Reading a lot about how PIP at Amazon and how people hate working at Amazon. I'm in process of interviewing for the Sr. Solutions Architect role. How's the working environment for SAs? Is it as bad as what people are describing? I know it varies by team and manager. Any current/former Amazon SAs can provide insight? Greatly appreciated. Thank you. #amazon #solutionarchitect #aws #tech
You will have enough customers to have terrible wlb 😃
Best advice I can give anyone is Stay Away from Amazon / AWS and second best advice, for those who ignore the first, is Get Out ASAP. There were a couple of Dev Plan folks in my team this year who took the second message. The terrible stories you read on Blind are true and worse.
I will present a different viewpoint . Agree that SA have to capture sales target but there is definitely market demand for AWS SA services hence the hiring . Work life balance is typically based on geography and team within SA you are in and also sometime speciality .Some Customers are hard to work with some are easy , but not as bad WLB as SDE roles for sure and your soft skills/presentataion and customer facing experience matter more in 90% cases
Hows interview vs SDE? I saw theres some specialist SA roles and heard the cloud infra architect is post sales version of SA. Also how technical is role there? From what i hear at msft the SA here varies where some are just ppt monkeys and non technical but idk directly if this is thats true or not.
Not an SDE interview for sure . No leetcoding . System design / presentation / etc expected . Its as technical as you want it to be , you can make it an ppt job and still grow really , end of day its sales . On the other had there are some seriously good technical guys in SA roles as well + they have sales and customer facing skills .For long term it is better than SDE roles imo . Pay is like 5-10% less than SDE on same band , but not everywhere SDE/SA bands merge and so external SA can have more salary than internal SDE easily
L6 SA here. WLB is bad, working hours can be 10-12 hours a day, worse during COVID and I’ve seen people working on weekends to finish projects or customer demos, or just to “raise the bar”, you can say no but there’s a lot of pressure to keep raising the bar. The scope of generalist SAs is very broad and ambitious as you get to L6+ with many responsibilities, SAs are expected to jump in many calls, thrown into multiple directions, know many AWS services, industry specific knowledge, produce content, help hiring, mentoring etc. What I’m trying to say is that they will keep you busy for sure. SAs get piped like anyone else, no free lunch. Pay is a little less than SDE. I’m happy with the role but not with the Amazon culture. Pay is ok. The main issues are WLB, career path, scope of role and backstabbing/unfriendly culture.
How much backstabbing happens in SA teams? Do you always have to be on your toes?
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Why you expect a different/unique experience for architects? Your assessment on varying by team n management is right. Rest it is known for its culture for a reason
I think my assessment came from reading lot of posts and reviews about Amazon. But it seems like most of them were by SDE and engineers having terrible WLB, being placed in PIP, etc. I'm thinking do architects have similar experiences? Because they would be more customer focused, being assigned to an enterprise customer and helping them with their needs. Thoughts?
That is true about the difference in work culture, though company culture remains the same. To tell you the reality, contrary to the belief,, core Tech/sdes group is much better treated in amazon, as compared to other amazon job families it gets worse as you go for blue collar jobs in fcs n delivery etc. Having said that amazon sdes /tech are in somewhat worse situation than other core tech companies. So while non sdes would be different, it won't be better