So here’s rant. I joined amazon 2 years ago. Well this company is pure shit. Doesn’t give a 2 flying fucks about its employees. I would describe my 2 years experience as follows: Running with a Firehose 🔥 from one place to another. These deadlines never fucking end, managers are just there to push their directs in the fire and chill. Things I have noticed, so far with this shit culture: 1. Manager will always be fake sympathetic about your workload but will never take steps to reduce it. I am a fucking SDE1, they made me do planning, estimation, coding, mentoring and what not. All my manager does is tells the team “This needs to be done because we are approaching deadline. Please somebody take it up”. That’s it’s and he is getting paid 400k for that statement. 2. Why the fuck they start all the Peak readiness activities just around the corner and then expect SDEs to work over time and deliver to these shittiest leadership. 3. Everyone one boast about quality, delivery, these shit principles yet when you see the code base, it’s trash. E.g. Tier 1 service code written by SDE3. Now guess we don’t have logs for quite a few code paths and one time some api broke, an sde 2 added following comments in ticket “Here’s CR for adding logs. Will debug once the code is in prod”. I literally laughed in the ops review. 4. They literally torture new College hires. I have joined as new grad and I somehow survived till now. I have seen manager expect so much from 6 months hire that’s it breaks them. And then manager in 1:1 is like “I don’t want you to work more than 8hrs and on weekends”. And next day here is the high priority task we need to complete in 2 days and your 8hrs is out of the window.😂 5. How can I forget. All famous Ops review. Here is general definition: A standard meeting organized to create action items to improve service which are never taken up. My manager question about customer impact so much in ops review, (which I agree) and then forgets all the decisions, impacts and actions items next day, like the service never had sev 2 in lifetime. Rinse & Repeat next week. 6. Ohh well, the 🥜 💰. PS: I m not generalizing anything about developers, managers etc but this is what I have experienced. Edit 2: I see many people saying that I should balance things out and deliver and as long as I meet deadlines I should be fine in Amazon. Here’s my point of view, how do you think I survived 2 years here. Balance things and deliver results should only apply when you are working a decent amount of time in week. Yes, I can work for 15hrs a day and beats the performance of every Sde2 engineer in my team (I am confident) but then what’s the point having no fun in life and no hobbies you enjoy and look like shit in front of mirror. I don’t want to only grow my professional career. Balancing Things at amazon = Get shit done outside office hours. Edit 3: Many people are asking why I m not changing teams or companies. Yes, I did thought about changing teams but then your promo gets delayed, currently I m doing good according to my manager and will be promoted in Q3. But to be true, I have decided that I will leave Amazon in next 6-7 months, since I know even SDE2 wlb is not good and this covid has taken some toll on me (I guess everyone) Still figuring how to find time to leetcode when working 12hrs a day and keep my sanity. Lot of goals to achieve (both professionally and physically). Stay Safe. TC. 180k Retail
one correction needed in your statement, your manager probably gets double of what you wrote above
True. Also I wrote half the shit my manager does. 🤣
Re: #1 — 200k? You know your manager is making 400k for that statement
What according to you should someone with 2 YOE be paid?
Depends on “How much your are asking me to do “
Job duties change pretty often. Let's hear a figure.
o O___ _____________ _][__|o| |O O O O O O|__ |___pip train__|-|_______| /O-O-O o o O-O-O 🚶🏻♂️--- OP?
Nah. Achieves 😅
Good for you my man. The points you mentioned are mostly legit, just sounded though as someone who's on a plan.
You should leave. I had the same feelings at 2 years and it just kept getting worse year after year until I left. Amazon is toxic and a trash company to be eng
Lol. That sounds like the Amazon I know and hate 😂. 6 months aint nothing. They expect this person who’s 1.5 months in to deliver. I had to defend her.
Lmao man when I was at amazon, I was already oncall by the end of my first month getting paged sev-2s like there’s no tomorrow
Sounds like you got a bad team and a terrible manager. Get out of there either by transferring internally or find a new job. On the bright side, you probably won't experience anything worse than this and you are now stronger and more experienced than ever!
Yes, manager is not good but then I have lot friends in same situation so chances are less I’ll get a good team. Switching companies is next best bet.
Literally i was thrown into service at 1 month mark, where the whole team had no idea. However after a year, I am confident that I can be thrown anywhere.
I joined as an SDE 2, got promoted to SDE 3, and then switched to SDM. I can validate that all roles have unrealistic expectations, we always have less resources than we need, and all that is by design. It’s probably easier to coast as a manager than as an engineer, but if you care about some kind self respect, then you have no option but to grind. I am here stuck on an L1 visa, but if you have an H1B and care about having a life - get another job.
Prefer getting PIPed but at least now study for interviews.
I m doing LC but not planning to quit yet. I’ll at least get my 2 vestings and then leave.
Hope you didn't say the same before the two previous vestings. Just saying. Good luck!