"The mission of the Amazon Developer Platform team is to accelerate Amazon.com shopping experience development via empowering and delighting developers."
Ugh. I hate that everything has to be delightful now.
how do your jobs delight you? My experience - back from when jobs only wanted you to have fun but it seems to be the same thing - is they give you foosball and ping pong and maybe a gym membership - ok also some times free soft drinks and good cafeterias?
So I guess I like some of that stuff now that I've listed it all but I was never really delighted, maybe just happy I could get a coke with my burger.
I guess to delight me I need magic doorways and 1920s era Santa Claus (none of this post modern stuff where Santa is a trained killer who enslaves elves or stuff, I don't like it)
The parent post was a parody of a user story in a very common format, possibly intended to highlight how little concrete information "delightful" conveys.
When something is terrible, then becomes not-so-terrible (like the JIRA issues page), it makes me happy. That's what they mean. Solving developer's problems so they can make them happier, or, for the jaded one, at least not as miserable
That has its limits. Corporate lawyers and investment banking analysts (from a Financial Times report [0]) receive absurd compensation, but still report high rates of burnout and mental health issues due to incredibly long hours (95 hour work weeks with five hours of sleep a night, according to first-year analysts at Goldman Sachs) and high demands.
People who are turned off by this language are not the people the team wants. They want engineers who feel deeply satisfied when things work and work well because those are the ones that will obsess over the consumer experience.
If you aren't the sort of person to feel any sort of "delight" about good tools, then the job probably isn't a good fit for you because the responsibility of the job is to build tools.
Nah, they're looking for those who get that endorphin rush when something works which they then exploit. Seen this since the '80s. "Young, smart, willing to work til you drop - you're our kind of hire"
This is an interesting perspective, but it may not be necessarily true that: 'If you aren't the sort of person to feel any sort of "delight" about good tools, then the job probably isn't a good fit for you because the responsibility of the job is to build tools.'
A professional can be perfectionist (in a good, not procrastinating way) and hold high standards to their work about creating good tools. Perhaps this is captured by 'delight,' but the language seems phrased in a way that 'delight' means showing positivity, bright energy, and explicit enthusiasm for work.
I think it's better for both the individual and the organization when there's a certain level of detachment with the work (so there's commitment to perfectionism but not super high enthusiasm that can be lead to burnout and health problems), but still high standards to ship a good product.
In my own experience, I've struggled the most with burnout specifically while on a DX team. The team was managed and entirely comprised of engineers transferred from other departments, most of whom had little-to-no interest in HCI, human factors, or design.
Every decision was made according to some arbitrary dogma about consistency or some other abstract CS principle. The manager was explicitly against sourcing any feedback from the teams we served when determining our priorities and roadmap. The result was tools that were essentially unusable, and endless refactoring from one tech stack configuration to another without actually solving any real-world problems.
For me, burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work. I agree with the general consensus that delight is an awkward word to use here, but it does at least signal that the team is run with a user-first mentality.
Thank you for sharing, I see more of where you’re coming from.
> burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work
This is a lesson I was grateful to have picked up from HN about a year ago. The thread is at [0], and the quote from the submitted article was:
“Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.”
This helped motivate a personal decision to leave a job where initiative and extra effort wasn’t noticed or rewarded (despite planning to stay a while due to inertia), and only seek work where I’m empowered to do the best work I can. I plan to avoid mistaking my identity for my job position at a company, but I would like to similarly aspire to be a professional who cares about doing good work for the user (versus just clocking in).
I believe Google offers 80% time (4 day work weeks), but I'm not sure if they post positions like that, or if you need to be hired full time and then transition to 80% time.
Everyone I know in Google on 80% (which is surprisingly many people) has started full time. I imagine some full week trainings you might want to start with would be quite awkward if part of participants would be skipping a random day of the week. Or, awkward if you've been promised you can keep spending your Wednesdays with your kids, but then suddenly need to stay in the office.
In my experience, Google doesn't offer 80% time. I switched to 80% time at Google (and 80% salary/vesting) but that was my suggestion after a number of years. It wasn't straightforward to transition (I think it needed VP approval), but I didn't encounter opposition either. I found that 80% time is a much bigger quality of life benefit than you might expect, since it's a 50% increase in the number of days you have off.
Maybe thats European thing, but this is quite common offer for developers. I guess companies do not advertise this option, but more often than not they will accept it. When thinking about my team (8 developers) I think there are maybe two people with 9 to 5 x 5 days a week arrangememt.
My guess is it’s easier in Europe. My guess is if you only work 29 hours you won’t get health insurance where in Europe you still would qualify. Many people (myself included) are the “health insurance breadwinner” with a wife and kids that has no option other than a 40+ hour gig.
Are you in Netherlands or something like that? Here in Poland I only know junior developers that are doing 1/2 or 3/5 time and finishing bachelors or doing masters simultaneously.
