Moving to Salesforce as software engineer from Amazon?
A good friend of mine works at Salesforce and he is very happy, working there for almost 8 years, as an Architect now. I'm "OK happy" at Amazon (across the street from Salesforce in SF) ; it's intense and rewarding, but I've seen a lot of people leaving Amazon left and right, moving to places like Google, FB, Uber, etc. My friend can get me an interview with Salesforce for this coming Monday... the problem is that I'm very rusty interviewing. He thinks I'll be fine and additionally, I could interview multiple times. However, other friends tell me to use my salesforce interview as a 'burner' interview to start looking at other 'better' companies.
So, I have contradictory (and strong) opinions here. My friend who actually works at Salesforce says it's awesome vs my other friends who 'heard' salesforce is not a good engineering company. So, should I cancel my screening salesforce phone interview and actually prepare for it or just use it as a 'burner' interview?
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Salesforce pay is pretty terrible, I'm moving to a tier 1 company, same level (L5) and my pay is going up 50%.. my current TC is 230k.
Salesforce is great if you're ready to retire. If you want to work hard, just know that your team will coast while you do all the heavy lifting and earning the same amount as them. The only thing you would earn is promo 1 or 2 quarters earlier. Salesforce very rarely gives RSU refreshers.
I would heavily discourage going from Amazon to Salesforce unless it's your only option.
Now, with a little more context. Another friend of mine from Stanford has a very small finance project that he would like me to help him with. It's small enough that I could work on it on weekends over about 6 months. The problem is that at Amazon I work 60+ hrs/week on a regular basis. Furthermore another incident at Amazon: I told my team **a month in advance** that I needed to take 2 vacation days (to take my mom to the hospital but I only told my manager the reason; to everyone else i said I was taking 2 PTO days). I put my OOO in my team's calendar and notified everyone about it via email (plus I added the standard OOO email autoreply). When I came back someone had reported me to my manager that I left without personally informing her that I was taking vacation days and she couldn't do part of her work because she was blocked waiting on my feedback. So, I cannot imagine dedicating a few weekends while at Amazon. That would be the main reason I would consider Salesforce, because of their WLB policy.
I know it's very risky to switch jobs like that, but if it goes well with my friend, we could engage in maybe bigger projects.