How is Alexa News team compared with other teams in Alexa, or in Amazon in general, in terms of 1) engineering culture ? 2) average work load ? Is it like 40 hours of productive work / week, or more like constant crunch 60-70 I'm considering joining the news team, if all goes well after the interview process. Bonus: what kind of insightful questions I should ask the team as I'll meet with them? Sure I'll ask standard stuff about : processes, product, technologies. But what kind of good questions would an Amazonian ask
Ask how the turnover rate and morale are. Ask for the average time on the team. Ask how many weekends a month you’ll work. Ask how much comp time is given, on average. Yeah, I’m a bit cynical. Amazon culture is hit or miss.
Hot or miss, is very team specific in big companies. I was in MSFT a while ago, but contrary to general believe, our team's WLB was terrible, mostly because we were migrating to cloud, and we did not have any clue, nor the management
How long with fb? Wlb there?
6 years with FB, WLB ok-ish
Brand new team so not many people will be able to tell you much. Director (Marcu) is well known and respected but beyond that not sure. Edit: there are two different teams doing stuff with news. One is Zeitgeist/News (Uppuluri) and one is Search/News (Marcu) - not sure which team you are thinking of. Different VPs of course - because this is Alexa so obviously each VP will have conflicting programs. Ugh.
What is alexa news? What do they do
It is the team supporting the news platform, answering queries like "Alexa, tell me the latest"
Is it organic news? As in no editorial intervention? Completely driven by algorithms?