Rant at being an SDE at Amazon

Amazon
kukariku

Go to company page Amazon

kukariku
Apr 4 74 Comments

Why the FUCK do you call the position "SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT ENGINEER" if all I fucking do is follow documentation after documentation to migrate X shit to Y shit. Less than 20% of my time is actual software development, maybe even 10%.

In my internship lasting 3 fucking months, I have learned several times more than in Amazon.

Why do people stay in these positions is beyond me. Is really working a little less than 40h and doing shit work better than working 50h doing actual, proper work? Fucking hell, this is why these people do not grow as engineers.

Fucking monkey work. You could hire a chimp to do the oncall tasks instead.

TC: 100K
YOE: <1

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TOP 74 Comments
  • Meta
    fomosapien

    Go to company page Meta

    fomosapien
    SDE is Software Documentation Engineer
    Apr 4 1
    • Flagged by the community.

  • LOL this is literally my life. Been in AWS for 1.5 years and have written ZERO lines of code. Documentation and prfaq's all day. Luckily I barely work 3 hours a day tbh.
    Gotta do side projects to remember how to code
    Apr 4 8
    • Google / Eng
      ABC-CEO

      Go to company page Google Eng

      ABC-CEO
      yL56, are you L6? When you're not designing aren't you busy doing patches, code reviews, migrations, customer tickets, dashboard investigation? Who's executing your design? Aren't you stuck with buggy dependencies?
      Apr 4
    • Ya L6. My team is mostly research oriented so we don't have many (or any really) code reviews, migrations, tickets, dashboard etc.
      Also, designs take 5000 approvals at amazon so everything moves at a snails pace.
      We have a few legacy systems that the L4/L5s monitor and thats about it
      Apr 4
  • Amazon / Eng
    -(.)-(.)-

    Go to company page Amazon Eng

    -(.)-(.)-
    Speaking of oncall, I'm terrified of my upcoming one
    Apr 4 5
  • Walmart
    .hack//

    Go to company page Walmart

    .hack//
    🍌
    Apr 4 0
  • Meta
    k6Ggs3na0f

    Go to company page Meta

    k6Ggs3na0f
    Sounds like a bad team.

    Also, don't come to Meta. SWEs basically do everything so in beginning stages of projects it's a lot of documentation
    Apr 4 8
    • Amazon
      kukariku

      Go to company page Amazon

      kukariku
      OP
      Thanks @Meta. Applied to Meta a few weeks ago, got rejected from CV round, probably not qualified enough for experienced roles and over-qualified for grad roles.
      Apr 4
    • Amazon
      GameMaster

      Go to company page Amazon

      GameMaster
      My buddy was in AWS and did nothing but write configs for the first 2 years, so definitely happens in AWS. Also heard this is common in SCOT org. Outside of that, this not normal at all.
      Apr 5