The same thing that happens when normal hours come up against a deadline. If most weeks are 32 and then occasionally they are 40 that is still reduced hours compared to most at 40 and an occasional 48.
There's either a dark pattern or a crazy bug on the cookie popup -- to turn off analytics cookies, you actually have to press the on part of the switch to toggle it off. Totally backwards and misleading. If you press Off, it stays On.
I have seen this a few times before. One-click to enable cookies, multiple clicks where you have to understand the double-negatives to disable. Definitely a dark pattern.
"Disabling cookies is not recommended for the best experience. Don't disable do not track?" CANCEL/CONTINUE
Technically true, in Seattle, but a large portion of comp comes in RSUs above that mark. You can see on levels.fyi that new hires in the 5-10 YOE range are getting total comps in the 3 or 400s pretty consistently.
Yes, which is a problem. Amazon employees have been watching themselves get steady, significant raises via stock vesting for years, but AMZN flattened out in mid-2020 and the company's done very little to account for that, so everybody's raises have started to dry up.
Amazon employees get RSUs. The difference between stock options and RSUs is that options are worthless if the stock price doesn't go up, but RSUs are worth the stock price, so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop.
> so it doesn't have to go up, it just needs to not drop.
Amazon compensation packages assume 15% increase in RSU value year over year, so when you get a 4 year grant as a new hire, your target compensation will be projected based off 15% year over year growth, which typically means less stock granted in year 4 compared to year 3.
With a stagnant stock price, many Amazon employees are potentially at risk of not hitting their year 3 target compensation.
I'm definitely aware of that. Amazon's comp was never competitive, and stagnant (or even declining) stock over a multi-year period exacerbates the issue for sure. I say this as someone who recently left AWS, in large part for comp related issues (actually kinda loved the job I eventually fell into, alas).
I’m not sure whether everyone else is getting poorly paid at Amazon, or whether my clique is just doing well, but I’ve found that my salary is (was) in line with the higher end of the market. The declining/flat stock price changes that though. I know quite a few Amazonians looking to leave once their two years are up*
* Amazon pay a signing bonus for the first two years in lieu of RSUs. The idea is that you could sell your RSUs to make up the difference. The problem is that, for anyone who started in the last two years, your RSUs won’t make up the difference between your base salary and what you were getting as a bonus.
Market has gone up, too - if you're a recent hire, your comp targets are actually above those of your seniors. As an incoming L4 you can make up to 200k now, whereas 140 or 150 was considered 'good' 5 or 6 years ago. L6s who are pulling in mid 3s can leave and get 5-600k elsewhere very easily. It's not that the amazon money is bad per se, just that the industry and talent market are kind of crazy right now.
L6 at Amazon is two levels up from the bottom (“senior engineer”)? Where are they making $500k-$600k a year?
From levels.fyi, FAANG and the unicorns are almost all in the $300k-$400k range. Have offers gone up $200k in the last few months? Or are you assuming people are moving up a level?
The top of the band has probably gone up more than the median offer, and most companies didn't increase their bands by that much (yet). This is definitely a case of "the future is here - just not evenly distributed yet".
Sounds more like experienced than cynical to me. In my experience, job descriptions and even the answers you get during interviews are not so much outright lies, as aspirational fabrications you have to take with a grain of salt.
Job descriptions are forward looking statements; the position may be entirely different.
Here are some of the many possibilities:
The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend.
Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release".
The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.
Assuming that Amazon is a profit-maximizing corporation that will fully exploit it's human resources to the extent possible, and that forward-looking but non-binding statements cannot be relied on to limit that might be called cynicism but to me it looks a lot like realism.
I know that's the popular cynical view, but I'd think with such a position (especially given that it was advertised as reduced hours), there would be 20% lower expectations as to what you'll accomplish. In other words, they'd expect it would take five weeks for you to do what someone else can do in four.
I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations.
Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.
there have been many studies that show that people who consistently work less hours are more productive per hour. generally going from 40 hours to 32 hours i'd be surprised if the difference in productivity was more than 5-10% (it may even be positive).
nay Amazon SW is very demanding as far as I can tell(many friends work there), yes it has higher pay but if you divide it by hours, it's not standing out above other companies at all. have a life.
From what I've heard of working at Amazon, this sounds like most likely you are expected to still put in the standard 80hrs/week, just cram it into Mo-Thurs (or maybe Sat-Thurs).
I find it reallllly hard to trust Amazon when it comes to working less. This really just sounds like a way to get someone to work the same amount for less pay (I assume the position has a paycut).
> As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams
In other words, when the janky build tools someone wrote >10 years ago break down, you're going to be on-call so much that you'll just run a landline into the back of your head, Matrix style.
IIRC it was in a trial period pre-pandemic. The impression I got was that they wanted to test a 4-day week, but worried it would be disruptive if only one or two team members were out on Fridays. Hence, 4-day teams.
