Yay, maybe fewer amazon recruiter emails now. I figure their recruiting team is big but they were sending 4-5 emails a day from different recruiters which feels like a lot!
Certainly seems like tech hiring is about to slow down like crazy, at least from my friends' qualitative experiences in recent weeks.
It isn't just that they send recruiting emails, they refuse to honor any opt outs and the recruiters will say things if you don't respond like... "I'll never stop trying" or "You don't live that far from me, I may just have to drop by"
Not just that, when i was banned from Amazon interviews for one year (I don't know why to this day), their recruiters kept contacting me. I spoke to one (on a whim) and the recruiter came back and apologized to me that they could not move forward with the interview process. Apparently they don't vet who they contact.
I've found a strategy that has worked fairly well for me. It doesn't result in them permanently leaving me alone, but it at least grants a reprieve. Ask to be removed from their contact list, and also reference the last person you asked. "Hi John, no thanks, and please remove me from your contact list. I previously asked Betty (bettysmith@amazon), and it seems to have not gone through."
I get about 3 months of silence from them each time I do that. When I just respond "no thanks" I continue to get about 1 contact per week.
It seems like borderline harassment. I am thinking a small claims case may get the right people involved to at least permanently be removed and maybe even get them to settle for small amount.
I’m not convinced there’s always a human on the other end of these emails. After suspecting so (when I started receiving multiple reach out from the same Amazon recruiter in one day, all with 24 hour follow ups), I starter replying to some with a short “Sounds great!” or just “Ok” and literally never got a response. I did however continue getting more reach outs.
I recently received a mail from them which was like "We found your profile interesting, so we automatically created a profile for you in our career web and will notify you about any matching job openings", all after I turned them down multiple times in the past. I basically just said whatever and let it go.
About a year and a half ago, I applied for a role in security engineering. I went through a phone screen and a 5-hour interview gauntlet, then got rejected.
A week later, another AWS recruiter e-mailed me saying I'd be a great fit for a security engineering role asking me to apply. It felt like salt on the wound. I was thinking...I just finished interviewing and got rejected. Do you recruiters not talk to each other?
Amazon employees also get those sorts of emails. During my time there I'd get emails from recruiters and management who had no idea I worked there but also those who did with the intent to poach me for their own team.
"We don't have a plan to require people to come back... But we're going to proceed adaptively as we learn."
No plan to come back != a promise to never force employees back to the office. Paired with Amazon's continued commercial real estate investments (discussed in the article), that's a massive competitive disadvantage in the remote work space. As a remote worker who plans on buying a home and putting down roots in the small, middle-of-nowhere town I live in, no way in hell that I'd accept a job offer from a company that dangles RTO over my head like this.
Of course, Amazon is toxic enough to avoid anyway. But I hope other employers don't embrace this nonsense.
Not exactly nonsense, of course employers should be able to ask people to work in an office if they think that's the best place for them and it's clear that working in an office might be part of the job during hiring.
The version of "ask" in that sentence actually means "tell".
Not setting clear boundaries about what you expect from employees is unfair, have some kind of agreement on number of days in the office, SLA for how long in advance a meeting needs to be booked for you to make it in office or whatever suits the companies needs.
Failing to make a clear decision on this is unfairly punitive for people expecting to live their life in a way which they chose. Those people who are brave enough can interpret it as it's fine to buy a house far from the office. More conservative people will have to stay within the commuter belt.
At least in the UK/Europe I imagine that it's not going to be long before someone ends up in court claiming constructive dismissal because an employer suddenly decided they had to work in a particular office.
Their position is pretty clear - we expect to be able to tell you to return to the office at some point in the future if we want you to work from the office.
IMO it's not really unfair or ambiguous - if you want to guarantee you can always do your job remotely then don't take the job.
I disagree. Permanently reserving the right to significantly and materially change your working conditions isn't clear or fair.
Perhaps for people who are still young, free and single it makes little difference but for people like me it changes everything from where we could buy a house, where our children will can go to pre-school / school and what our childcare arrangements with the grandparents look like. It's not something we can change just because some exec misses being able to rule over thier kingdom in person.
IMO it is clear (i.e. you understand what it means), but it wouldn't fit you personally because of all your other commitments and life position, and everything you listed.
Which is totally fine, and means this working arrangement isn't for you, but it doesn't mean it is fundamentally unfair or that it wouldn't work for someone else (like you say - it could suit someone who isn't you).
To me though, you seem to say "this is unfair because it wouldn't work for me".
There is probably no point in arguing this further, though I appreciate your input and the manor in which you have given it.
The thing for me is no one benefits from the lack of commitment to some way of working (and I mean a company commitment to something isn't a cast iron guarantee either). It's not like saying we're an in office company we expect you here 5 days a week; for me that would be a massive disadvantage. However, I can see that for other people that would suit them perfectly and might well have lots of advantages in terms of social life and opportunity to learn from those you work with. If a companies stance was that we are working from the office but reserve the right to work fully remote at some unidentifiable point in the future that would similarly disadvantage those people who seek out in office jobs.
On again / off again in office work is way more disruptive than an employer firmly deciding they are fully remote and furnishing people with good hardware for home offices and workspaces.
Honestly, equipment is cheap (relatively speaking). It's whether you have a good home office environment and your employer has very little control over that.
how is his statement worse than a company that says "we will never force people back to the office" then flip-flops two years from now? If you plan to physically locate in a place that requires you to work remote you're accepting risk regardless of who you work for; a CEO's comments at some conference shouldn't influence your risk mitigation.
Exactly. If your company tells you to RTO, it’s not like “yeah, but the guy was CEO at the time said in an interview N years ago that XYZ, so ‘haha, nope!’” is going to get you an exception.
I'm proud to have worked at Amazon over 14 years so I guess I don't agree about the toxic part. At this point I'd be pretty surprised if we ever forced employees back to the office. Amazon has always had very autonomous culture where teams and orgs have a lot of latitude in how they work. We value results above doctrine. Andy is also a very pragmatic leader who thinks very deeply about these kinds of decisions.
I think offices are more and more going to become an out of home workspace for people who prefer them (and I think we should give everyone who can commit to coming in enough an actual office) ... and an occasional collaboration hub for everyone.
I recently rejected an offer from AWS that paid significantly more that what i currently make because of this. I have family that work there ( on visa) that were adamant that i keep looking and not accept the offer. I am wondering if i made the right decision, haha.
Does aws have a higher churn rate than a typical tech company?
I know several people that work (or have worked) at Amazon, and am currently going through their interview process (among other companies, but I would likely accept a good offer from Amazon).
My conclusions:
1. Amazon's internal beurocracy enables good teams to be very good, and bad teams to be very bad
2. However, there is significant internal mobility, so you can move if you get stuck on a bad team
3. WFH policy is effectively left up to each individual team, so that is something to probe about during the interview
4. Everybody at Amazon is in the on-call rotation, but on-call load varies significantly by team (I know someone working on an internal tool that has literally never gotten paged)
5. Churn is roughly 6%, as that is what the infamous URA target is set to; however, you'd be surprised how many incompetent people make it past even FAANG interviews, so I wouldn't particularly worry if you're good at your job and your boss isn't an asshole
Overall, I would describe Amazon as a relatively good place to work on average, but the people that have it bad have it really really bad, and hopefully they can switch to a good team.
Bingo, I've had a hard time reconciling the HN's perception of AWS SDE work and my job. I have people telling me that it's horrible, attrition rate, constant grind and endless oncalls. Yet I've never experienced any of those things. Of all the places I've worked at in Canada, AWS was the nicest and I highly recommend it.
