Going from Amazon to VMware is culture shock
At Amazon everything is about truth seeking, productivity, and getting stuff done. At VMware it’s a culture of babying, stalling, throwing wrenches in things with silly ideas, making tiny details into mountains, and horrible prioritization. Could understand if this happened on the front lines but I’m talking about leadership doing all of this. Feel like I’m going crazy. TC: $250k 10+ YOE
At Amzn, there is empire building too and that results in leadership brainwashing us into thinking all the Alexa stuff they are doing is a top priority using their LPs.
And you get a way better chatbot duct taping in gpt-4
As an Amazon shareholder I want all of Alexa disbanded and investments to be suspended. Deploy the people to work on other things but Alexa is a disaster.
Sounds like Google. Amazon doesn't seem that bad. There's something nerve racking knowing you're not working on something impactful.
Amazon tricks you into thinking your work matters and everything is mission critical. Almost none of it is
Isn't that all of software Engineering? We're just automating and simplifying things for on-ground people and making their life easier. So we are having at max a secondary impact on the world, that too assuming someone working on a cutting edge health tech or defense tech or some tech that existed before 2000. Other than that, the FAANGs are just making people more addicted and lazy.
Agreed world can do away with them.
Curious why Amazon to VMWare? Nothing about VMWare stands out, and pay is bad. If laid off though I get it
You are so wrong. Almost everything at VMw is better than Amazon except pay.
Can you throw some light. @Jok3s
Majority of mid tier companies are like that
Leaving Amazon is a culture shock almost anywhere. Take a minute to consider if your WLB has improved and maybe slow down a little.
My WLB improved drastically moving to Block, and yeah, Amazon has a lot of BS that you have to deal with, BUT as OP said, it's a huge culture shock going somewhere else and seeing how behind other big tech companies are. I can only speak for my org at Amazon, but code and design standards were top notch. Everyone had an attitude of always wanting to improve our tooling, our processes and mechanisms. At Block, I'm basically told not to "rock the boat". Everybody's happy with the status quo. It feels like the company is 5 years behind in best practices.
So they are basically telling you not to bring your bullshit Amazon practices to Block. Damn you been institutionalized son.
Is that true? Amazon is all about red tape in my experience.
What red tape are you talking about? My org is the wild wild west. A bunch of cowboys trying to do things their own way and it’s a whole lot of uncoordinated action and shooting each other down. Basically whoever claims the big project, gets the brownie points for impact wins the game, and it doesn’t matter if you followed the rules or carried your team with you not.
That's your opportunity to have impact.
Why did you move to VMware?
That's my question too. VMware pays terribly, especially compared to Amazon
People need jobs... often they aren't ideal