New Job at Amazon

You’re starting newly hired as an SDE II at 170k? That sounds impossible, it is below band. Are you in a very low market rate city? New hire L5 should be over 200k. Beyond that I will dig up a link. It was more geared towards promos but should be fine here. Edit: https://us.teamblind.com/s/hLjNoKUX Edit 2: pasting primary body here because it’s in a post in the amazon subforum that is restricted Quote: Your scope has changed from yourself to your team. You need to know about what your team does and be responsible for improving it. You will need to review more code and designs. You can’t just batter your peers and SDE-Is with the same comment over and over, you need to help make systemic changes so the problems don’t happen. The training wheels are off. Your manager will not coddle you when you don’t know how to proceed or your dates slip. You need to be independent and own your screw-ups and be providing a path to green. Know your teams systems to a point that you have context when reviewing new features or other changes. Know the touchpoints between your own systems and inbound and outbound dependencies. If they are too numerous to memorize wiki it and the whole team benefits. Be able to competently on-board any of your services to a new dependency you need. Be able to describe the system to the POC for the dependency and provide them with TPS and how it will trend. On the other side be able to be that POC when others depend on you. Be able to guide them to the proper API. In either of those cases you can make strong recommendations for API or design of the foreign system, but it’s not on you to influence and make these outside systems better. That’s L6 level scope, you just need to keep your house clean. You need to mentor and coach SDE-Is. They are babes in the woods and have no idea what they are doing. You need to help them be productive and teach them out of their worst tendencies. Finding someone on an adjacent team is best so you don’t have conflict of interest sharing a manager. You can help a lot more with hiring soon. Probably need a few months (6ish) in-level to really go it on your own, but be sure you have all classes done and enough shadows done that you can have some reverse shadows then go it alone. Hone your questions and interview skills. Find ways to make your team better. As the SDE-III list mentioned, look at the tech survey. Focus on your team. What’s the major pain points? You may not be able to solve them, but you should understand them and see what you can do. Maybe it’s tech talks you organize, a book club, better organization of tasks, etc. You aren’t alone on this, but you need to care and “get it” even if you don’t agree with all the results. As I mentioned in the SDE-III post, time to up your mentor to a Sr SDE, though maintaining current relationship with a more tenured SDE-II is fine, but you’ll want room to grow with them. Talk to your manager, and see what projects you can help on, even if it’s just oversight and not implementation. Ask what they want you to own for the team (code quality, planning, particular project delivery, release process, improving CM/COE process, etc). You are the code workhorse now. SDE-IIIs get pulled away from the code (most of the time), and SDE-Is need more oversight. You should be able to go from template to module or small service (eventually big service) independently, and the code should be solid. You should have metrics and alarms without anyone asking. Your launch plan should be robust and have dials to ramp, and the metrics telling you if you’re winning or losing. Form relationships on consistent partner teams. Help them when they need it, check in, etc. Be a good steward for your team when you represent it. Document what you do. Leave a paper trail including how you modified your plans based on feedback. Show your work and process. Document why you didn’t do something not just why you did. These artifacts should be instructive to more junior engineers. Have a vision for SDE-III but don’t go nuts. You will need a couple of years. Be solid and deliver what you say when you say. Start looking at the project horizon next OP1 to see if there are opportunities during 2020 to pick up projects with SDE-III scope. Be able to handle on-call issues quickly regardless of system. Write or supplement run books, and be looking at how you can eliminate root causes. When a problem is hard to solve due to poor logging or metrics, add them, don’t kick the can. Don’t be a dick. This should have been in the SDE-III list but they can be dicks and still succeed. You haven’t earned it yet.

Not able to access the link

If you are starting, you would hope there would be training to ease you into the role. I would focus on understanding as much of the technology you know you will be working with. Also understand the competition. You have 2-3 weeks.. that’s a lot of research to prep you.

This sounds like the beginning of a horrible experience. Best of luck.

Learn the internal tools. Master them.