There are certainly some toxic teams out there, just like there are in any large org. I think an even bigger factor is the fact that Amazon is an enormous vertically-integrated monopoly that:
- abuses its market position to run competitors out of business
- mistreats its most vulnerable, low-level employees
For many of us, that's a moral dealbreaker. But there are certainly some great teams and interesting projects in the SDE space if that's what you want!
I wonder how much of this is the perception of Amazon warehouse workers being transferred over to Amazon technology workers. I've heard a ton of bad things about the former, but the folks I personally know who work at Amazon / AWS as tech workers all seem to be happy with it. Of course, how Amazon treats its warehouse workers is an indictment on the overall company, so I think I'd have a difficult time choosing to work there.
I don't think it started with warehouse workers, there was a famous NYT article talking about office workers at Amazon where entire teams would leave a meeting in tears:
I know two acquaintances that are SDEs that worked at Amazon and hated it. One of them was "forced" to work until 3-4 AM. His manager said to him, "How can you even think of sleeping right now?". Fortunately he found a new position at Microsoft. The other SDE feels like a cog in a machine and hates it so much he's going back to his home country.
You’re always a cog in the machine. If you think otherwise you’re being naive. No matter where you work, if you got hit by a bus tomorrow, your company would send “thoughts and prayers” to your family and have an open req for you before your body got cold.
I definitely can’t imagine “being forced” to do anything at a job too often before I’m looking for another job.
There are more than 3 suicides every day in Seattle, I don't see how 1 suicide of a person that happened to work for Amazon is really telling of anything.
Disclosure, long time principal at AWS but all statements are my own opinion.
1. Yes, but I believe its more culture than bureaucracy. 2. open transfers 30 days post hire, IIRC. 3. More org than team, and exceptions abound. 4. Yes. 5. Not quite; unregretted is employees with low perf rating leaving there is also regretted attrition which is mid-high perf rating employees leaving. The total is inline with industry norms (10-13%/yr) in my experience.
FYI: all of these are off the mark, some more than others. Here's some more info to help flesh it out (which is lacking too because there is so much nuance to this stuff).
> 1. Amazon's internal beurocracy enables good teams to be very good, and bad teams to be very bad
These get sniffed out eventually. It's usually a cluster of teams and it comes down to a specific leader creating a toxic environment. Some are very good at managing up and hiding the problems. But that only lasts so long (although sometimes years).
> 2. However, there is significant internal mobility, so you can move if you get stuck on a bad team
Not true.
If you are SDE I (entry level) moving teams is incredibly hard. All of the job posting are for SDE II (except for rare circumstances) and above so you can't apply for other teams. Usually the only way to switch teams is if you know someone there and they can help you out.
If you are not in an engineering role, switching teams is even harder. The business side tends to be more political and also have more candidates for positions.
> 3. WFH policy is effectively left up to each individual team, so that is something to probe about during the interview
Not true.
If your skip-level or even higher says no remote then there will be no remote. While some groups may leave it to each "individual team" it can always be overruled.
> 4. Everybody at Amazon is in the on-call rotation, but on-call load varies significantly by team (I know someone working on an internal tool that has literally never gotten paged)
Not true.
There are teams that don't have on-call rotations. Groups that are building software that hasn't launched yet are likely not carrying a pager. Higher level managers and engineers (Principals) are likely not on a paper rotation. And a bunch of business teams don't have on-call rotations.
> 5. Churn is roughly 6%, as that is what the infamous URA target is set to;
Oversimplified.
That 6% changes every year. I've seen it much lower in some years. It all depends on what's going on in the company. That 6% is just a number they want forced out. It doesn't include people leaving on their own terms that the company would love to have back, so churn is higher.
> however, you'd be surprised how many incompetent people make it past even FAANG interviews, so I wouldn't particularly worry if you're good at your job and your boss isn't an asshole
That's a dangerous assumption to make. It's not as simple as if your boss isn't an asshole. A big factor is if your boss knows how to set you up for success and if you know the rules of how things work there.
During review time, groups that are run well will have each team bring a list of their lowest performers to discuss. They vet how well these employees are functioning against the expectations for their level. If things naturally fall into the right ratio of people that need to be slotted below the bar, then they are done. But if there are not enough people they start digging more into where people land in relation to each other. If your boss hasn't set you up with work that allows you to demonstrate your real abilities then you are likely in trouble. It's not that your boss is an asshole, but that they are inept and screwing things up.
Passing on a career building line on your resume and a significant increase of your salary on the possibility (far from guaranteed) that you may end up in a team so unbearable you would have to leave the company before reaping the aforementioned benefits is of course not the right decision.
Some teams do truly suck at Amazon, either because of the manager or the work (or both), but in those situations you can always easily change team after a year if not less. And you will find such teams in any other company.
AWS and Amazon is not for everyone, and that's not quite about us being 'elite' or the 'we only hire the top X%' (though statements like that are probably true too). It's more that the first part of "Work Hard. Have Fun. Make History" is true at Amazon and long-time Amazon employees tend to be unusually driven and missionary and very much about shipping things.
For those this suits, it's great, we tend to weed out bullshitters and we're vastly less political than other operations I've seen. But it's not for everyone and others move on, and that does contribute to some churn. If you're considering Amazon, it's important to think hard about whether this is for you or not.
Our 'median tenure' numbers are constantly skewed by how much we've been growing. At times our doubling rate has been as little as 18-months, and so you get a lot of employees who haven't been here very long just from that too. Our actual attrition numbers are pretty middle of the range for tech. This year we has a spike in attrition at the beginning of the year - as did other tech companies - but we think we've been out-performing industry over the year as a whole. We were also ranked the #1 company where Americans want to work by LinkedIn, which is not nothing.
Amazon is full of very long-tenured folks and tends to have very stable leadership teams too.
I worked back at microsoft when gates was still there. we had saturday meetings all the time. Like a couple of times a month. I was routinely doing work at 11pm trying to get things checked in before midnight. This was before gates had kids, we all joked. The stock made the job lucrative but it was killer, I can't believe I did that. Mostly I saw people retire, not quit or get fired.
The difference with amazon is that everyone experienced knows a fair number of people who quit because of the stress and negatives, with lots of money on the table if it goes 2 or 3 months. I have two friends who quit, each with a quarter million coming if they stayed one more quarter. It would have to be pretty bad for that. I didn't see this happen at microsoft. We made progress in our jobs, and rest and vest wasn't even an ironic statement.
That fact is true, a fair point - when I left microsoft I left money behind but I got to go to a new faang job and left that ass ballmer behind ;-) But these friends were coming up on their 3 year anniversary I think. Amazon backloaded stock for a while. And it was more than 250k. I asked them why they couldn't get sit for a week, then take vacation, just do no shit for a month at amazon. And these two people separately said it was just so stressful they couldn't take it any more.
It’s the same concept. The first two years you are getting your base + prorated signing bonus + 5% of your RSUs the first year and 15% the second year. If the stock price stays level. Your 4 year compensation is going to stay about level - you get a slightly smaller signing bonus the second year. If it goes up significantly by year 2.5 (20% every six months after year 2). You will see a massive jump.
If Amazon did just pay you base + stock at an even 25/25/25/25. You would still be “leaving money on the table”.
One factor I haven't seen mentioned is that Amazon has a split-personality problem.
AWS is a tech company. Reasonably comparable with other FAANGs, with wide variation within teams.
Amazon is a logistics company with a web site. Logistics companies treat their employees very differently than tech companies. Amazon proper seems to me to have split personality.
