connection ratings. Karma always comes around.
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Where’s the Google run down?
Will add on the next potty round
It may be the con part :D