Amazon gets a bad rap, but it can be a nice place to work as a developer. The overtime and pressure varies wildly from team to team, and you'd have to figure that people who choose to join a 4/3 team aren't the sort to press deadlines.
This listing looks like it is for a position which supports their internal developers and/or retail site. Those systems are probably fairly mature, so maybe it's a good business move to hire people to keep them running on a slow burn with better work/life balance.
Very common in Oil & Gas companies to offer 9/80 schedule where you work 9 hrs Monday - Thursday, 8 hrs Friday and this way every other friday can be off. There was another co offering 4/10 where every friday is off
Managers who have the power to do this can't allow their teams to work any less than the "default" 40hr week, because then the first time any outcome doesn't go as planned, the person most incentivized to knife them in the back in that company's politics has an easy way to do it: "See, we would have hit goal xxxx if Steve's team wasn't a bunch of lazy SOBs who take Fridays off!"
Heck, in many companies I've been in, I've even been made to feel inferior/lazy for not working a bunch of (obviously free) overtime. And I've never even worked for a startup where there was a realistic possibility of stock-option riches, where I can understand why some would be willing to make personal sacrifices for a couple years in the hopes of life changing exits.
The job is "reduced hours," so assuming you work more on the other days to make up for it is quite cynical IMO. You can choose to not believe the listing, but the benefit is stated clearly, and it isn't any less informative than typical US SWE job listings where you should still look into the company's work life balance (they're all nominally 40 hours).
Doesn't really seem meaningful when you can get a remote position at pretty much any company right now. As long as you're high performing you can work well below 40 hours, work pretty much whatever schedule you want, and everyone's happy.
Obviously don't make it so you couldn't get back to your computer within an hour. But that still gives you a ton of options for things to do and a way higher quality of life than almost all workers have.
The team doesn't work Fridays. Even if in other roles you can get by with < 40 hours, you'll be hard pressed to fully disconnect from work on Fridays. Having clear 3-days weekends every week is much nicer than just trying to take it easy but being available all 5 days, IMO.
That said, in the nominally-40hr roles you won't get paid less, so YMMV on what's better
FWIW, it's incredibly rare for someone to bug me on a Friday in my 5+ years of remote work across 3 companies (medical devices, scientific devices, and blockchain) in 3 completely separate stages of their life (early startup, mature startup, and 60+ year old established company).
nice way for the companies to hit back at the compensation growth. I knew they would find a way :) . Reduced hours -> reduced pay. While pushing the required responsibilities/deliveries up, not initially of course, yet slowly after the "honeymoon" back to the pre-reduced level and may be further up as the reduced hours at various places were anecdotally associated with higher performance.
>As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams and be the key technical advocate with partner teams. You will work with senior leaders across Amazon, finding solutions to multi-dimensional problems and driving a consistent tooling experience across the different parts of the Amazon.com product portfolio.
and the requirement is just 2 years of experience! May be it is just a team which can get away with anything - like either a pet project of a high VP or/and just a project pretty irrelevant to anything serious, ie. it doesn't look to me like a typical AMZN dev sweatshop.
Salesforce globally does 1 Friday off a month (adopted during Slack acquisition). However it's not enforced and the expectation is if you're meeting with someone external (eg customers) you move that date.
I mean one of these leadership principles is 'Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer', but at the same time they have attrition targets, that means there must be some zeroth law at amazon, that mandates some sort of catch... (a nagging suspicion is that all FAANGs are like that, maybe they drive themselves to be ruthless, in order to stay ahead of the pack)
leadership principles for amazon are just a bulleted list of qualities they want candidates to say they have. it's overly emphasized to look for these during hiring rounds. people prep answers to align with them, as it is the easiest route to get into faang
i think most of the answers here have some bad faith interpretation of the listing. i disagree. there's been small scale research about shorter work weeks not impacting productivity. there's a good chance that research is bs. they probably want to run an experiment in-house using their own dev productivity metrics.
I dislike the whole "reduced-hours" concept. It implies that this engineer would be working in an area that does not require cutting edge innovation and can get away with working 3 or 4 days per week while others work 5 or 6.
I think the job title should just be SDE; work times and other logistics can easily be clarified in the job description or during a phone screen.
It doesn't imply that to me. It could imply, for instance, that there is a lot of talent that is uniquely interested in a 4-day week rather than a 5-day week, and that this provides an opportunity for Amazon to attract that talent.
I also don't share the notion that "cutting edge innovation" is a type of work which would require more hours per week. Quite the opposite, actually.
Interesting to see following this thread (seemingly about Amazon) I happened upon the other day, discussing their internal issues and watering down of the interview process to be able to keep hiring engineers: https://www.reddit.com/r/cscareerquestions/comments/setxnt/p...
