So I wanted all the bananas and joined Amazon as an SDE II (comp was almost 4x what I was making before, hard to turn down.) Thing is, I've worked in IT my whole life, and completed a coding bootcamp (Codesmith) which led to this opportunity. To be fair, the bootcamp was an absolute joke, and I went to college for CS about a decade ago (so DS/Algos came naturally to me) and my Leetcode game is strong, but my true coding experience was the bootcamp and not much more. I'm currently wrapping up my first month and just got assigned my new manager (who is also new) and am terrified of failing, but I don't have the slightest clue what is expected of me on a day to day once the work starts rolling in. Can any Amazonians or professional devs give me insight into what I need to do to stay relevant? I am committed to no work life balance and working/studying 12-14 hours a day for at least the next year because I understand what I have to overcome, but any advice/direction would be great since this is absolutely a life changing opportunity. Worst case, I get PIPed in 6 months and still come out ahead financially and leverage it into a less stressful job. Previous experience was in IT consulting and cloud engineering in Azure. TC: 95K -> 350K #amazon #engineering #swe
Nobody really comes in, so unfortunately can’t do that. However, I’ve been building a strong rapport with my team and everyone likes me a lot, I think. I used to be a Team Lead before here so I’m experienced with people management and know how to research and deliver.
aws_person gave you right advice, delivering results is your currency to success in Amazon. Initial 6 months can be brutal but focus on learning and delivering, ask early ask often and always think of the bigger picture.
You will do good.
New at Amazon, but not new to managing. Why is that a yellow flag?
She held her last position for almost 8 years as a senior manager (got promoted there to senior) for one of the big banks, so I’m not afraid of her being a crap manager. She’s been leaning on me a lot for internal Qs like where to find info and who to talk to and I’ve been able to deliver since I’ve been taking notes like crazy.
Where are you located ?
NYC
If you’re committed, you won’t get pipped. A lot depends on your manager but even a bad manager wont want to lose a hard worker. I would focus on building relationships with team members as well as with people on sister teams. You’ll need their help to really make an impact. Learn your team’s code base well, understand why you’re building things and the tradeoffs. Try to get assigned impactful projects over busywork. When yearly perf reviews come around you need to point to things that you’ve delivered and show how they’ve benefited the team/org, so journal what you’ve accomplished throughout the year. Work with L6 and L7 engineers as much as possible. Congrats on the offer and Good luck!
Thank you - I am absolutely committed and have been spending every waking moment just doing what I can to make sure I am prepared! I expect things will ramp up soon, so hopefully all goes well!
Congratulations bro👏🏻
Hey OP, congrats on the new opportunity. Give the following two books a read if you haven’t already: system design interview by Alex Xu and clean code. These books will leave you with a wealth of practical knowledge. Attend postmortems as an observer. What happens in these war rooms sessions will seriously speed up your learning about relevant systems, peers, debugging techniques
Fuck off, I'm L6 at 250k I'm leaving this shithole
Not just that. People 1 or 2 levels below who are next to useless make more than me.
How am I supposed to justify working more than 2-3 hours a day?
Did you had any competing offers? Did they provided you 350K or you negotiated?
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Cool! Just set the expectations clear with the manager. Understand what is expected of you and then negotiate timelines and work towards it.