I see lot of negative experiences/opinions about working at Amazon. 1) Is there anyone working as SDE at Amazon/AWS who is happy with the work and work life balance? If so, what is your team and location? 2) How would you compare working at Amazon against working at investment banks like Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan?
1. L5 SDE @ Amazon and Iโm very happy withmy job and wlb. Create a poll to see 2. No idea. Never worked with those companies
1. Another L5 SDE @ AWS. Location Dublin. I am very happy with my WLB, and happy enough with my job. 2. No idea
I was at Aws earlier, and wlb was fine, though lot of it depends on the manager and the team/product. In amazon, most teams with good wlb *usually* translates to not-so-important team, with less promo chances, and less ratings. Overall I worked with both kind of teams(good and bad wlb) and experience was fine. Coming from outside, you would find lot of assholes that you cannot trust, and manager being partial to hard-working employees. So, culture wise it is cut throat. On the plus side, not everyone is smart, so it may be easy for you to outsmart other people. So, either be smart or hard-working (this is what most happy people do), else be ready to be mistreated and get piped (this is unhappy people). (I personally was on hard working side, I liked it that way, and mostly had positive experience).
Damn, if there are dumb people that got passed the Amazon interview, I must be a sack of potatoes, because I've failed it like 4 times now
Hiring bar is low for intern hire and new grads. As you go higher level/yoe, it is difficult to get in. sde2+ external candidates are on average better than internal ones.
I worked for multiple amazon orgs including aws and work life balance was always good for me. There were always enough not as efficient or not as smart engineers on my team so I didn't have to work super hard or long to appear like a super star even though some of these less efficient people would work really long hours every day. If I were to take average team members wlb, there were teams that were good and there were teams that were bad. I would say ~70% of teams have bad wlb from my experience. It doesn't make sense to target for a good wlb team cuz there are so many reorgs and manager changes and managers leaving that your team's wlb and situation will change before you know it. By the time you join a team that supposedly has good wlb, it could be shit. I do agree with above that in general, shittier products that nobody cares about on average will have better wlb. Hot products will have horrible wlb as upper management will continually try to beat the time of market and squeeze much as they can out of you to deliver faster.
^ this, I had similar experience.
SDE @ AWS on tier-1 service. WLB can be a bit improved but overall I'm happy
Sure, people are happy because they get to do a lot of: - Fire fighting, everyone admire fire fighters! - Babysitting deployments, who doesn't love waiting for deployments to fail after 2 hours and still have 3 zones x 15 regions more to go, super chill! - Dashboard reviews where you have to explain why 4 nines = max in some cases, playing with numbers to get you out of trouble is great - On-call reports: your brutal on-call is not done until you tie it up with a nice report and raise the bar etc... Be the hero in the Ops meeting looking shiny after not sleeping for 3 nights. - Customer tickets (that you have no clue and no time to resolve), and you're supposed to be obsessed with every one of them, another hero taking bullets for the team - And don't forget region build out where they expect it to be fully automated but then every region is a brand new learning experience - And the occasional onboarding to some random new stack, it's rewarding to read wiki pages and track down the last person who edit it to make sure it's not your fault that it doesn't work - But wait there's more, it's always fun to work on compliance and renew certificates and guess what, it requires a deployment to complete, more chill!
What are those guidelines?
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TESLA UP 14% AFTER HOURS ๐๐๐๐
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Take the stuff you read with a grain of salt, most people that are happy wonโt post about it
Doesnโt seem to be the case with Google employees
Amazon has strict pr guidelines. The ones who enjoy it are not on blind