Highly skilled software engineers get to make their own hours, and don't have to look for a job that has reduced hours (and pay) on paper, since they can just AFK on a Wednesday and no one will say otherwise - because of their tenure and leverage.
The important part is output. If you produce enough work to satisfy your manager, and show up to enough meetings that nobody asks them where you are, when you work does not matter at all.
This is one of my favorite things about the job. Apart from a couple meetings, you really have complete control over your schedule - you aren't dictated by regular business hours or the opening and closing hours of markets. Such a far cry from the typical high school or college experience.
Sure. But not everybody wants to try to achieve those marks on 30h per week. Instead, they might prefer to achieve 75% of expectations on 30h per week.
The "do enough to not get fired" plan also leads to fundamental career stagnation, whereas a reduced schedule can actually still let you advance in your career.
It not that simple. Most engineers still want to get a good perf rating. Amazon plans projects with the assumption that everyone works 5 days a week. Therefore, 4 days a week means you plan at most 4 days a week. If you choose to take a day off every week, then you will be at least 20% more productive than your peers to output at the same level. Unless you assume that your peers are 20% less productive than you, you will be at a disadvantage by working only 4 days a week.
That's probably part of the reason they're finally rolling out this part time program after years of testing with roles only available on the HR software team.
Amazon seems to be finally seeing their chickens come home to roost after well over a decade of burning people out and developing a toxic reputation that keeps all the great people away.
And now that their stock is stagnant and out of hyper growth, the bleeding is likely accelerating.
It seems like programs like this are an attempt to try to incentivize (or, cynically, bait and switch) good engineers back in.
Having said that, it's a step in the right direction and I hope to see more companies embrace part time SW roles.
There are plenty of stories out there about teams hiring people for the sole purpose of having someone to fire to meet a culling quota. If there is a company initiative to cut dead weight every year, it's going to develop cliques and clubs of people who want to keep their jobs above all else.
I've also heard that people on those teams can generally be happy in their roles as long as they feel secure they aren't on the chopping block.
They treat their top level (principal) people fine but the others like trash. Forcing people to return to the office unless they get special permission from their team (something no one I personally know has ever gotten, although if you have a twitter account with at least 50k followers the odds goes up considerably.
Interesting. I find that Google is retirement home engineers. Netflix is top quality if they didn't join first in 2020. Meta is same as you. Microsoft is questionable.
But the Amazon thing is surprising a little. Some of the guys I've spoken to from there were fantastic!
I guess I could be a terrible judge. Or I could be over-indexing on the guys I've encountered. Or there's some team effect here that I'm missing.
I had a junior system admin working for me in ~2012. He wasn't bad, in general, but he was extremely dishonest. We had a failure in a raid volume and volunteered to do the work, got trashed at a trivia night and then completely destroyed the system before passing out. This was one of many, many issues with him that were all documented.
I have another friend, a woman, who had five years experience before working at Uber and several years there. She applied for a senior position but was denied. However, they did put her on the hiring committee for it.
My friend knew what happened with my junior system admin (and new him personally). The first thing she noticed was that his resume was completely made up- he gave himself a senior devops title, lied about his previous internship being a job, and otherwise grossly overstated his skillset. My friend on the hiring committee pointed all of this out, and said a simple reference check would resolve this.
He was hired for the senior position, she was treated like crap. He was later fired for stalking and sexually harassing a coworker. The hiring process at that company is just ridiculous.
I've seen a somewhat surprising amount of bad from Apple FWIW. Uber is kind of this weird snowflake because it grew its eng org way too fast then shed a ton of people in their layoffs.
In my observation, the really good people either climb through the ranks or they leave for non-unicorns (either for some technically interesting / otherwise fulfilling niche like edtech etc, or to create a startup/company of their own)
Good engineers can come from anywhere, just like bad engineers.
Engineers leave a company for three reasons:
Lack of career development opportunities -- Not being able to move up or grow in the way you want to. This is a sign of bad management.
Failure to perform -- Management and said engineer couldn't see eye to eye for whatever reason. Incompetent engineer or (worse) incompetent management.
Boredom -- Work has become stagnant, stale, or otherwise boring and management can't find a better place, or there's limited opportunities internally for someone to find new interesting things to do.
Only one of those reasons is truly something that should raise concern. Bad management makes good engineers leave.
Amazon's core problem isn't the engineering. The engineers there are sharp as tacks, in my experience. I am frequently in awe of the people I work with for their technical acumen in so many different fields.
But management training at Amazon is lacking. Managers are often ICs that have been drafted into management with little to no formal training and the amount of training that they get is often from their subordinates who were previously their peers. What little training outside "Just figure it out" seems to be mandatory HR-related content on how to handle the HR systems. That's it.
The Engineers in Defence look at all other Engineers like this. FAANG to me means your a sheeple who trades off dignity for aspiration. A Defence contractor just means your smart and well meaning and get unlimited budgets but ultimately your just a pawn in a large bureaucratic nightmare paid to keep your secrets secret along the way loosing all sense of self and freedom.
