Amazon (AWS) vs Google Engineering Resident

Intel
Sfcx75

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Sfcx75
Mar 12, 2019 12 Comments

I am a new grad with offers from AWS in Seattle and Google engineering residency in Mountain View as a SWE.

The total compensation for AWS is about 8K more for first year and 4500 less in the second year. And I do realize that AWS is in a cheaper location. However I am much more interested in long term compensation vs short term. I know that Google pays for performance and has good refreshers. I am not struggling financially by any means. I have a very good amount of savings and never paid for school.

The engineering residency is a one year role (that could potentially be 6 month long) that apparently has close to a 90% conversion rate. I never interviewed for Google SWE and never failed that interview. I was just directly referred to eng res and did well on the interviews. I talked to a good bit of converts and all of them claim they don't know anyone that didn't convert to full time. However from what I hear once you convert, your TC will be on the lower side of L3. You get to rotate between teams and pick one based on available head count.

I do realize that amazon has the higher TC (given the location) and is offering me to join a great org (AWS). I like the cloud market and see growth there. Also Amazon is the leader by far in the market. However, I have also consistently heard bad things about amazon culture. This includes frugality, easy PIP and non reasonable expectations. Which leads to bad work life balance. Its risky for me to figure out if all this is true or not. Also the perks and benefits just aren't there compared to Google (eng res gives you all the perks and benefits as a full time).

I think the optimal solution would be to go to AWS and go hope to get into Google later, but that is a huge gamble. Although I am confident in my abilities, these tech interviews have a lot of randomness in them. Which means that I might never get the opportunity to join Google later on.

I do want to eventually join Google during my career. So my options are either gamble or take the Google offer now.

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