I want to share my experience working in AWS Aurora for less than a year and hopefully save someone from joining it. 1. INTRO I'm an SDE from Europe, had 5 yoe when entered AWS. 2. BECOMING AN AMAZONIAN Passed my first FAANG interview at AWS and was assigned SDE1 role. Recruiter said that the level is ideal for me, and I agreed: there was a vibe that I'm joining an outstanding team and I would not be able to keep up if joining as SDE2. 3. FIRST MONTH Everything went well: internal ML course was scheduled which made me think that people here do some AI-related stuff, the teammates were great and helpful. However some minor red flags appeared: * Almost everyone in the team was a new hire including manager. Others were SysDE. * WFH budget was allocated in a strange way: $500 but monitor should cost < $150, chair and desk < 100$ each. I expected more generous budget from top IT company, but the most interesting part about the equipment is at the end of the post. I bought simple monitor, small desk and standing mat, spent around $250 total. * When browsing emails and participating in meetings, I saw and heard "ops" suspiciously often. On-call training was set up weekly for a component which we were not developing. * Benefits were poor: basically it included only mediocre health insurance. Other advertised benefits like commuter ticket discount appeared to be provided by the government, not by Amazon exclusively for Amazonians. 4. NEXT MONTHS There were quite a lot of ops work like hosts replacement/patching deployment pipelines. The job was advertised as "developing hyper-scalable database at cloud", but in reality there was no development at all. Unpaid on-call took place 1-2 days per week during working hours for the component being developed by another team. Around 8 Sev2 per day were generated on average, some of them required writing customer reach-outs. But the manager kept saying that it's a good opportunity to learn. Speaking about our team's project - despite being advertised as smth sophisticated, I quickly realized that it's a poorly designed internal product causing a lot of maintenance trouble to the SysDEs, which can be redesigned and reimplemented easily in several weeks. It was nice because I started feeling that I'm not worse than SDE2-s there, and decided to take this opportunity to redesign the product from scratch and receive promotion quickly. First new hire left the team. 5. MAKING THE DECISION TO LEAVE I reimplemented the product successfully in a month, the new design was much simpler (not because I'm clever but because the use-case was simple and the previous design was poor), easier to maintain and cheaper to run. After introducing metrics comparison, colleagues agreed that the new product is better, and we started rolling it out to prod. My direct manager and his boss said a lot about how they are thankful to me and how I should think about designing new components. However when trying to speak about my promotion several times - the response was that I'm not ready yet because I need to improve some LPs including ownership (I tried to avoid on-call and other maintenance activities at all costs because it seems unfair to me when, being an SDE, I'm forced to support products which my team doesn't even develop). Manager said that in half of a year he'll probably start collecting some docs for the promotion, and I may expect it not earlier than in a year (1.5 years from start date). I was really upset because the team had been just stuck in maintenance before the new design was introduced, and, sorry for the pathos, it ended up being the most important team achievement during the year. I realized that manager's gratitudes are not baked by any value and I'll remain SDE1 with new grad salary regardless of my achievements. Also the on-call pressure appeared to be not a good opportunity to learn, but just some dumpster activities to make Aurora alive. Another point was that the manager always said that he is here to help, but in reality he didn't protect the team from endless external maintenance requests by prioritizing them somehow and building some realistic roadmap. Instead, he just talked on high level about "introducing innovations by you guys", and in daily activities acted more like a router: just forwarded all the requests to the team members. When I asked him about that, he said that he did this intentionally to eliminate him as a single point of failure from the team: "If I become ill, the team may still function without me". The Christmas came, no any single small present from Amazon, only an e-mail with "congratulations for solving N tickets and performing M releases". Other 2 people left the team. I decided to leetcode and leave. 6. LEAVING I spent several months preparing and didn't do too much work for the team. It was pretty tough time with several failures. Received 3 offers from other FAANGs for SDE2, the question whether to leave became a no-brainer. I asked mature teammates about how much money should I return to Amazon in case of leaving (I worked for almost a year at that point), they assured that one have to return only part of sign-on, because the relocation bonus usually isn't requested back by managers after several months of work (it could though according to the contract). After announcing that I'm leaving, the manager's attitude changed quickly. 