Warehouse employees are treated badly, but pretty well in many ways, compared to other warehouse employees.
Tech employees at Amazon are treated well, but I can see an exec that came through the logistics part having a different mentality.
[Everything that follows is my personal opinion. I do not speak for my company.]
Seven years and counting for me, and likewise proud. I have found it a good experience, on balance. I have witnessed -- and been subjected to -- behavior by individuals that people would reasonably consider "toxic", and I've been fortunate to have avoided long-term impact. I do what I can to fight it where I find it.
To the point of remote work, I've been primarily remote the whole time, and it's worked out well. If enforced RTO ever does happen (I don't expect it to), I'll have a decision to make, is all.
Do both of you just “not see” all the bad things your company does ?
Your proud of what ? Worker exploitation ? The people in fulfilment centres are also employed by Amazon. They’re your peers. If I worked for a company where my peers are treated like dirt, I wouldn’t be proud of it. I’d quit.
While I am critical of many things Amazon does, what I see in the media about AWS is usually laughably false. We aren't all in broken marriages due to on-call duty.
The stories I read about drivers urinating in their pants because they have too many deliveries scheduled simply does not reflect the behavior I've seen from drivers in my area (I ride a bike everywhere, Amazon drivers are noticeably bike friendly in a way that makes me think they aren't under pants-urinating pressure).
So when I see stories about the FCs, I assume the same. I guess I am biased towards thinking the media focuses on the negative and totally ignores anything good. So... yea I guess I "don't see" all the bad things. Still pro union... but treated like dirt is probably a little far.
You riding your bike around waving at drivers disproves nothing. I often read warehouse workers are treated badly, threatening to strike, discouraged from unionizing and paid terribly.Are you telling me the news just makes this up?
You're obviously seeing what you want to see, and that's OK, just don't try push it onto others.
The context I made my comment was in regards to people saying "Amazon is awesome, I've worked there for 14 years.". I don't really see why warehouse workers shouldn't feel awesome too. If it's really a great company, they should feel pretty awesome.
tl;dr I don't believe Amazon is an awesome company based on how I see it treat lower skill workers, people who think it's awesome probably only feel like that because they're needed, as soon as you can be replaced by someone cheaper, you will be.
It's a cliche at this point - "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it." I would say compared to Bezos (or any oligarch with penis rocket money) we're all peers in the sense that we work for a living, but I doubt most Amazon devs would say that about the soldiers working the warehouses or driving the trucks.
Do you know how any large company like Amazon operates? This isn’t meant to be a demeaning comment. I spent 24 years bumping around at mostly small companies you’ve never heard of before 2020.
And nowhere in that company’s supply chain are that not workers who aren’t treated like the “elite” software developers?
How many people toil away in factories “working” for Apple creating iPhones or “working” for Google creating their servers and phones. Or is it morally better since they are outsourced?
I'm not sure what you're going for here. I'm sure that capitalism makes us all complicit somehow or another and of course I can't trace the supply chain for everything (or probably any) I use. But the small places I've worked have been much more human and egalitarian than the multinationals without exception.
That’s true. Before coming to AWS I worked as a senior dev/de facto “cloud architect” (in the land of the blind the one eyed man is king) for a 60 person company where we had 5 weeks vacation and free family healthcare. I could basically get anything I wanted pushed through and the CTO trusted my judgement implicitly.
When they got bought out for 10x revenue (I had already left), the founders gave each of the employees an extra bonus and they reached out to a former employee who had been there for years and gave him a bonus on top of the options he exercised - they had no legal obligation to do so.
But, they didn’t and couldn’t give me the 50% bump in compensation I make now and working remotely (permanently).
So is your company feeding starving children in Africa. It kills me to see people clutching their pearls when it wouldn’t take much to find something bad about every company.
You don't see a problem with the culture _because_ you have been there 14 years. If you had a negative impact of the culture, you likely would have left. Survivor bias.
There are a significant amount of people who disagree with you (on blind, with amazon proof of employment). They would be in the non-survivor-bias group.
It takes my manager 2 hours and $50 of transportation cost to reach the office (one way!), and his manager is in another country where he is the only team member. My team's never going back to the office.
Amazon has already made it clear it will leave the decision to individual teams, and it has been the case so far.
"Until your manager changes which happens often at" many/most companies.
As I wrote elsewhere, there are no guarantees in life. Maybe you're at a large stable company that pays well enough and that has a pre-COVID history of being remote friendly. In that case, you're probably in reasonable shape at least until you want to change jobs for some reason. But anything that's team dependent could change in a heartbeat. You may be able to drag your feet for a while but eventually you may have to choose between going back into an office at least part-time or finding something else.
> eventually you may have to choose between going back into an office at least part-time or finding something else.
Resume/LinkedIn, savings and mindset are important here. If you want the freedom to say "That's gonna be a 'no' for me, dawg." when your company decides they want everyone to RTO, you need to be mentally prepared for it as well has having a good profile/resume and enough money to tide you over. That takes planning.
As a remote worker who plans on buying a home and putting down roots in the small, middle-of-nowhere town I live in, no way in hell that I'd accept a job offer from a company that dangles RTO over my head like this.
Amazon refusing to make a firm commitment doesn't mean you shouldn't work for them if you want a remote role. It means you should see that role as just one job in a long career that will contain many jobs. If Amazon decide they want everyone back in the office and you want to carry on working remotely, then you quit and find a new remote role.
Literally any company might decide that they'd like everyone back in the office, and make moves to make it happen, no matter what they might promise today. Your current employer could announce "Yeah, we know we promised, but things have changed so now we're unpromising." A promise from your employer means very little.
My career advice to anyone looking for a job is to find what you need now and to be prepared to find a new role when your needs change. The same is true if your needs remain the same and the company changes around you.
But I don't think it's a good idea to build a career on shifting sands -- if you know that you want to work remotely, it would be silly to accept a job at Amazon when you know they could force you back into the office at any time and you can't do that. If the job market significantly cools, or you like your current project and coworkers, it would be a shame to go through another hiring process because of an external decision like that.
If they make a great offer, and you're really excited about the opportunity, though... could be worthwhile. Just another factor to consider in the process.
And that all-remote startup could run into headwinds and run out of funding.
There are larger companies that almost certainly have a longer history of being more remote-friendly than most, if not all, of the West Coast companies. But there are no guarantees anywhere.
I agree with both of you. One can always get a job from somewhere if there are interested and leave if the expectations are not there anymore. And on the other hand, better join somewhere you have more trust that the expectations will be met in the long term.
I'm currently remotely working for a company where the remote part of my hire was a sine qua none condition. Everybody knows this. We are several people for whom coming to the "back" to office (to the extends that coming to the office always was exceptional) is not practical. During onboarding, we are told that the company will help you and find accommodations if you move to another country (though if we can choose a country where there already are people working for the company it would be better). The company has been already, de facto, split in two countries (in which there are offices). The company recently bought a smaller office because people didn't come as often / as many. The company actually could not handle everybody coming to the office at the same time anymore. At this point, a "everybody in the office from now one" would be highly unexpected.
Someone mentioned contracts, indeed my home is one of the two places where I can work from. And actually they don't care, I could work from anywhere as long as I'm reachable and I can work in good conditions as long as they are concerned. Of course, if I hurt myself and I'm not at one of the two places, that would be on me, insurance-wise.
I'm on a contract for working in an office. I was employed to do that, signed up to it. I am offered some remote working capacity, during Covid it was 100%! But whatever I get is not my primary working condition.
