TL:DR at the bottom of the post. Lots of venting and drama starts here :) Hi, good people 🙏 Ex-Amazon dev here. Got hired at Amazon as L5, had 2.5 YoE leading dev teams of 4-8 people before that. I joined Amazon because FAANG, looks good on my resume, It seemed like a fun adventure at the time. Boy, my ideals crashed quickly - landed in the org with a ton of legacy, detached from reality senior SDM that only knew how to play politics and very few senior engineers. The team was new and felt cool, our manager was trying to make a change, but it all drowned in politics, other managers pushing toy projects to get a promo, clueless principal engineer who didn't really have an overview of the entire system and a bunch of unowned code migrating between teams, because people that built it are long gone and new team split didn't explicitly assign domains from code perspective. Being a huge Coral-based monolith didn't help this codebase either. In 1 year out of 3 teams reporting to our L7, 2 were completely disbanded, including managers, because of how toxic everything became. This was the first company ever where I've been told that having a product owner is a luxury and SDEs can figure out what is needed themselves. The problem was that SDEs were not exactly asked to help design and build a product. Instead we would receive some stupid goal impossible to hit because of all the legacy, no commitment to long-term design and refactoring, a bunch of smaller projects and freaking SAS being a bitc*. Losing my train of thought here. Oh yes, so 2 teams under our L7(15 people give or take - a lot of good talent) either left the org or the company in one year. I've tried another org - I had an understanding manager willing to invest in his people, good leadership on L8 level, but I guess at that point I was just too hurt by Amazon and how it can be. So I left and joined a startup with a cooler techstack, promising field, a lot of product people mostly available for questions, remote culture, etc. We still have our pains of growing company, a lot of processes need to be established, monitoring isn't great and engineering feels a bit distanced from infra (different timezones and remote work does not help either), but I would say we are moving in the right direction. In 3 months my teamlead left and I decided to try and get the role, since I already have some idea of what I want to achieve. It's not easy, it takes time to build trust with an existing team, but I think I am making steps in the right direction by trying to fix missing links of communication between product and team, establish some sort of ownership and pride for what we build and try to focus on showing my people how we can be better. What I do see though is that a lot of remote folks in the org either don't give a *uck or are just bad engineers and at such moments I miss people that I worked at Amazon with. I miss design documents, monitoring built as a part of your code, I miss meaningful CoEs (don't confuse it with "managers said we have to do a CoE, so VP doesn't *uck their brain" CoEs) and believe it or not I miss on-call as an idea of having a 3rd line support (even though I don't agree on 24/7 rotation especially on flaky systems that don't get tech debt addressed and are just dragged into the future as is). I am not actively looking for a job - I want to make sure that I make a change at the current org, but I do consider going back to Amazon or other similar companies eventually, hence probing the ground on what is currently available :) What am I looking for in the next place of employment: 1. Committed senior leadership - I want people that think strategically and try to keep tech debt at a reasonable level. I don't mind pushing feature work at lower quality in favor of early delivery, but we should pay the tech debt consistently. 2. Fun domain - I think I've built a fair share of CRUDs and internet stores - so looking for a company with an actual business domain. 3. Good salary obviously :) This turned out a bit longer then I expected - I guess I just re-opened some of the Amazon inflicted wounds and spilled the blood all over here ;) Anyway - looking forward to reading your suggestions! TL:DR: Ex Amazon dev, happy with my Team Lead job at startup, feeling like eventually wanna try myself as SDM L6 in challenging environment. Looking for suggestions :) Total YoE: 8 YoE as dev at Amazon: almost 2 YoE as team lead: 3 Salary when leaving Amazon: ~CAD130k base, CAD220k total. Current TC: CAD185k base +15k sign on + potential annual bonus 16-32k depending on performance of the company. Desired TC: I need MORE!!! I guess 350-400k is the least to convince me to prep for interviews again xD Have fun in the comments! #amazonleadership #techdebt #longpost #starryeyedboy #thankyoupeeps #imissfaang
Good luck. Vancouver’s TC is in a shithole
levels.fyi seems to suggest that my ask is not that unreasonable, but it is definitely not as great as Seattle - which is a mystery to me all things considered. If Amazon paid Seattle salary in Vancouver - that would poach a lot of talent in no time. The cost of living is not that different anyway.
COL is actually higher in Vancouver and housing prices are also higher. It will take some time (who knows how long) to match Seattle’s TC.
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Sorry about all the drama, we have Elon 👯♀️
Feel bad for you. You've got it worse xD