AWS SDE1 offer: TC: 170k+ Location: Seattle, WA Team: High impact AWS EC2 team. Currently at Workday: TC: 200k+ (due to stock growth) Location: Pleasanton, CA Team: Decent team with good wlb / culture. Reason to join AWS: Really interesting Distributed Systems work and higher customer impact but am concerned with crazy wlb and the usual Amazon horrors we hear. Reason to stay at Workday: Really nice wlb / culture, company actually cares about employees but may not be as impactful / scale as AWS. Given these, is it wise to consider AWS? YoE: < 3 years
Honestly don't think the name matters. It is respected (and ridiculed) by techies. But you can get a call even otherwise and all that matters is converting it. AWS has a lot of high impact and learning but its at the cost of wlb and boring ops load. It's a great company for customers more than employees. And G/F etc tend to downlevel anyways. So unless you are really desperate to work on high scale, I'd find a better place or just stick around. Personally I might have considered if it was an sde2 role for a few years, but not otherwise.
AWS is high impact, high stress across the organization. Are you comfortable carrying a pager? Ops load in that org is high.
I personally wouldn't go to Amazon even if they matched your current comp. They'd have to beat it by 10-20%
Thanks for your input folks!
AWS ops workload is insane
If you are thinking that you will be working on distributes system and it will be a dream. You will be working on small project that will be a co Pone t of distributed system. You can’t learn any distributes system. You will be firefighting all the time and you left with zero time to learn.
Amazon is a no go for me, son. If you’re young and ambitious in tech I would take it for the name for a year. Me personally would not sacrifice my sanity.