If you intend to do a 100% remote job as a life plan, don't take a job that isn't contractually 100% remote.
I feel like we're in a weird place wrt WFH policies atm.
I’ve worked professionally as a software developer since 1996. I was a hobbyist for 10 years before that. The sands are always shifting. My “stability” comes from.
This is true, and I think actions speak louder than words in this case. If you see your company not renewing lease, or growing without expanding office space, I think you can take that as a good indicator they won't change tack so hastily.
I've worked at Amazon a little over 6 years now. I have not found it toxic. I had the good fortune of joining Amazon working under a director who had been my manager at a previous company, so I knew what he was like going in, and when I decided to switch teams I worked for someone else I already knew from around Amazon. I think it's like joining any other company - as the team interviews you, you also want to be interviewing the people for the team you'll be joining to see if it's what you want.
Different pockets of the company have different trade-offs and incentives. The on-call burden on some teams is higher. When I've seen this happen under good management, the managers work to do different things to relieve the burden (such as spending time working on tech debt, improving test automation, and so on).
Some of the aspects of Amazon's culture that I hear criticized often come with unfair comparisons. No one likes getting paged at 1:00 AM, and that's a thing that can happen to you at Amazon. In my personal experience though, I got paged at weird hours much more often working at start-ups. Amazon at least (again, generally, in the parts of the company I've worked) has a healthy culture around continuing to improve operations, preparing people for on-call, and to address any page events so that particular reason for getting paged doesn't happen again.
(I'm just offering my own opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity.)
I think it’s time to fight back against the anecdotes against whatever point. There’ve just been too much bad faith and misdeeds done in service of internet misinformation.
As you said, your anecdote isn’t worth much. Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum.
With how job descriptions can be unilaterally rewritten by corporations at will even having a stance of remote work in a job description shouldn’t be taken as solid, unshakable truth.
Edit-trust that corporations will use you exactly as far as it benefits them and in the most exploitive nature they want.
> Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum.
I mean, I don't make it that hard for people to figure out who I am if that's a thing they care to do.
But I think you're right about the larger part - it's hard to trust Corporations. As I said in my case, and what I advise others to do, is rather than trusting a company (big or small), try to find individuals there you can trust (either, early in your time there, or ideally find someone that you already trust that happens to be there).
I think the more even-handed criticism of Amazon would be this: they're a highly process driven company. Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills.
Highly motivated people who always go the extra mile get exploited and burnt out. Kind people get their kindness taken advantage of and it sours their view of the world. At least that's what I've seen from the outside.
The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them.
Empathy is actually a disadvantage in this type of role and it selects for all sorts of what I would consider adverse behaviors among managers. The "leadership" principals relate to actual leadership as a jellyfish relates to Smucker's. Look up Google's project oxygen findings if you want a comparison.
I personally doubt I'll ever hire someone who learned engineering management at Amazon unless they've been sufficiently detoxified in a different company.
That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting.
I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
It was difficult for me to watch severance because so many of the interactions among the employees reminded me of my time Amazon. I actually cried a little bit when the boss threw a coffee cup and then blamed her report for it.
> Practically the definition of "process over people". There are certain types of people who thrive in that environment. The people I've seen be successful there are either people who successfully disassociate their working lives from their personal lives or who are engineers with high technical ability but lacking social skills.
That has been exactly my experience, after 5.5 years. My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week (there are 9 of us). It is way more important to try to plan out work than it is to actually do the work.
> The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them.
I did burn myself out trying to reduce operational load. I wasn't arguing for it the right way, so I ended up doing it myself. I was able to measure my results, but it didn't even count towards a promo because I didn't "harmonize discordant views"... instead I just did what needed to be done.
Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. That is false. Try to find out how many of those folks have actually worked outside Amazon before taking their advice.
Why wouldn’t it be more important to plan out the work than to do the work? We’ve all seen the graph of how much more expensive things are to change the further down the process is.
I absolutely think you should plan out how your customer will solve their problem with your product, including concrete examples, and make sure you are always headed towards that goal. I'm very waterfally that way.
In this case I'm talking about the tasks in each sprint. I think 1 day of planning per sprint is a lot. We are supposed to be agile. If we missed a task, swap it with another. If something isn't actually important, bring in something new. We end up doing this anyway... so why all the upfront planning each sprint?
Related back to the above comment, (my opinion) people really love to establish rules and processes and are not able to handle ambiguity. I spend a lot of time (remember the 4 hours a week) arguing whether a story is a mouse or a hedgehog.
IMHO it's splitting hairs, let's just do the work and we estimated a little wrong it just isn't that important.
I don’t work for a service team. I work in Professional Services. I was working on a project and I found a bug in one of the APIs. I reached out to the service team and they found the bug - it was a 3 line change in some front end code (long story). They put a fix in almost immediately. But as I was tracking the weeks long deployment process across regions, I came to appreciate how costly any changes are at the scale of AWS. You have to measure twice and cut once.
My implementations are for a specific customer and I don’t have to worry about that type of scale where a mistake or miscommunication in requirements can be costly and affect hundreds of customers.
I have made mistakes as a contributor to a popular company sponsored open source project. Even that caused headaches beyond the scale I was use to dealing with.
Oh yes, the pipeline deployment process is pretty amazing. I agree, for good reason. My manager has actually recommended I look at profserv teams because of the ability to deliver results for customers.
When I started in AWS, I watched customers implement hack solutions for themselves because it would take our team too long to deliver a proper solution (so hard to give specifics on HN :) ). That was the hardest thing for me to handle. The mindset is what works best over the next N years, not what works best for a set of customers right now.
Honestly that is the right mindset. Early adopters know they are early adopters and will have to work around problems.
I think the take away from this conversation, for anyone still following, is that a lot of developers (like myself) want to move really really fast. AWS has processes in place to prevent this movement from breaking customers. While it is so annoying for me, it really is a win for customers.
> My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week
That seems excessive, but I don't know what area you work in. Does your team need to spend that long? I have heard of that happening within Amazon, but then people vote with their feet and move to a team that doesn't spend four hours in sprint planning.
> Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture.
I've spent roughly as much of my career at startups as I have at Amazon. It's a bit of a mix bag. Having worked at start-ups that had to spend time doing undifferentiated work (just getting automated deployments, for example), it's in some ways nice not to deal with that, and yes, you have to follow The Process for that to be easy. I sometimes see people taking chances and acting quickly on new opportunities. But yes, I also see people not taking chances when the cost of doing so would have been small. Then again, I once worked for a start-up where you had to use a particular template for a design document, and you had to produce a project plan that 6-month long projects that was accurate to the hour. So... I think it's hard to make generalizations.
When the pay/bullshit ratio gets too low, I send my always updated resume out, review my “career document” to prepare for behavioral/informal interviews (I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews), talk to people in my network and I get another job.
Before my current job, I was a dev lead and then the de facto “cloud architect” at smaller companies. My current job is much less stressful.
[1] currently my official title is not “software developer”. But for all intents and purposes, I still develop user facing software along with a crap ton of yaml, HCL, diagrams and PowerPoint slides.
I stayed at one company too long from the time I was 25 until I was 34. By the time I left, I was very much an “expert beginner” - I was doing old school VB6 in 2008 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC/COM programming (ask your kids). But at 34, I had developed soft skills and knew how to talk to business people.
From 2008 - 2018, I both modernized my enterprise dev skills and learned how to solve business problems. I also got lucky and always seemed to get connected to managers, directors and CTOs who were new to their company and needed to solve business problems. Most of my “interviews” were casual semi-technical but mostly about process/development improvements even as I stayed hands on.
