Genuine answers only - Why do Amazonians feel burnout?
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Unfair PIP process, even if you are a top performer, you getting PIPed is influenced heavily by manager, and/or your backstabbing teammates influencing the manager I haven’t been PIPed (atleast not yet) but after 3 years of performing well and a manager change, my gut says something is amiss
Politics is everywhere. At least at Amazon you get interesting work
How did you avoid PIP for 3 years? Working 12+ hours?
There’s pretty much a limitless amount of things you can work on here. If you’re unable to switch teams and uninterested in your work, then the burnout will be quick. But that’s true with any job. If you like survival of the fittest kinda environment, your manager isn’t a snitch, and don’t feel like you’re at the lowest 10% performance-wise, then you’ll be fine 😂 If you survive the next 2-5 years, everything else down the road will be a breeze in comparison.
I'm curious how the pip culture works at Amazon. Say, a manager has 10 devs reporting to him, should he put one in the plan even if they're doing good? What if there are only 5 reportees?
Constant pressure to do EVERYTHING while starving team of resources. Manager encourages competition among my peer group of SDMs and then demands collaboration. balance and prioritization get lip service.
When I worked at a Seattle non-FAANG we would still get an influx of burnt out Amazonians interviewing for the chill culture of the company. I don't think I ever passed a single Amazonian. The biggest reason being that when I wanted to deep dive onto their technical tasks there wasn't a lot they could give me. Ie it boiled down do the fact that they had a lot of busy work but not a lot of time to grasp what they were doing to relay it in an interview setting.
I'm an Amazonian that has done 99.98% ops and documentation work and virtually no dev work. It's the same for the rest of my team. Fortunately, I have good work life balance where I work about 35 - 40 hours per week. I'm mentally exhausted and I feel that the longer I stay here, the less I have to show for my experience. Is it possible to burn out where I'm underworked? Anyways, I'm Leetcoding in my free time and casually interviewing around. Internally, roles have been open and shut since there's already a queue of people waiting for a team match while the hiring manager tells me I have to do like 2 - 3 rounds of technical screenings. 🙁
Insightful.
Everything I do is dictated by the SDE 3s on my team. I no longer try and come up with innovative ways to code, I just do what I am told. The work is mind numbingly boring, I’m not sure how much value we are even providing. It’s a slog and I’d leave if we weren’t in a pandemic.
To people commenting ops work - is it so messed up/complex that it can't be automated with scripting languages?
AWS guys busy in forking open source projects and then adding some bells and whistels before selling to corporates. That is tedious job and hence fatigue.
Copy open source projects and change Kubernetes to AKS, storage to S3, database to DynamoDB in its source code. Then ship it as AWS product. Sounds like forking but making all open source work seamlessly on NAWS is too much work and not a good work! The good work in that is done by L6
It sucks here
Which aspect?
Build times