Is Amazon in Austin a lot better than other locations? I see a lot of scary comments about working at Amazon but nothing much about the Austin location even though they have a pretty sizeable workforce there. What gives ?
Not a lot of Austin Amazonian is here, that's why you don't see a lot of comments about amazon Austin Also a major portion of Austin Amazonians are in AWS - SAs, TAMs, AMs and they don't use Blind that much
Got it. I'll be joining as an SDE 1 in Austin so trying to gauge the environment.
TC?
It's not perfect, but in my personal experience most parts of the company are better than you'd guess from the online reviews. My theory is that a plurality of the bad reviews are caused by the performance management system. People that get PIPed out usually have a strongly negative opinion of the company. Orgs that are expanding heavily in new places sometimes get a pass on attrition targets for a couple years and, just like in startups, rapid growth compensates for almost any problem
Fun fact: Amazon and Fb are in the same building at Austin.
I interviewed @ Amazon in Austin a few years back. It's getting bigger by the day. The facility is not impressive itself nor inspiring. The people at that time were not from Texas themselves. Not a single one of the 5 I interviewed with. Most on that in a second. Got to meet the person who bragged about their part for the windows 8 start menu, could barely hold back the laughter and I know they saw my facial expression. This was to be my lead. Interview went fine actually and they are a very nice person. They were a transplant and ex ms Seattle transplant. Meet a SDE's who really was cool. Loved to talk about overall speed for a site and was passionate about speed. That went well. Had a teleconference with someone remote in Seattle over the worst connection possible. I mentioned this several times and he got upset at me. I was in a room alone with that jackass for an hour who was pixelated and breaking up and freezing on a super small screen. That was an unmitigated disaster. He yelled at me several times when I asked him to repeat himself, as if that was the problem. Talked with a UX designer and had a good time whiteboarding. Mentioned the issue with the teleconference and she was like, get used to it and when they yell at you just take it. Had a group meeting with all these people at what I thought was the end, and that went well. I was done on schedule and was supposed to meet with an hr person, and then they sent the bar raiser. This dude was nice, but he didn't have the JD for the position, and the position didn't have a formal JD they told me. That was odd. So he said whiteboard some code. I had asked everyone prior to that, do I need to practice whiteboarding code. No I would never do that as part of my role. Yea so that went bad as well. I had spent 0 prep time on that, as it was not described as a job role. All in all, it was a complete clusterfuck. The videoconferencing was just beyond trash for a company like Amazon I was shocked. They decided not to move forward, as a result of the bar raiser and yelling teleconference feedback, which was "negative". I felt lucky in some sense.
Interesting. I interviewed last summer and my experience was really good. Had two remote interviews without any video/audio issues! I'm hearing they're moving to a new building next door so maybe facilities get better
Yea so that was like 2015/16 and they were new in the area...I think their stock was like 500/600 at the time. I'm sure they have changed a lot of things for the better infrastructure wise. The domain itself is great, but housing is getting up there and traffic is not great on mopac if you try to get anyplace asides from close by.
seemed chill when i interviewed there
It’s probably not about Amazon, but sunny Austin vs expensive and gray Seattle
Hmmm. I'd assume unhappy Amazonians based in Austin would be sharing their experiences here. Maybe there aren't that many unhappy ones there haha