I have been working in Amazon for the past 7 years. Joined as an L5 and got promoted to L6 2 years ago. I miscalculated efforts and f'd up a project in May 2023. Still delivered after some re-design. We pushed dates by 3 months and I was told that they cannot afford more than 2 resources (had 4 before f'ing up) including me which was fair given our commitments. No issues were found after completion. We hit more than 1.8M requests (may not be a lot by social media app standards but this is a different system) by October. Got nice feedback from customers. Along with this I denied mentoring new hires and did not get too involved in other projects that teammates were handling which resulted in more f' ups. I was indirectly blamed for it as I was not too involved in those projects. My plate was full. To my surprise right after completing the project I was given -ve feedback for the reasons mentioned above which I ignored given that it was still delivered, had no production impact and some happy beta customers. After a day or 2 I got to know of people being put on Focus in other teams in the org. In October I got an email about not meeting L6 role requirements. I worked with my manager to address issues. Was given a bunch of tasks which I completed. I also picked up things that were in the backlog, addressed some complex/multi team involvement projects, guided some L5s and helped them complete their deliverables etc. I approached the process with honesty and intentions to come out of it. I also kept applying and interviewing to be safe. Got offers from Bloomberg, PayPal and Salesforce in Dec. I am joining Bloomberg. My H1B got approved today morning and 2 hours later my manager handed a pivot lolol. What timing!! It ended well but I felt my team was a little aggressive given how much work I did in 5 years in the same team. Major pain points were - I was too focused on personal performance and delivery than team development which is a major ask from an L6. I was tagged as a good high L5 and a not so good L6. Anyways I have learnt what went wrong. Focus on yourself. Be interview ready (esp folks on a visa). Keep reading some good engineering blogs to keep your system design skills sharp. My interview prep - Soon after I delivered the initial project and got some harsh feedback I took 2 weeks off citing stress. I hammered 120 LC questions, patterns and some design in those 2 weeks. By Nov I had 250 (Blind 75 and the 150 list). Overall I revised those 250 questions pattern wise almost every week. Surprisingly continuous revision helped me identify patterns in interviews (mock and real). I still failed in a few but overall I did well with LC. Design was doable with Alex Xu's 2nd edition book and Micro Services patterns. Never encountered DP questions (I wasn't prepared as well). Market is not all that bad if you have 5+ YoE. Amazon tag and experience definitely helped me get all calls. I am so relieved now. Have been sleeping well, exercising, spending time with daughter and wife, watched 4 Netflix series and around 15 movies since I signed the offer lol. I also took my daughter to disney land!! She is 5 and this was the best time we had as a family. I will never make the mistake of sacrificing family time for work. Never gave her the time she deserved. Old TC - 345K in Seattle New TC - 320K in NY. I did not negotiate at all. Got great feedback about WLB and I just accepted it. Work is also interesting.
Amazing story. You deserved better than Amazon. Good for you
Good luck !
What are good Eng blogs like you mentioned??
Fb/netflix/aws/azure and microservices.io helped me a lot
Great going! That exit package from amazon hopefully covers up the dip in the new TC.
Congrats. And good luck. But the market is not good. You are fortunate.
Yes I was definitely very lucky. Amazon tag might have helped me get some attention.
Your story shows the lesson everyone should know about Amazon (and others that try to copy Amazon) - it's that it is set up to blame "someone" for the slightest deviation. Whenever something goes "wrong", their first thought is "who" to blame and not "given the circumstances, how can we meet our goals". The only people that are apparently blameless are the clueless L7+ managers. It is just not worth it to work under such incompetent management.
Congrats, happy for you. So In companies you had offers, you were asked Lc hards? How was overall system design etc. lastly, why didn’t you negotiate given that you worked hard to get multiple offers in short time
Only lc medium types. I never got a hard one given I did well in almost all lc rounds across companies. System design was reasonable. I had questions like design twitter, booking.com, ticket master etc. In all of these the discussion was around microservices patterns, distributed locking, api design, customer experience when it comes to throwing errors etc (microservices.io has great information). It was definitely doable. Get your basics right..not one interview asked me beyond that. I worked in NY for a few years before joining amazon. I wanted to go back to the east coast as I have friends and a few family members there. Bloomberg was the only east coast offer. Also 300+ in east coast is not bad at all given how cheap (relatively) the houses are.
What’s your Yoe?
Congrats. What's your yoe?
Around 10
Congrats 👏 and well done !
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Honestly I found no sense in blaming amazon or myself. I gave the best I could with all honesty. I knew how brutal amazon can be right from the time I joined. Luckily found a good therapist who helped me navigate this time. I only focused on what I can completely control and the results were amazing.