By 2016, I belatedly discovered “the cloud” when the company I worked for as dev lead wanted to “move to the cloud” and they hired “consultants” who were really just a bunch of old school Net ops folks who knew how to do “lift and shifts” duplicating and on prem architecture to AWS and of course costing more. As I learned more about AWS, I knew I could bring a unique set of talents as someone who knew both the infrastructure side and the development.
I found a job at another company where the then new CTO wanted to pivot the company to being “cloud native” and sell access to micro services to large health care companies.
I talked through my proposals after listening to him and I led the effort over the next two years.
Then at 46 a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I was not interested in being a software engineer at any large company, not interested in relocating “after Covid was over”, nor was I interested in doing the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance.
She suggested I apply for a role in cloud consulting “application modernization” (really just software development + devops using cloud services) in Professional Services that was fully remote. I had the tech skills, the project leadership experience and the customer facing experience from working at small companies. My interview was all behavioral besides a little AWS techno trivia as part of the initial screening.
So in reality, I just fell into a specialty where companies are more interested in my ability to solve business problems than reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard.
Why shouldn’t all employees of any for profit company “disassociate their professional lives from their personal lives”? I go to work to exchange labor for money to support my addiction to food and shelter.
Again, this is me speaking just my experience, and not for the company in any official capacity:
Capital-P-Policies get followed. But there are a lot of lower-case-p-policies, more what you might call guidelines, that are not. Sometimes, for good reasons! There are examples of things Amazon does that try to encourage individual judgement, trusting the people in place. But there are also examples where we think we know what the right process is, but for whatever reason (prioritization, we haven't figured out the right way to enforce it, scaling challenges) it's not as strictly followed as outsiders might assume.
Until UnRegretted Attrition (re: stack ranking) is gone, it'll always be a place to avoid. Nobody likes to work with that hanging over their head. I think this is the #1 thing that will always hurt Amazon recruiting, everyone knows about it now.
Can you share a little bit about how Amazon handles on-call? Do they make their dev teams be on-call for their product areas, do they have first line responders/SRE, and things like that?
You are oncall on your team's services. No matter how old those are. The frequency depends on your team size, and the level of tickets/incidents depend on the quality of the codebase. I have seen everything from one high sev ticket every 2,3 months to constant paging (3am, etc...)
What counts as "first line" depends on your situation.
On my first team, we managed internal tools. Our customers were other people at Amazon, they submitted tickets to us directly.
For some teams at Amazon, there is at least a filter through some sort of customer support to handle certain kinds of issues. You are still on-call, but it's not like you are interacting with customers directly.
Also, since teams at Amazon tend to be small, the amount of things you are on-call for tends to be however much your team handles on its own. I know of other companies in which the oncall covers areas in other team's code bases - this is not the typical setup at Amazon.
Generally, we don't have SREs. Software engineers usually understand best how their software works, so we get faster mitigations, and they are also incentivized better to not write buggy software.
That depends on the team/org you are, if you are in some cosy team in CDO, that just maintain a couple of services that other internal services use, that aren't really that important, then of course is not toxic. Talk to the folks at EC2, VPC teams.
Im not sure people are always referring to the tech sector of Amazon when they call it toxic - unless explicitly stated as “planned attrition” etc. I’ve heard great things about AWS, for example. My opinion is people refer to the company as toxic as a whole because of how warehouse workers’ conditions are or the disruption of communities around Amazon warehouses.
Counterpoint to your anecdote. I didn't find Amazon all that toxic for my first 2 years until I had a baby. First, the parental leave is significantly worse than competitors. I took 3 weeks when my son was born and another 5 to help my wife transition back to work herself (only 6 were paid by Amazon). There was a 10 week period in between leaves where I was stressed, anxious, and feeling overworked and burned out. My performance suffered. I received no extra help from my manager but also received no negative feedback during that time. Welp, came back from the 2nd half of my leave and was immediately put on a pip (technically called 'focus'). Worse, there was absolutely zero empathy from this manager during the focus.
Maybe Amazon can be a good place to work if you're ALWAYS able to be a solid performer but god forbid you're going through something in your personal life that temporarily impacts your ability to deliver.
In my experience, an important chunk of the experience depends on who your boss is, another chunk depends on the company itself.
I experienced both "toxic" and "fantastic" work environments at AWS, during my 6 years tenure. I'm not surprised other can find Amazon "toxic", but I know that there are good people there, and good teams, and good job opportunities.
Also, I used to pretty much work ~90% remote, back in 2008-2014. My boss(es) never had anything against that. The "remote work" policy is influenced by the company, but it also depends on your boss and team.
I think your assessment is way too polarized against working at Amazon. My 0.02.
>As a remote worker who plans on buying a home and putting down roots in the small, middle-of-nowhere town I live in, no way in hell that I'd accept a job offer from a company that dangles RTO over my head like this
Well, they can be honest about it, "we have no plan...", or they could potentially lie or be ignorant about it, like your current employer might be, and change their mind down the road.
I'm also a remote worker living in a small town. But I'm a realist as far as understanding that this might not last forever. Perhaps it turns out there's a competitive advantage to office work after all? If so, can't blame companies for wanting to return to those conditions.
That's exactly my position, in my case my team is fully remote (a niche little team in AWS), I am not sure if I want to buy a place where I live either, a team reorg, or leadership change can destroy my life plans in a minute. I think the solution is a) Start your own online business, or b) Find a fully remote job, which for what I have seen so far, smaller companies that offer remote opportunities , don pay as much as I make now. Does anyone knows any fully remote company that pay FANG salaries?
that's absolutely your right. But don't try to force what works for on everyone, or confuse your desire for what the market overall will do.
There will be plenty of remote work but the articles about death of in office are exaggerated. In a recent informal poll of a top VC startup CEOs (via a private mailing list) many were bragging about how they went back to the office and the benefits they are seeing as a result. However, this is an unpopular opinion you won't see on twitter.
Finally, if someone can hire you in the middle of nowhere they can also hire folks in South America which is a huge engineering demographic and currently underpaid. Same timezone. They can also more easily hire people in different timezones like India or Eastern Europe. Because of that, I do expect over time salaries of in person to diverge from salaries of remote work.
Remote work may still be a great value prop for people like you, but as I said don't pretend everyone is moving to remote work or expect the same benefits as those living in major urban hubs and showing up for work in person.
> No plan to come back != a promise to never force employees back to the office
That doesn't apply solely to Amazon, or even the rest of FAANG. _Any_ company, even those currently remote-first or remote-only, are just one CEO change away from an open-plan office.
Amazon has over 1 million people. Different departments are different. My department (Professional Services) is permanently remote, I’ve never consistently worked over 40 hours a week accept when all hell broke lose because of Covid.
I manage customers expectations so I don’t overwork myself.
I’ve worked at 8 jobs in 25 years and 6 since 2008. Anytime that a job stopped meeting my needs and desires, I changed jobs. Any company is just a means for me to exchange labor for money. The last thing I stress out about is if a job isn’t going to meet my needs some day in the future.
I wwas initially contacted by a recruiter at Amazon Retail about an SDE position in mid 2020. The recruiter said that the expectation was that I would relocate after “Covid was over”. I was about to say no thanks and keep working as your bog standard enterprise dev with my big house in the burbs in the southeast.
We kept talking and she suggested with my background I apply for a fully remote position in AWS Professional Services and the rest is history. But in the grand scheme of things. It’s one of many jobs I’ve had.
