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What's the learning opportunity at Amazon for SDEs? Do you get to do a wide variety of projects or are you just a sprint monkey trying to satisfy deadlines and no real deep work or engineering?
SDEs, from what i've seen, mostly grind and don't level up until they move on to different roles outside coding anecdotally, I see some going up to Sr Staff, fewer to Principal but many remain at Sr level and job hop every 2-3 yrs for TC, not promotions - cant imagine doing that for 30+ years and still being at that level
No real deep work or engineering
Varies by team ofc
Grind 4 $ - If you aren't learning in your role or growing as an engineer, try jumping a ship - get yourself involved in doing stuff you will enjoy and be challenged with. No point in learning something and not using it in production - you will forget it after 6 months if you haven't used it or dealt with the problems of scaling whatever you are learning
Not true. One can document everything (and keep a copy) for future reference. Eg. Employee Sam worked at OpenAI and has documented his work and learnings. He can use this when he jumps ship and ask for $ or stake for his knowledge and value addition.
Yes absolutely! You can definitely learn new technologies, don't get me wrong. But if you don't plan on changing jobs or teams and continue with a current tech stack or learning for fun, that won't go long way
I learn a lot from reviews with people senior to me. They make me think about my designs and decisions in new ways. It’s not something I experienced in my previous company as much. I’m also learning how to grow less experienced engineers which I feel like is going to be a useful skill as I progress in my career - and it feels rewarding too.
> What's the learning opportunity at Amazon for SDEs? There are a lot. People just don't take advantage of it. To be fair, too much work but there are many "resources" that people don't even bother to check. As they are internal, i won't disclose here
For the most part, just learning enough to satisfy deadlines. But there are some interesting learning opportunities during design reviews since the feedback from senior or principal engineers are generally useful and makes me think differently about the problem.
I think you only learn if you’re open to it. My team specifically loves to deep dive and make sure everyone is on the same page. They don’t shame us for asking questions like “How does Dynamodb benefit us here?” You just have to keep an open mind about your work and the struggles or tedious tasks or what can be improved upon. Growth starts with you, they can only guide you so far. - An SDE 1 who joined recently
1. working in ambiguity and figuring out things yourselves. I didn’t see this at my previous companies, and that helps you setup for Senior/Staff roles. 2. Learn from other Senior Engineers (not all) on design thinking/coding modularity. 3. There are is a ton to learn from internal resources; but that is being made available publicly on “AWS Builders library”. P.S - My opinions may not be relevant to you as Amazon is my first tech shop.
I used to learn a lot but nowadays there is a huge overhead of ORR, AppSec, alarm creation, etc that around 30% of the time.
Been on two back-to-back projects for the last 5 months where all I’ve done is ORR, API doc review for someone else’s API changes, alarm creation/neutering bc on-call hated getting tickets… 90% of my time. The rest was ad-hoc “fix this weird bug for another team’s test” and weekly ops meetings. In short: I feel ya.
what is the point of this poll
To figure out growing and learning opportunity at Amazon, if you work 40hrs/week you'd expect to grow as an engineer and get exposed to different things