Bad intern experience at Amazon
This is the intern experience of one of my friends, since he does not have a blind account, I will post the story for him. Below is the copy and paste from him. "I did not get a return offer after I finish my stretch goal. These are the reviews I got from my manager: deliver result/ownership/bias for actions are very good. However, code revision is too high(2.8). and is defensive sometimes. Here's what happened in my internship. Summary: - My manager and primary mentor and most teammates are very supportive - I worked really hard, 60+ hours a week and finished the stretch goal - Intern project requirement is not finalized until week 5 after I pushed really hard - My mentors are not assigned any sprint points to mentor/help me - My secondary mentor never respond to any message (except 1:1). I know people can be really busy sometimes, but not replying to any messages, especially from your coworker, does not look very professional to me. You can at least let me know you are busy, do not send you a message as a basic etiquette - My secondary mentor approved my design during 1:1, but asked me why I didn't follow his design during the internal demo meeting. However, we both agreed clearly in 1:1 before the meeting that his design doesn't match the situation in our team. - because my Cr reviewing is extremely slow. The longest wait time was 7 days, and the manager didn't allow me to ask others to review the CR. so I have to post big Crs each time, and people don't give all comments for revision 1 at the beginning. So I guess 2.8 revisions are too high anyway. things like too many static and getter and setters make me a little confused -- since no one mentioned anything about it in the Cr. And I just learned that my manager is going to another team, and my last day is also his last day. Overall, not a good experience. "
Didn’t you already make a thread about this? You care so much for your friend to post multiple times?
Sorry if you already read. Couldn't move that one from Amazon channel to here so just posted here. And yes he's my best friend
Oh well. He got Amzn on resume.
Advice to all amazon interns who want a return offer: 1. Make sure your project requirements are set in stone on your first week. If your project requirements keep changing after that, then either you work late hours or weekends to catch up or say goodbye to a return offer. 2. If your manager keeps skipping your 1:1s then you are in a bad spot. Do your best to make sure he/she gives you feedback every week. Whether thru email or chime. 3. Code reviews at amazon are there to prevent you from getting a return offer. Which is something crazy that doesn’t happen at other companies. Do your best to create only one huge CR at the end of your project. This is in your best interest. Don’t believe your mentor or whoever saying they want smaller CRs. Because too many comments will affect your return offer. As an intern I think the primary goal should be to learn and contribute and so indexing on CR count is just sad. And lastly, Goodluck! But in all honesty, join Amazon only if you don’t have a better option. It’s possible you could land on a good team and do great but that’s a huge gamble you’re making.
Point 1 and 2 are on point. Point 3 is BS and you should never encourage this behavior (regardless if it’s an internship). Small code reviews lead to good development, easy communication with your peers, less revisions per review, and not chancing being unable to finish on time because you couldn’t get the review completed. It also shows your progress and gives you better things to talk about during 1:1s. If I see a review that is less than 50 lines I’ll often review right away. 50 to 100 lines I may wait until the end of the day. Over 100 lines and you may be waiting all week. One thing that helps here is getting good with branching and rebasing. This will prevent you from being blocked while waiting for reviews. Submit PR, branch, work on next feature, get feed back and update branch A, commit / push branch A to get approval, rebase the changes to your new feature in branch B. If I remember right CRUX handles this even easier than GitHub.
Disgusting