I think that considering Amazon, a company with independent business units in completely different business (retail and cloud computing) as an entity with a single personality is about as accurate as thinking everyone from the same country has the same personality.
It's not as if the small group of people at the top determine everything else about the company: they only hire the people directly below them, and their influence decreases the further down you go. I think the larger determinant of a company is the business it is in, since that determines at large what people the company is attractive to and which it tries to hire.
Hiring is speeding up again in Australia and New Zealand in private companies. Government and public sector not so much, but all the consultancies have massive shortages which feeds into public sector quite a bit.
I don’t think it ever really slowed like it has in the US. Then again inflation is only just starting to ramp in Australia. New Zealand doesn’t really have an excuse.
Good people are already working in the US. This is the people who couldn't be bothered moving there.
I've had to tell recruiters straight up that they can't fill that position and never will in Australia/Canada/New Zealand because anyone who could do it is already doing it in the US for x5 the salary they are offering here.
If only the US had a functioning healthcare system I'd move back there too.
> If you are getting paid 5x then your healthcare costs aren’t nearly going to approach anything close to that amount.
Australia has a hard cap on how much you can be charged for. I lived in the US when I was a teen under the most gold plated of plated plans and after a protracted hospital stay that was over $2m we still have over $100k that was not covered after the company lawyers spent months fighting with the insurance lawyers. Things have only gotten worse since then.
In Australia the same thing cost $2k out of pocket.
Other companies have done so in the past, well pre-pandemic. And historically companies have asked (i.e. told) people to transfer locations all the time--at least if they wanted promotions. Companies also eliminate projects and organizations. All of which is to say that just because you're hired into a position that's either remote or in a specific location doesn't mean those options will exist in a year or five years.
Well, a 2 hour eah way commute is probably doable one day a week but not every day which gives you a lot of latitude from most cities. Obviously you can't move a plane flight away. (Well you could. But it would be expensive and painful.)
I do it from time to time for an event (like a conference) or meeting in the nearish-by city. I'm at least 90 minutes door to door whether I drive or take the train. The day's not a waste--but it is a very long day. It's mostly events to tell you the truth; I have very little reason to go into our office there these days.
I did actually commute in about 50% of the time at a previous job. It wasn't really sustainable long term.
(My nearer office is a relatively easy commute though I don't go in there either.)
RTO issues aside it feels more like a regular recession rather than bubble popping. The biggest difference is wages were insane last year, even in 2000 devs weren't paid more than doctors.
No, that was more of a straight up closure of startups and tech companies. Like people would go into the office on Monday and all be fired without any idea it was going to happen. The money ran out and the good times immediately stopped. Within weeks the companies would be liquidating assets and going through bankruptcy. This is more of big companies slowly reducing costs because of the uncertainty of profits ahead.
>> people would go into the office on Monday and all be fired
Guess that's a good reason to put off bringing people back in the office. Just one day your work accounts are disabled, and the direct deposit stops coming.
Well, and then when all those startups closed, a lot of companies those startups reliably wrote checks to went through (at least) difficult times as well. There was a pretty hard knock-on effect (mostly within the tech industry).
Partly because of public cloud, open source, and the sources of revenue of the large firms, there are other exposures (especially ad spend in the case of a number of the big firms) but financial relationships within tech seem a lot ore loosely coupled today.
Dotcom crash was a whole different level, with super senior architects and other extremely experienced people lining up around the block for entry level positions.
For a while I was running the whole IT and software development of a biotech company for 10 bucks an hour. while my peers went on to be manager at Best Buy shift to other non-tech related roles.
Yep. I got laid off right after 9/11 (which was sort of the last straw). Fortunately, I almost immediately landed a similar (but better job), albeit with a pay cut--and there were some lean times for a few years once the tech recession hit my new company in force. But I had started looking around elsewhere as well and there was nothing that I found.
I lot of people I knew ended up exiting the industry and no small number of them ever really got back on track with their careers.
>For those who went through the dotcom bubble is this reminiscent?
One of the world's largest tech companies slowing hiring from a decade of absolute torrid pace of recruiting is not at all reminiscent of the dotcom crash. Yet?
The .Com crash was more similar to the Crypto crash you're seeing today. Today's tech tightening is nothing like those. One of the worst parts of the .Com crash was that even businesses that were generating revenue and hitting milestones were folding because many of their customers were going out of business.
Anecdotally, I have gotten a bunch of recruiting messages from them over the past year or so for remote positions, whereas previously they were like "come live in rainy, gray, depressing Seattle!" and I would politely respond "I live on the east side of the Cascades with lots of sun. No f'ing way am I moving to Seattle!". Still not interested in a job there as I'm more of a startup guy, but it does seem they're more interested in remote.
Amazon did the same thing the first year of the pandemic. Hiring petered out, but nobody was quitting due to pandemic concerns. Then in 2021 (when I left) we had massive turnover. They probably had to over hire a bit in 2022 to recover.
163 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 300 ms ] threadCertainly seems like tech hiring is about to slow down like crazy, at least from my friends' qualitative experiences in recent weeks.
I think that it already has slowed down pretty significantly.
Someone recently wanted to hire me as a Junior Android Developer. I'm not a (professional) dev. I've never done Android. I'm a Senior Product Exec
I still get Amazon recruiter emails.
I get about 3 months of silence from them each time I do that. When I just respond "no thanks" I continue to get about 1 contact per week.
A week later, another AWS recruiter e-mailed me saying I'd be a great fit for a security engineering role asking me to apply. It felt like salt on the wound. I was thinking...I just finished interviewing and got rejected. Do you recruiters not talk to each other?
No plan to come back != a promise to never force employees back to the office. Paired with Amazon's continued commercial real estate investments (discussed in the article), that's a massive competitive disadvantage in the remote work space. As a remote worker who plans on buying a home and putting down roots in the small, middle-of-nowhere town I live in, no way in hell that I'd accept a job offer from a company that dangles RTO over my head like this.
Of course, Amazon is toxic enough to avoid anyway. But I hope other employers don't embrace this nonsense.
Not setting clear boundaries about what you expect from employees is unfair, have some kind of agreement on number of days in the office, SLA for how long in advance a meeting needs to be booked for you to make it in office or whatever suits the companies needs.
Failing to make a clear decision on this is unfairly punitive for people expecting to live their life in a way which they chose. Those people who are brave enough can interpret it as it's fine to buy a house far from the office. More conservative people will have to stay within the commuter belt.
At least in the UK/Europe I imagine that it's not going to be long before someone ends up in court claiming constructive dismissal because an employer suddenly decided they had to work in a particular office.
IMO it's not really unfair or ambiguous - if you want to guarantee you can always do your job remotely then don't take the job.
Perhaps for people who are still young, free and single it makes little difference but for people like me it changes everything from where we could buy a house, where our children will can go to pre-school / school and what our childcare arrangements with the grandparents look like. It's not something we can change just because some exec misses being able to rule over thier kingdom in person.
Which is totally fine, and means this working arrangement isn't for you, but it doesn't mean it is fundamentally unfair or that it wouldn't work for someone else (like you say - it could suit someone who isn't you).
To me though, you seem to say "this is unfair because it wouldn't work for me".
The thing for me is no one benefits from the lack of commitment to some way of working (and I mean a company commitment to something isn't a cast iron guarantee either). It's not like saying we're an in office company we expect you here 5 days a week; for me that would be a massive disadvantage. However, I can see that for other people that would suit them perfectly and might well have lots of advantages in terms of social life and opportunity to learn from those you work with. If a companies stance was that we are working from the office but reserve the right to work fully remote at some unidentifiable point in the future that would similarly disadvantage those people who seek out in office jobs.