There are plenty of great engineers at Amazon, although most of them are long-timers. It's probably true that good engineers don't join Amazon any more.
I work on a team in AWS and while I am average there are many really strong engineers in my org. Some are stuck due to visa issues, some just really like the area we work in. We all know we are paid below market and many of my team members have left, but I will say some that stayed got a really nice out of cycle raise because attrition was so bad.
In my experience if people work 80% of the hours, they're at least 95% productive, because often on Fridays people don't start new things, or generally faff about, or are tired. Having an extra day off a week to recharge can work wonders for creativity, productivity, lower stress levels, finding solutions to awkward problems. I wonder if actually 80% hours leads to more output than the original 100% for a lot of people.
Most companies still expect people to document their availability and absences. Some people still frown upon those that don't follow the butt-in-seat rules. Some managers (I've had some really bad ones) will try to keep you under your thumb if they can.
Everything else equal, I would prefer to explicitly have the days off and not have to deal with that.
I think even highly skilled engineers end up needing to be available for certain kinds of meetings.
To whatever extent I'm highly skilled, I'd prefer that it be reflected in my responsibilities and compensation, rather than leverage to blow off meetings.
Yes. Communication and availability overlap is important to get certain kinds of things unblocked. Plus, career-wise, it's bad to be a vampire no one ever meets or sees regardless of electronic responsiveness within their working hours.
Although, I think butt-in-seat mentality was always broken if an employee could broadcast or interact from anywhere. There are certain kinds of pair programming, whiteboarding, co-design, collab, and conversations that lead to higher signal in-person vs. remote.
That’s why a lot of jobs have core office hours. My company’s main office works East Coast USA hours & we have a lot of team members in Europe, too. Unofficial our core hours tend to be like 9a to 1p eastern.
Do you think that sounds fair? Would you agree with other highly skilled individuals working a smaller subset of agreed hours due to their competency being high?
I have a bunch of friends that either work on dev tools, or used to. Relative to the rest of AMZN, thats the team you want to be for work-life balance and promotions :)
I've been trying to find a salaried position at a company for a while now. I've been offering 3 days per week for 50% salary and health care. This give a company that couldn't afford an engineer with 16 years of professional Rails experience at Apple, Intuit, and successful startups at the rate of a junior engineer. You get all the mentoring, team building, hiring experience. Still haven't had any serious takers yet, so I started woodworking instead. If anyone is interested in leaving teach to learn woodworking/furniture making, reach out!
I consulted long ago, but I just didn't really enjoy looking for clients, thinking about taxes/deductions, invoicing, and the like. I'm always open to helping out with consulting, but it isn't something I want to go out of my way to seek out.
I ask because I've never seen a company employee a software engineer for 3 days/week, at any price, but I've seen them pay a lot for contractors with 20-30 hours of availability per week
I've been pretty lucky getting 4 days a week at 80% plus health care, at several locations. Some of them had existing policies that 80% was the least you could work and still get health care though.
It may be that 3 day is pushing it too far, even at 50% instead of 60% of salary (or that may be too confusing to not have the salary be proportional).
I am pretty confident that I am 95% as productive at 4 days as I am at 5 days (and I'm a fairly productive engineer). But I take 80% of salary anyway, cause it's worth it.
(I also don't, even at 100%, make the 99th percentile incomes that many on HN seem to).
That's great to hear companies are open to four days for 80%. I'm surprised as engineer's salaries go up and up that there aren't more people looking to trade money for time.
Ah I'm not too far into my tech career (2 years) and wouldn't say I'm looking to get out quite yet (I'd like to pay my debts off first), but I'm curious to hear what you've learned about getting into woodworking. I can't find your email on your page though :(
Here are some of my big takeaways after just a few months:
- Hardwood is expensive. Very expensive. I get most my wood out of the scrap box and use that to practice techniques (bow tie inlays, dovetails, veneer making, epoxy, live edges).
- Quality tools are expensive. Very expensive. Even hand tools can easily be over $100 for a single chisel or rasp. Hand planes and hand saws will start at over $200 often times.
- The work is very rewarding.
- The people are very helpful. I reached out to a furniture maker on YouTube I've been enjoying and asked if I could come work and learn with him for a couple weekends and they were onboard.
- There are co-working spaces with full wood and metal shops. I belong to one and I'm there most weekdays for a few hours, but most of the others are running 1-3 person companies making quality furniture and art. It's great to be around. $200 a month for table saws, drill presses, band saws, planers, jointers, spindle/edge/disc/widebelt sanders, 10'x5' CNC.
- Community colleges and local woodworking associations offer lots of classes on a variety of topics and techniques. I took an initial five day course where I made a cutting board and stool. Since then I've taken a lathe classes and I have a measuring and marking class and a shaker tray class next week.
