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Hi all, tl;dr; Stay far far away if you can help it. I apologize in advance that this is yet another don't join Amazon post. I just feel that it is my civic duty to warn others to stay away if they have any other *viable* options (I know not everyone has this opportunity, and sometimes financially you have to take a chance). However, I would caution anyone who can get into at least any other viable company to go there instead. My background: I previously worked at another large respected tech company, and wanted to come to Amazon because I'm a bit of a nerd and thought the AWS scale was impressive. However, I quickly realized what a sh*t show this place is (pardon my french!). - Internal tooling is significantly behind industry and open source standards. The build system is a joke, that constantly breaks and silly issues have to be resolved. It's difficult to even make a simple hello world commit and verify everything works. Forget about changing files across multiple files or packages! - There seems to be no focus on improving oncall load, which was super high. My teams solution was just to use manual processes to resolve issues. They didn't want to spend time on automation "because you must focus on the customer". Basically who cares about engineering quality if it doesn't impact the bottom line customer. - My team would work weekends and late at night to meet artificial deadlines. I have literally never done that in my career, and don't think that's a hallmark of good planning or should be normalized. - Going in I did not realize just how rare L6+ is. It seems like only 10% of the company is L6 or above. At my previous company almost half of engineers were at this pay level or above, and I had multiple ex principal Amazonians on my team doing normal SDE work. What this means for you is promotion is very hard, and salaries are low across the board for majority of engineers that could be senior/staff etc. at other companies. - The comp structure especially around refreshers, and bonus is low or non-existent. A friend literally only received a 2K raise from L5 to L6 because they were already making more money than "their band". That's right if the stock goes up Amazon gives you less! But don't even count on getting any refreshers. Oh, and bonuses they literally don't exist. Your salary is also hard capped at 160K. This is real dumb as many companies you can get even up to the 250K range and you're not tied to just stock. - Managers love to micromanage and babysit. There is significantly less autonomy, and much more oversight. As an example I couldn't believe there were sprint tickets for integration tests. At my last company these are easy to create (because of tooling in Amazon sometimes whole weeks have to be allocated to making simple tests of services), these were just expected as a normal part of work and my manager wouldn't be influencing these decisions or checking in on such trivial progress. - There is a focus on leadership principles which comes across as corny and cultish. In discussions rather than focusing on data or logic people just bring up "focus on the customer", "dive deep", etc. as a be all end all argument. - There are set quotas for performance improvement plans, leading to a fearful crowd of engineers. You can be managed out even with average performance. There is no compassion. When I knew this was a failed experiment I started interviewing again, and quickly found a job that easily out payed my Amazon salary, and yes like almost any other top company I've seen they give refreshers per year, and yearly bonus which goes up with performance. Please if you can avoid Amazon don't come here. With that said it's not like it's torture or something it may very well be your best option and you could still learn some things :). There's just so much better!
I took a pay cut because I was a bit bored of Facebook, and like you wanted to see AWS’s scale since it seemed awesome for customers. I agree with all you said, the dev infra is a complete joke, and yet Amazonians still somehow try and defend it. Also can’t emphasize enough how cut throat the culture is, and mis leading offer letters due to no bonus / refreshers ever, capped base salary, and terrible vesting schedule (basically nothing for two years) I quickly went back to FB :) lesson learned!
tbf most amazonians have no clue about what it means to have good tooling. They think aws is best, which it is for storage and database, but CI/CD sucks, version set sucks, brazil/apollo sucks.
Which company did you end up going to if you don’t mind sharing? I am in the same boat, starting to feel iffy by my 3rd month here and by end of 4th month coming to conclusion this was what you called a “failed experiment” (for same reasons you mentioned). They claim it’s the result of the “scale” why ops is so bad, but in fact it’s the result of poor planning, short-term decision making (technical, not business) along with a complete idiotic belief that they are somehow the best.
I’d rather not say just yet to not dox myself. But it’s another large tech company definitely with a better reputation (not saying much for Amazon). Also part of the whole tech FANG crowd. I agree with you! I actually learned that it’s possible to have scale with bad technical architecture if you apple enough bandaids cover up with high oncall loads, work sdes hard on menial tasks and lower quality! I would encourage you to try jumping ship. This will be the only short stint at a company on my resume, so I hope it won’t be a red flag. I guess this was just a life experience that I gained from the “experiment”!
I agree and that seems to be the approach Amazon took (consciously or not), but what I don’t understand is why not hire a bunch of non-engineers, teach them to run those manual scripts and read runbooks and have them do the work while paying them a 1/3 of what they pay engineers to do a non-rocket science job. That would save company tons of money and would align better with their “frugality” principle 😂. Anyway, thanks a lot for the encouraging and detailed post, my plan was to try switching internally first but somehow I just don’t feel about this company anymore. Will start applying externally, fortunately out of precaution I never stopped leetcoding when took this job.
AWS’ learning curve is also a curse.
OP you're spot on. The only thing they're good at is to scare everyone into working nights and weekends to deal with ridiculous tech debt and on-call load because the service was written by someone in a hurry, uh I mean "Bias for Action". The LPs really get to you. I used to be paged in the middle of the night and the first thought was Customer Obsession, or Ownership, or Dive Deep... It took a while to flush the LPs out of my system.
Fuck this company
When I first came to amazon and saw apollo, I was shocked and felt sorry for myselt, been here for 1.5 year want to leave to smaller company or likes of top paying fb
Apollo as in the GraphQL data layer?
I still dont know waht is does entirely but certaily not releated to GraphQl
At Amazon working is not a problem, it's the incompetent backstabbing managers from who you have to protect yourself while delivering results. Manager is not there to support their reports.
Very informative summary. Why does tooling seem so bad? Why is Bias for Action seem to outweigh good engineering practices? I have worked for a small company and they had working Jenkins/Bamboo pipelines for development. Amazon is a TRILLION dollar company so no excuse for being cheap. Frugal is when you save on some things but spend more on other important things. If they met halfway with G’s engineering practices, they could be the first $3 trillion company.
G hadn’t released anything innovative in a decade. They’re cloud is garbage compared to AWS
What innovations did AWS release?
I confirm everything you say. Stay away if you value your health
Amazon sucks! I worked at Amazon, and relate to every single thing. Another thing that was difficult was how harsh and ego-filled most colleagues were.
Amazon is toxic culture, however we just need to accept that some people thrive in such environment unfortunately. Great post anyway.