> The thing for me is no one benefits from the lack of commitment to some way of working
Amazon would be the one benefiting, because it means they can bring in office working in the future without contractual changes.
I think offices are more and more going to become an out of home workspace for people who prefer them (and I think we should give everyone who can commit to coming in enough an actual office) ... and an occasional collaboration hub for everyone.
I recently rejected an offer from AWS that paid significantly more that what i currently make because of this. I have family that work there ( on visa) that were adamant that i keep looking and not accept the offer. I am wondering if i made the right decision, haha.
Does aws have a higher churn rate than a typical tech company?
My conclusions:
1. Amazon's internal beurocracy enables good teams to be very good, and bad teams to be very bad
2. However, there is significant internal mobility, so you can move if you get stuck on a bad team
3. WFH policy is effectively left up to each individual team, so that is something to probe about during the interview
4. Everybody at Amazon is in the on-call rotation, but on-call load varies significantly by team (I know someone working on an internal tool that has literally never gotten paged)
5. Churn is roughly 6%, as that is what the infamous URA target is set to; however, you'd be surprised how many incompetent people make it past even FAANG interviews, so I wouldn't particularly worry if you're good at your job and your boss isn't an asshole
Overall, I would describe Amazon as a relatively good place to work on average, but the people that have it bad have it really really bad, and hopefully they can switch to a good team.
- abuses its market position to run competitors out of business
- mistreats its most vulnerable, low-level employees
For many of us, that's a moral dealbreaker. But there are certainly some great teams and interesting projects in the SDE space if that's what you want!
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...
I definitely can’t imagine “being forced” to do anything at a job too often before I’m looking for another job.
https://thenextweb.com/news/amazon-employee-email-note
> 1. Amazon's internal beurocracy enables good teams to be very good, and bad teams to be very bad
These get sniffed out eventually. It's usually a cluster of teams and it comes down to a specific leader creating a toxic environment. Some are very good at managing up and hiding the problems. But that only lasts so long (although sometimes years).
> 2. However, there is significant internal mobility, so you can move if you get stuck on a bad team
Not true.
If you are SDE I (entry level) moving teams is incredibly hard. All of the job posting are for SDE II (except for rare circumstances) and above so you can't apply for other teams. Usually the only way to switch teams is if you know someone there and they can help you out.
If you are not in an engineering role, switching teams is even harder. The business side tends to be more political and also have more candidates for positions.
> 3. WFH policy is effectively left up to each individual team, so that is something to probe about during the interview
Not true.
If your skip-level or even higher says no remote then there will be no remote. While some groups may leave it to each "individual team" it can always be overruled.
> 4. Everybody at Amazon is in the on-call rotation, but on-call load varies significantly by team (I know someone working on an internal tool that has literally never gotten paged)
Not true.
There are teams that don't have on-call rotations. Groups that are building software that hasn't launched yet are likely not carrying a pager. Higher level managers and engineers (Principals) are likely not on a paper rotation. And a bunch of business teams don't have on-call rotations.
> 5. Churn is roughly 6%, as that is what the infamous URA target is set to;
Oversimplified.
That 6% changes every year. I've seen it much lower in some years. It all depends on what's going on in the company. That 6% is just a number they want forced out. It doesn't include people leaving on their own terms that the company would love to have back, so churn is higher.
> however, you'd be surprised how many incompetent people make it past even FAANG interviews, so I wouldn't particularly worry if you're good at your job and your boss isn't an asshole
That's a dangerous assumption to make. It's not as simple as if your boss isn't an asshole. A big factor is if your boss knows how to set you up for success and if you know the rules of how things work there.
During review time, groups that are run well will have each team bring a list of their lowest performers to discuss. They vet how well these employees are functioning against the expectations for their level. If things naturally fall into the right ratio of people that need to be slotted below the bar, then they are done. But if there are not enough people they start digging more into where people land in relation to each other. If your boss hasn't set you up with work that allows you to demonstrate your real abilities then you are likely in trouble. It's not that your boss is an asshole, but that they are inept and screwing things up.
Passing on a career building line on your resume and a significant increase of your salary on the possibility (far from guaranteed) that you may end up in a team so unbearable you would have to leave the company before reaping the aforementioned benefits is of course not the right decision.
Some teams do truly suck at Amazon, either because of the manager or the work (or both), but in those situations you can always easily change team after a year if not less. And you will find such teams in any other company.
For those this suits, it's great, we tend to weed out bullshitters and we're vastly less political than other operations I've seen. But it's not for everyone and others move on, and that does contribute to some churn. If you're considering Amazon, it's important to think hard about whether this is for you or not.
Our 'median tenure' numbers are constantly skewed by how much we've been growing. At times our doubling rate has been as little as 18-months, and so you get a lot of employees who haven't been here very long just from that too. Our actual attrition numbers are pretty middle of the range for tech. This year we has a spike in attrition at the beginning of the year - as did other tech companies - but we think we've been out-performing industry over the year as a whole. We were also ranked the #1 company where Americans want to work by LinkedIn, which is not nothing.
Amazon is full of very long-tenured folks and tends to have very stable leadership teams too.
The difference with amazon is that everyone experienced knows a fair number of people who quit because of the stress and negatives, with lots of money on the table if it goes 2 or 3 months. I have two friends who quit, each with a quarter million coming if they stayed one more quarter. It would have to be pretty bad for that. I didn't see this happen at microsoft. We made progress in our jobs, and rest and vest wasn't even an ironic statement.
If Amazon did just pay you base + stock at an even 25/25/25/25. You would still be “leaving money on the table”.
AWS is a tech company. Reasonably comparable with other FAANGs, with wide variation within teams.
Amazon is a logistics company with a web site. Logistics companies treat their employees very differently than tech companies. Amazon proper seems to me to have split personality.
Warehouse employees are treated badly, but pretty well in many ways, compared to other warehouse employees.
Tech employees at Amazon are treated well, but I can see an exec that came through the logistics part having a different mentality.
Seven years and counting for me, and likewise proud. I have found it a good experience, on balance. I have witnessed -- and been subjected to -- behavior by individuals that people would reasonably consider "toxic", and I've been fortunate to have avoided long-term impact. I do what I can to fight it where I find it.
To the point of remote work, I've been primarily remote the whole time, and it's worked out well. If enforced RTO ever does happen (I don't expect it to), I'll have a decision to make, is all.
Your proud of what ? Worker exploitation ? The people in fulfilment centres are also employed by Amazon. They’re your peers. If I worked for a company where my peers are treated like dirt, I wouldn’t be proud of it. I’d quit.
While I am critical of many things Amazon does, what I see in the media about AWS is usually laughably false. We aren't all in broken marriages due to on-call duty.
The stories I read about drivers urinating in their pants because they have too many deliveries scheduled simply does not reflect the behavior I've seen from drivers in my area (I ride a bike everywhere, Amazon drivers are noticeably bike friendly in a way that makes me think they aren't under pants-urinating pressure).
So when I see stories about the FCs, I assume the same. I guess I am biased towards thinking the media focuses on the negative and totally ignores anything good. So... yea I guess I "don't see" all the bad things. Still pro union... but treated like dirt is probably a little far.
[edit, have worked for aws for about 5.5 years]
You're obviously seeing what you want to see, and that's OK, just don't try push it onto others.
The context I made my comment was in regards to people saying "Amazon is awesome, I've worked there for 14 years.". I don't really see why warehouse workers shouldn't feel awesome too. If it's really a great company, they should feel pretty awesome.
tl;dr I don't believe Amazon is an awesome company based on how I see it treat lower skill workers, people who think it's awesome probably only feel like that because they're needed, as soon as you can be replaced by someone cheaper, you will be.