I've been a reduced hours engineer at AWS for almost 4 years and it's good. I'm not on a reduced hours team like this post, my teammates are full time. I work Monday thru Thursday for 80% pay, full benefits. Oncall is normal but if it causes me to work on weekends I take time off. Same if I have to work a Friday for a meeting or deadline. I've received a promotion while working part time.
Man, every time I see the total compensation for someone at a FAANG I wonder if I should switch. I get like 205k (cash+bonus, we don't do stock or RSUs) as a senior software engineer at the southern california office of a bay area company. Admittedly we get a truckload of PTO and company holidays (30 PTO and like 17 holidays) and the work/life balance is fantastic, but sometimes I wonder if I'm screwing myself over. All of my friends moved to the bay and took like 300-400k tc jobs at FAANG...
I used to work in AWS, and had a less-than-positive experience with the amount of hours I worked in Amazon. I hope that reduced-hour work becomes successful inside Amazon and out, but I worry that those in the position will sleepwalk into working far too many hours, as is what happened with me.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 219 ms ] threadUgh. I hate that everything has to be delightful now.
I want... the development experience to be delightful
So I can... be delighted
So I guess I like some of that stuff now that I've listed it all but I was never really delighted, maybe just happy I could get a coke with my burger.
I guess to delight me I need magic doorways and 1920s era Santa Claus (none of this post modern stuff where Santa is a trained killer who enslaves elves or stuff, I don't like it)
Too many places have horizontal silos, elaborate bureaucratic policies, throw it over the wall mentality
It's surprising some places pay engineers so much to fill out e-paperwork all day
While looking you dead in the face and saying "we've broken down all of our silos". Current job is this way.
"We are all DevOps"
Yet only one person is allowed to deploy, build pipelines, and provision resources.
No one's broken down any silos, they just changed the name on the land deed and kept the silos where they are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y8OnoxKotPQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYvhC_RdIwQ
- Charles Crumb
There's too much content now, and it's a race to the bottom as every piece tries to gain attention.
[0] (Paywalled, but to cite the source) https://www.ft.com/content/f4006248-eb05-49d2-a938-d70118c4c...
If you aren't the sort of person to feel any sort of "delight" about good tools, then the job probably isn't a good fit for you because the responsibility of the job is to build tools.
A professional can be perfectionist (in a good, not procrastinating way) and hold high standards to their work about creating good tools. Perhaps this is captured by 'delight,' but the language seems phrased in a way that 'delight' means showing positivity, bright energy, and explicit enthusiasm for work.
I think it's better for both the individual and the organization when there's a certain level of detachment with the work (so there's commitment to perfectionism but not super high enthusiasm that can be lead to burnout and health problems), but still high standards to ship a good product.
Every decision was made according to some arbitrary dogma about consistency or some other abstract CS principle. The manager was explicitly against sourcing any feedback from the teams we served when determining our priorities and roadmap. The result was tools that were essentially unusable, and endless refactoring from one tech stack configuration to another without actually solving any real-world problems.
For me, burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work. I agree with the general consensus that delight is an awkward word to use here, but it does at least signal that the team is run with a user-first mentality.
> burnout was the result of clocking in every day to do what felt like meaningless work
This is a lesson I was grateful to have picked up from HN about a year ago. The thread is at [0], and the quote from the submitted article was:
“Don’t half-work just to put in the hours. It’s better to give full effort half the day and then be done. Cultivating an ass-in-seat mentality is harmful to myself. When needed, give full effort all day, exceed expectations and demand compensation.”
This helped motivate a personal decision to leave a job where initiative and extra effort wasn’t noticed or rewarded (despite planning to stay a while due to inertia), and only seek work where I’m empowered to do the best work I can. I plan to avoid mistaking my identity for my job position at a company, but I would like to similarly aspire to be a professional who cares about doing good work for the user (versus just clocking in).
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27328705
Same with the re:invent portal —- it’s outsourced and terrible.
"Disabling cookies is not recommended for the best experience. Don't disable do not track?" CANCEL/CONTINUE
FYI, in case anyone else has a hard time finding what exactly the hours reduction is.
Amazon compensation packages assume 15% increase in RSU value year over year, so when you get a 4 year grant as a new hire, your target compensation will be projected based off 15% year over year growth, which typically means less stock granted in year 4 compared to year 3.
With a stagnant stock price, many Amazon employees are potentially at risk of not hitting their year 3 target compensation.
* Amazon pay a signing bonus for the first two years in lieu of RSUs. The idea is that you could sell your RSUs to make up the difference. The problem is that, for anyone who started in the last two years, your RSUs won’t make up the difference between your base salary and what you were getting as a bonus.
From levels.fyi, FAANG and the unicorns are almost all in the $300k-$400k range. Have offers gone up $200k in the last few months? Or are you assuming people are moving up a level?