1:1 reduced from 1.5 hours to 10 minutes. And finally I was charged both sign on and relocation, with relocation prorated for 2 years (i.e. more than half of relocation was charged). The most interesting happened during last days though: I didn't need to retain WFH equipment because it was so cheap that carrying it with me to another country would be more expensive than to buy new. But I found policies that furniture bough for WFH is not taken back by Amazon, and decided not to give any single penny back to Amazon but just throw out the stuff instead. However the manager started insisting on my returning desk and standing mat "for future new hires" because it's his team budget and he decides what to do with it. I was shocked: one cannot imagine how a new hire is suggested taking a used shabby standing mat. We argued about this, and finally the manager agreed to leave the stuff to me after showing him the policy. 7. CONCLUSION The experience was awkward and cringy in everything. Now I'm working in a well-known place which feels much better, and I cannot believe that somewhere in the past I argued with my manager for $50 used foldable desk after being top contributor to the team. If you are thinking about joining AWS Aurora or AWS in general, remember that FAANG is a good investment target but isn't guaranteed to be a good employer. If you were able to crack AWS interview, then you are smart enough to pass any other interview with a bit more preparation. If you still decided to join - make yourself a favour and find some inside about the team from LinkedIn. I hesitated about whether to share my experience, because probably I can be deanonymized. However why I should be afraid of this if I'm just describing how it was? #amazon #aws #aurora #cringe
Great write up. Thanks for warning everyone considering this org/company
Sorry about your experience. Do you know anything about Project Santos
Lol
Umm.. I really am anxious about joining that team
Heard many Amazon, AWS sad depressing stories, this adds to then... Good that you shared, will help new aspirants (who r mad for big techies) to decide and make sound decision!!
Not to defend Amzn, but Europe is not the place to work on interesting parts of Aurora. Palo Alto or Seattle should have more options. It’s common among FANG to have the most attractive projects on HQ campus
I disagree. Amazon, especially AWS is OPS all the way.
Yeah but in Europe you get mostly downsides (on call, ops) without an upside, like critical features development
I thought you are referring to why AWS aurora is not a good database. Suggest you to add "team" to the title.
your experience makes me think again of having a manager rating app/website to save future hires working for an as** manager. I had to leave from my previous job in a short time due to shitty manager
Looks like a winning startup idea to me. Blind but to rate managers
Usual Amazon hiring tactics by promising a role that does not exists. Anything and everything at AWS is operational but they don’t let that information out to candidates. I would say you did a good job on making a better design that influenced change in your teams work. That work would likely not stand too strong for your promotion to L5. A few other such wins are required. So I think you had wrong expectations for getting promoted within a year.
On the one hand you are right, on the other: I felt that I'm downleveled several weeks after joining and the fact that I was able to pass SDE2 bar for other companies supports this assumption. Another supporting fact is that I had 2 people in my team joined as SDE2 with 10-12 yoe, one of them left after 2 months for SDE3 at Facebook. So it seems that downleveling is smth common at least at AWS Aurora. And in this situation in my opinion it's not an optimal way for an employee to perform on a higher level for lower money for 1.5 years just to finally end up being on his level.
I don’t think passing a bar for SDE2 at two other companies after 1-2 years at Amazon justifies your promotion comparison at Amazon. It does show you have the knowledge and experience for SDE2 and maybe Amazon hired at awrong level. Once in at a level 4, it takes more than technical skills to get an L5. Also, for L5 one needs to have expertise in more than one technical area, think big etc. it’s not that easy for people with mainly operational work to make L5. I can rant about the promotion criteria and process for days. The wort promotion process I have seen.
Cringe indeed 🤮
Aurora Europe team is System Engineer and Operations team, not development team. They do hire SDEs sometime to help out with the tool, but the leadership and majority of the team is still System Team engineer only. You have written such a long email, but you should have checked the title of your peers and your manager and should have realized that you are not part of a development team. Why you are putting blame on others. Also, if you want to do good work in AWS, as others has pointed out, move out of Europe. Only Vancouver (Canada) and US locations in AWS has good quality work with faster promotions. Aurora is flagship product for AWS and has received numerous awards externally
Yes it was my fault not to check it before joining, that's why I'm warning others. It doesn't justify Amazon for posting false positions though: I have a full description of the position saved, and there is no any single word about ops.
Well, you got an important life lesson, if there are too many red flags - GTFO. I have also learnt it and I only give a new place 2-3 months.
Cars
Yesterday
1951
Cyber truck killer: Chinese version of EV truck
Ask Blinders
20h
923
Why Pronouns shit captured US ? I don’t see this anywhere else
India
15h
2981
Why is it so G*damn difficult to move money out of India
Health & Wellness
14h
881
Issues with sleep
AMA
Yesterday
3124
I have worked at TikTok US core tech for 3 years. AMA.
Sounds like typical Amazon experience. Nothing new here.