After reading blind I have an impression that they often pip leetcode wizards. And if you are a good engineer WLB is not that bad and PIP is not that common (as usually shit happens in any big company). Please correct me if I’m wrong #wlb #engineering
Amazon is good as a step stone in your career. People don't stay in amazon for very long. There are few differences between regular tech companies and Amazon: 1. Even though amzn claim to be tech company they are not. They are run by MBAs. SWEs are not considered as asset but a resource. So lot of PIP culture comes from that 2. Amzn is inherently very frugal. For thr amount of work you would do, tech companies pay you lot more. 3. Amazon inherently promotes to be selfish and ruthless. If you are not ruthless in amazn you will be thrown out or you will leave yourself. Backstabbing / taking credit of others is very common. 4. Amzn is very dubious with its policies. Let me givr you one example. If you join Amazon and let's say you have a baby within first year, you are *not* entitled for parental leave. Amazon does apply for your green card unless you get promoted to sde2. 5. Amazon uses target compensation strategy. There are infinite number of posts on these. 6. Amazn puts 5% of their employees on PIP every year. This concept was started by ford and perfected by Amazon. Amzn hires a lot and fires a lot. All these issues makes Amazon the worst place to work in tech industry. I have worked in amazon for 3 years and my personal life got affected by being on-call for countless hrs. I was such a fool to stay at amzn for such a long time.
Omg damn you nailed it, you touched the real points, I wanted to tell you that you 100% ex-amazon before reading even your last sentence !
> Amazon does not apply for your green card unless you get promoted to sde2. Wow, that sucks. Bloomberg started my process barely a few months after I joined as a new grad.
Yes you are basically right with your assessment, but it also depends on the team you land in. I've been here 5 years and been pretty happy with it. I've seen a number of people "managed out" aka PIP and in every case they were legitimately really bad for a really long time before they were eventually let go. I suspect that's the same subset of people that whine so loudly on blind.
One thing is that even good engineers will have a tough time there initially, maybe for a year or two. There is so much work to be done on good teams and bad teams, and there’s not a lot of direction on what’s important, urgent or benign. You’ll get pressure from management about new features. Day to day will put pressure on improving ops or internal services. Peers will want to do benign stuff. Until you’ve had enough time there to not only figure out which work is important but to also learn how to influence the teams direction, the pressure will feel overwhelming. Once you figure that out things start to drastically calm down. As you influence the team to work on the important things you’ll start to be treated as a more and more important person on the team. Once you get into that spot though things are great. Anecdotally I was working about 30 hours a week when I left, accomplishing more than I did my first year there where I worked 80 hours a week (voluntarily since I was interested and had the time, never pressure to work more). I think my last full year there I used up about 3 months of vacation/sick time, spent about 2 months traveling to other locations (because I wanted to) to meet with other teams and customers. I was a highly valued member of our 300+ engineer org. It was great. Unfortunately there are still some things built into amazon that need to change. Specifically for me, promo’s and comp (too much reliance on the stock doing great to compete with other FAANG).
Even good engineers face problems. There is so much to learn and expectations are high. Most of the managers behave like scrum masters and don't care about complexity of work and scale. You should be really good at articulating and elevating the work you do to be successful.
Another veiled attempt to ask "Is Amazon that bad?"
Not really. Was genuinely curious if FB and Amazon have bad rep because of people who chase high tc and take shortcuts
It's not about being good or bad engineer. It's about being a good engineer, finding a good team AND a good manager. PIP is for the bottom 5-10%, but what they don't tell you is not the bottom "engineers" it's the bottom "performers". Big difference. Poor performance can come from, skill, luck, team or manager.
Let's all be in agreement. Its better to be on a slaveship than to join Amazon. At least on the slaveship they will treat you with some dignity.
What?!
There’s no such thing as kindness in corporate world. The best you can hope for is respect and work/life balance. Which unfortunately Amazon doesn’t offer either.
Amazon is very bureaucratic compared to most tech companies.
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There are good and bad teams at any company including Google. Only according to Blind, 100% of teams at Amazon have bad WLB.