If you filter by "New Offers Only", you'll see a pretty sharp shift in the trend starting around October 2021.
Same with Uber, a notable uptick starting late last year: https://www.levels.fyi/company/Uber/salaries/Software-Engine...
The top of the band has probably gone up more than the median offer, and most companies didn't increase their bands by that much (yet). This is definitely a case of "the future is here - just not evenly distributed yet".
If stock goes down, you end up getting more shares and vice versa but the $ stays the same
It's basically just regular bonuses tied to tenure
I for one get serious heart symptoms if I don't have adequate sleep.
Here are some of the many possibilities:
The service has poor uptime and you're on call every weekend.
Schedule pressure or poor management means that you're asked to come in on Fridays "until the next release".
The reduced-hours position was sponsored by a VP who has lost interest or left the company. Your direct manager has deadlines to meet and pressures you into working full-time.
I mean, that's all they have to determine/enforce how much you time you put in currently... general expectations.
Some people say you work the hours needed to get the job done, but that doesn't really make sense. Somehow the work the company needs to get accomplished gets divided up and distributed to employees. And ultimately you've got to think of how much is reasonable to accomplish. Here, that expectation of reasonableness is going to get reduced by about 20% if they are hired to work that many less hours.
I find it reallllly hard to trust Amazon when it comes to working less. This really just sounds like a way to get someone to work the same amount for less pay (I assume the position has a paycut).
In other words, when the janky build tools someone wrote >10 years ago break down, you're going to be on-call so much that you'll just run a landline into the back of your head, Matrix style.
IIRC it was in a trial period pre-pandemic. The impression I got was that they wanted to test a 4-day week, but worried it would be disruptive if only one or two team members were out on Fridays. Hence, 4-day teams.
Amazon gets a bad rap, but it can be a nice place to work as a developer. The overtime and pressure varies wildly from team to team, and you'd have to figure that people who choose to join a 4/3 team aren't the sort to press deadlines.
This listing looks like it is for a position which supports their internal developers and/or retail site. Those systems are probably fairly mature, so maybe it's a good business move to hire people to keep them running on a slow burn with better work/life balance.
I had a different reply lined up, then I read the comment again and did a doubletake
Heck, in many companies I've been in, I've even been made to feel inferior/lazy for not working a bunch of (obviously free) overtime. And I've never even worked for a startup where there was a realistic possibility of stock-option riches, where I can understand why some would be willing to make personal sacrifices for a couple years in the hopes of life changing exits.
In the EU it's pretty clear the hours a full-time job takes so this - even in a US context - doesn't mean much without the specific detail.
Can't resist puns related to marketing "reduced hours" even for those who've done serious time. /s
That said, in the nominally-40hr roles you won't get paid less, so YMMV on what's better
>As an Engineer on the Developer Platform team, you will be contributing to the design and development of the end-to-end developer experience across all 50+ teams and be the key technical advocate with partner teams. You will work with senior leaders across Amazon, finding solutions to multi-dimensional problems and driving a consistent tooling experience across the different parts of the Amazon.com product portfolio.
and the requirement is just 2 years of experience! May be it is just a team which can get away with anything - like either a pet project of a high VP or/and just a project pretty irrelevant to anything serious, ie. it doesn't look to me like a typical AMZN dev sweatshop.
I mean one of these leadership principles is 'Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer', but at the same time they have attrition targets, that means there must be some zeroth law at amazon, that mandates some sort of catch... (a nagging suspicion is that all FAANGs are like that, maybe they drive themselves to be ruthless, in order to stay ahead of the pack)
references to attrition targets at amazon:
https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/jun/27/amazons-unre...
https://www.inc.com/jason-aten/amazons-controversial-hire-to...
i think most of the answers here have some bad faith interpretation of the listing. i disagree. there's been small scale research about shorter work weeks not impacting productivity. there's a good chance that research is bs. they probably want to run an experiment in-house using their own dev productivity metrics.
I think the job title should just be SDE; work times and other logistics can easily be clarified in the job description or during a phone screen.
I also don't share the notion that "cutting edge innovation" is a type of work which would require more hours per week. Quite the opposite, actually.
Disagree on the last part. Because everything still gets done.
I write code slower than I used to but I throw away a lot less of it. Turns out going slower is faster.
The "do enough to not get fired" plan also leads to fundamental career stagnation, whereas a reduced schedule can actually still let you advance in your career.
Amazon seems to be finally seeing their chickens come home to roost after well over a decade of burning people out and developing a toxic reputation that keeps all the great people away.
And now that their stock is stagnant and out of hyper growth, the bleeding is likely accelerating.
It seems like programs like this are an attempt to try to incentivize (or, cynically, bait and switch) good engineers back in.
