Hello, I've been under a year at AWS and I never felt so out of place, underperforming and I never got just a harsh-brutal feedback as I've got so far... I am barely reaching "the bar" and every month it feels like my ass is on the line, it is almost like by design that amazon want to break you, before you can start the actual work. In order to add some context: I have been in the IT industry for several decades, worked for well known Nasdaq100 and S&P500 companies, had ups and downs, had different kind of workloads and challenges, worked in many countries... but I always been consider top performer or to the very least better than average, never got an average or poor performance review. I also I have some publications, patents and have always been praised for hard work and even won some awards... that was until I got this job as an SA at AWS. I feel I am at the "invasion of the body snatchers" or in some kind of cult because it seems everyone keep adding one of Amazon leadership principles to every email or communication sent all the time, is like everyone drank all the "Kool-aid", pretend to believe everything... or at some point of time they are replaced by pod people. One example, you tell your manager "I am doing all I can, I am working 10 plus hours a day and weekends"... what answer do you get? Fuck you, I don't care... in Amazon language is "take ownership", "deliver results" and "dig deep". Another one, "I am confused on the number of tools used for the same thing, can someone spend some time and help me?" the answer you get is not "you figure it out" or "fuck you" but something like "Learn and be curious". During the first months you are judged whenever you present to others, feedback is sometimes brutal-in-your-face, how do they tell it to you "Hire and develop the best". On this process called master builder your team-mates job is "play devil advocate" and try to sabotage your presentation and architecture, something easy because they have been years there... and some seem to enjoy doing so. Don't get me wrong, I am okay with feedback and things to improve but here you seem to get more negative than positive feedback and it is coming from your peers, like they want everyone at each other throats. Their expectations is that you go from near zero to be an expert in weeks, not months and they don't care if you have to work nights, weekends or holidays. There is no real training, the training is you go to cloudguru or the linuxacademy and "dig deep". The second part of the story, is that pretty much nothing that you know pre-amazon has any value in amazon, at least for technical jobs. Everything is about amazon services and what you know on amazon services, if you are hired to be a manager or to be an account manager/technical manager, sales or marketing it may be different. Nobody cares about if you had 10, 20, 30 years experience, 2 PhDs, dozens of professional certifications, or if you a world known expert for X or Y; if it doesn't apply to amazon, nobody cares... which me wonder why do they hire anyone over 30 here? if everything is "fucking day zero" here, just hire college graduates or just hire smart teens and early twenty something and brainwash them from day zero. Why would you hire someone with decades of experience in X and Y to work in Z? Seems this happens a lot in Amazon. The third thing what is a bit odd in US, is that although they claim to be very "diverse", over 75% of the experts I interact are Indians, and no, I don't work in India, I work in US... and no I am not one of them, that makes you feel a bit more out of place and that's very odd; there are few Chinese, Europeans, Latin American, Africans or any other places. Makes me wonder sometimes if I was a "diversity hire". I have met other SAs and they tell me similar stories, crazy work hours, feeling of being helpless, insomnia, seen people crying, etc...Wrapping this up, is my story standard in AWS US? is the way I am feeling somewhat normal? is everyone here pod-people or psychopaths? or they just pretend and inside they feel the same way? Maybe I just happen to be in a terrible group under a terrible manager. So far I can say this is by far the most toxic and demanding workspace I ever seen, there is absolutely zero WLB and I feel any day I am going to be PIPed any time. Any advice would be more than welcome. At the very least I'd like to survive a year, perhaps trying to change to a group where they will appreciate my experience on the areas I know, but it seems you can't move until you pass the one year mark... of course you can always quit or wait to be PIPed. I could also be like "fuck it", I don't care but that's not really on my nature and that's why I am so stressed out. Thank you #Amazon #aws #help
Amazon is well known for its evil culture. You should have not joined at the first place. Indeed has good WLB. DM me if interested for a referral
Jesus. What a horrible company. I keep seeing this theme over and over here on Blind.
SWEaaS
So ah....what group are you in? I’ve been looking to move to AWS as an SA for a new challenge and had heard the SA culture and expectations weren’t crazy. I got a good thing going at my current gig so that’d be a real bummer if it is this bad.
Dm me. Can provide some strategies that have worked for me. Non SA though..
Lol man.. shove up your LP's
Why so salty ? Just trying to help a brother out who seems to be facing similar challenges... Chill
If you are a citizen, just get PiP'd.. take the severance and tell them to go fuck themselves
That's what I did.
OP not sure why you are suffering so much. Just quit (if not on visa). Market is again getting hotter so will get something in 1-2 or may be 6 months
I don't know OP, my group is very easy going, but if someone with 30 YOE, after months on the job, approached me and requested some training (?) and said they didn't know how to use some tool (??) and then had holes in their presentations that youngins can see (???), all the while giving off racist vibes (!), I might just PIP that grampa right then and there, hard.
Life is too short to waste it making Jeff bezos richer. Move on, Amazon is not worth it at all.
Your experience sounds completely foreign to me. You literally have 90 whole days to complete the Master Builder program (with next to nothing else to do during that period) and it is pretty basic. When I did it, I never at any point felt as if anyone was trying to 'sabotage' me. I'm sorry your experience was so dramatically different but to answer your question, no. It isn't at all like that for all SAs. As it relates to training, nobody is going to hold your hand. The SA role inherently has a lot of ambiguity and if you can't figure shit out on your own you won't make it very far. Almost every piece of information you need to do your job, technical or otherwise, is in a document somewhere. It's on you to either figure out where it is or to ask someone to point you in the right direction. I've never been told 'no' when I've asked for help. Finally, you absolutely need a technical base to build on. Cloud computing has changed the way we do lots of things but the basic laws of math, computing and physics still apply.
not true ... some of the more sr positions are expected to hit the ground running within the first few weeks. All depends on the level/ org / team / expectations
L6 here. I was hired at the same time as an L7 SA and we were held to the same onboarding expectations.
I've worked at many different companies in my 15y+ career, Amazon is the only company with such insidious LPs, which are really just about PIP: - PIP Obsession - Bias for PIP - Hire to Develop the Devplan - Own-the-PIP - PIP, A Lot - Insist on the Highest URA Quota - Invent and Simply PIP - Disagree and Come PIP and so on...
Lol, thank you for the laugh. The thing that drives me crazy is that I am always thinking anytime someone quote one of these... is he/she pretending? Or he/she actually believes it? Who are still human and who are pod people, I mean Amazonian
The LPs are all that's left after they take over your mind, replace your thoughts and eventually annihilate your ego. Once you're no longer yourself, there's no need to believe anything, for you have become the embodiment of the LPs that act on Jeff's behalf in the name of the Customer Obsession, and of the Ownership, and of the Frugality. Amen!