Having said that, it's a step in the right direction and I hope to see more companies embrace part time SW roles.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-59641784
I've also heard that people on those teams can generally be happy in their roles as long as they feel secure they aren't on the chopping block.
But staying for less than 12 months may look suspicious.
MSFT and Meta have bad and good depending on the team.
Uber and Amazon have the most surprising incompetence. I interviewed a Staff eng from Uber that couldn't figure out a junior engineer interview.
But the Amazon thing is surprising a little. Some of the guys I've spoken to from there were fantastic!
I guess I could be a terrible judge. Or I could be over-indexing on the guys I've encountered. Or there's some team effect here that I'm missing.
Well, thanks for sharing! It's useful.
I had a junior system admin working for me in ~2012. He wasn't bad, in general, but he was extremely dishonest. We had a failure in a raid volume and volunteered to do the work, got trashed at a trivia night and then completely destroyed the system before passing out. This was one of many, many issues with him that were all documented.
I have another friend, a woman, who had five years experience before working at Uber and several years there. She applied for a senior position but was denied. However, they did put her on the hiring committee for it.
My friend knew what happened with my junior system admin (and new him personally). The first thing she noticed was that his resume was completely made up- he gave himself a senior devops title, lied about his previous internship being a job, and otherwise grossly overstated his skillset. My friend on the hiring committee pointed all of this out, and said a simple reference check would resolve this.
He was hired for the senior position, she was treated like crap. He was later fired for stalking and sexually harassing a coworker. The hiring process at that company is just ridiculous.
In my observation, the really good people either climb through the ranks or they leave for non-unicorns (either for some technically interesting / otherwise fulfilling niche like edtech etc, or to create a startup/company of their own)
Engineers leave a company for three reasons:
Lack of career development opportunities -- Not being able to move up or grow in the way you want to. This is a sign of bad management.
Failure to perform -- Management and said engineer couldn't see eye to eye for whatever reason. Incompetent engineer or (worse) incompetent management.
Boredom -- Work has become stagnant, stale, or otherwise boring and management can't find a better place, or there's limited opportunities internally for someone to find new interesting things to do.
Only one of those reasons is truly something that should raise concern. Bad management makes good engineers leave.
Amazon's core problem isn't the engineering. The engineers there are sharp as tacks, in my experience. I am frequently in awe of the people I work with for their technical acumen in so many different fields.
But management training at Amazon is lacking. Managers are often ICs that have been drafted into management with little to no formal training and the amount of training that they get is often from their subordinates who were previously their peers. What little training outside "Just figure it out" seems to be mandatory HR-related content on how to handle the HR systems. That's it.
$400k+ cash and no junior engineers can’t hurt.
how is productivity measured?
does impact matter? some may say the PM and accounts folks may be in the hook there as much as the swe is.
apples to apples comparisons even for swes is nuanced
Everything else equal, I would prefer to explicitly have the days off and not have to deal with that.
To whatever extent I'm highly skilled, I'd prefer that it be reflected in my responsibilities and compensation, rather than leverage to blow off meetings.
Although, I think butt-in-seat mentality was always broken if an employee could broadcast or interact from anywhere. There are certain kinds of pair programming, whiteboarding, co-design, collab, and conversations that lead to higher signal in-person vs. remote.
I'll take 'problems no one else wants to go near' for $500
I have a bunch of friends that either work on dev tools, or used to. Relative to the rest of AMZN, thats the team you want to be for work-life balance and promotions :)
It may be that 3 day is pushing it too far, even at 50% instead of 60% of salary (or that may be too confusing to not have the salary be proportional).
I am pretty confident that I am 95% as productive at 4 days as I am at 5 days (and I'm a fairly productive engineer). But I take 80% of salary anyway, cause it's worth it.
(I also don't, even at 100%, make the 99th percentile incomes that many on HN seem to).
Here are some of my big takeaways after just a few months:
- Hardwood is expensive. Very expensive. I get most my wood out of the scrap box and use that to practice techniques (bow tie inlays, dovetails, veneer making, epoxy, live edges).
- Quality tools are expensive. Very expensive. Even hand tools can easily be over $100 for a single chisel or rasp. Hand planes and hand saws will start at over $200 often times.
- The work is very rewarding.
- The people are very helpful. I reached out to a furniture maker on YouTube I've been enjoying and asked if I could come work and learn with him for a couple weekends and they were onboard.
- There are co-working spaces with full wood and metal shops. I belong to one and I'm there most weekdays for a few hours, but most of the others are running 1-3 person companies making quality furniture and art. It's great to be around. $200 a month for table saws, drill presses, band saws, planers, jointers, spindle/edge/disc/widebelt sanders, 10'x5' CNC.
- Community colleges and local woodworking associations offer lots of classes on a variety of topics and techniques. I took an initial five day course where I made a cutting board and stool. Since then I've taken a lathe classes and I have a measuring and marking class and a shaker tray class next week.
- Buy the SawStop.