News alert: I bet your company would replace you with someone cheaper also.
Does anyone really know how a large company like Amazon operates?
I've certainly worked for multinational companies before. One of our C levels even palled around with Jeffery Epstein.
How many people toil away in factories “working” for Apple creating iPhones or “working” for Google creating their servers and phones. Or is it morally better since they are outsourced?
When they got bought out for 10x revenue (I had already left), the founders gave each of the employees an extra bonus and they reached out to a former employee who had been there for years and gave him a bonus on top of the options he exercised - they had no legal obligation to do so.
But, they didn’t and couldn’t give me the 50% bump in compensation I make now and working remotely (permanently).
There are a significant amount of people who disagree with you (on blind, with amazon proof of employment). They would be in the non-survivor-bias group.
Amazon has already made it clear it will leave the decision to individual teams, and it has been the case so far.
As I wrote elsewhere, there are no guarantees in life. Maybe you're at a large stable company that pays well enough and that has a pre-COVID history of being remote friendly. In that case, you're probably in reasonable shape at least until you want to change jobs for some reason. But anything that's team dependent could change in a heartbeat. You may be able to drag your feet for a while but eventually you may have to choose between going back into an office at least part-time or finding something else.
Resume/LinkedIn, savings and mindset are important here. If you want the freedom to say "That's gonna be a 'no' for me, dawg." when your company decides they want everyone to RTO, you need to be mentally prepared for it as well has having a good profile/resume and enough money to tide you over. That takes planning.
Amazon refusing to make a firm commitment doesn't mean you shouldn't work for them if you want a remote role. It means you should see that role as just one job in a long career that will contain many jobs. If Amazon decide they want everyone back in the office and you want to carry on working remotely, then you quit and find a new remote role.
Literally any company might decide that they'd like everyone back in the office, and make moves to make it happen, no matter what they might promise today. Your current employer could announce "Yeah, we know we promised, but things have changed so now we're unpromising." A promise from your employer means very little.
My career advice to anyone looking for a job is to find what you need now and to be prepared to find a new role when your needs change. The same is true if your needs remain the same and the company changes around you.
But I don't think it's a good idea to build a career on shifting sands -- if you know that you want to work remotely, it would be silly to accept a job at Amazon when you know they could force you back into the office at any time and you can't do that. If the job market significantly cools, or you like your current project and coworkers, it would be a shame to go through another hiring process because of an external decision like that.
If they make a great offer, and you're really excited about the opportunity, though... could be worthwhile. Just another factor to consider in the process.
There are larger companies that almost certainly have a longer history of being more remote-friendly than most, if not all, of the West Coast companies. But there are no guarantees anywhere.
I'm currently remotely working for a company where the remote part of my hire was a sine qua none condition. Everybody knows this. We are several people for whom coming to the "back" to office (to the extends that coming to the office always was exceptional) is not practical. During onboarding, we are told that the company will help you and find accommodations if you move to another country (though if we can choose a country where there already are people working for the company it would be better). The company has been already, de facto, split in two countries (in which there are offices). The company recently bought a smaller office because people didn't come as often / as many. The company actually could not handle everybody coming to the office at the same time anymore. At this point, a "everybody in the office from now one" would be highly unexpected.
Someone mentioned contracts, indeed my home is one of the two places where I can work from. And actually they don't care, I could work from anywhere as long as I'm reachable and I can work in good conditions as long as they are concerned. Of course, if I hurt myself and I'm not at one of the two places, that would be on me, insurance-wise.
If you intend to do a 100% remote job as a life plan, don't take a job that isn't contractually 100% remote.
I feel like we're in a weird place wrt WFH policies atm.
- an always updated resume
- an always updated career documented
- keeping my skills in sync with the market
- keeping a strong network
- having sufficient savings
This is true, and I think actions speak louder than words in this case. If you see your company not renewing lease, or growing without expanding office space, I think you can take that as a good indicator they won't change tack so hastily.
Different pockets of the company have different trade-offs and incentives. The on-call burden on some teams is higher. When I've seen this happen under good management, the managers work to do different things to relieve the burden (such as spending time working on tech debt, improving test automation, and so on).
Some of the aspects of Amazon's culture that I hear criticized often come with unfair comparisons. No one likes getting paged at 1:00 AM, and that's a thing that can happen to you at Amazon. In my personal experience though, I got paged at weird hours much more often working at start-ups. Amazon at least (again, generally, in the parts of the company I've worked) has a healthy culture around continuing to improve operations, preparing people for on-call, and to address any page events so that particular reason for getting paged doesn't happen again.
(I'm just offering my own opinion, I don't speak for Amazon in any official capacity.)
As you said, your anecdote isn’t worth much. Much less since you’re posting semi-anonymously in an Internet forum.
With how job descriptions can be unilaterally rewritten by corporations at will even having a stance of remote work in a job description shouldn’t be taken as solid, unshakable truth.
Edit-trust that corporations will use you exactly as far as it benefits them and in the most exploitive nature they want.
I mean, I don't make it that hard for people to figure out who I am if that's a thing they care to do.
But I think you're right about the larger part - it's hard to trust Corporations. As I said in my case, and what I advise others to do, is rather than trusting a company (big or small), try to find individuals there you can trust (either, early in your time there, or ideally find someone that you already trust that happens to be there).
Highly motivated people who always go the extra mile get exploited and burnt out. Kind people get their kindness taken advantage of and it sours their view of the world. At least that's what I've seen from the outside.
The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them.
Empathy is actually a disadvantage in this type of role and it selects for all sorts of what I would consider adverse behaviors among managers. The "leadership" principals relate to actual leadership as a jellyfish relates to Smucker's. Look up Google's project oxygen findings if you want a comparison.
I personally doubt I'll ever hire someone who learned engineering management at Amazon unless they've been sufficiently detoxified in a different company.
That show is incredibly good. I'm not quite done with the first season (two more episodes, will likely be watching them both tonight), but it's very interesting.
I think a lot of people at first think that if they could have an operation done that makes them essentially skip their work day, they'd jump at the chance. This show really shows how there could be serious problems with that.
That has been exactly my experience, after 5.5 years. My team spends 4 hours in sprint planning every week (there are 9 of us). It is way more important to try to plan out work than it is to actually do the work.
> The bigger problem I have with the company is the types of managers that environment creates. The primary function of a manager at Amazon as far as I can tell is to enforce process and the secondary function is to maximize output of the people reporting to them.
I did burn myself out trying to reduce operational load. I wasn't arguing for it the right way, so I ended up doing it myself. I was able to measure my results, but it didn't even count towards a promo because I didn't "harmonize discordant views"... instead I just did what needed to be done.
Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture. That is false. Try to find out how many of those folks have actually worked outside Amazon before taking their advice.
In this case I'm talking about the tasks in each sprint. I think 1 day of planning per sprint is a lot. We are supposed to be agile. If we missed a task, swap it with another. If something isn't actually important, bring in something new. We end up doing this anyway... so why all the upfront planning each sprint?
Related back to the above comment, (my opinion) people really love to establish rules and processes and are not able to handle ambiguity. I spend a lot of time (remember the 4 hours a week) arguing whether a story is a mouse or a hedgehog.
IMHO it's splitting hairs, let's just do the work and we estimated a little wrong it just isn't that important.
My implementations are for a specific customer and I don’t have to worry about that type of scale where a mistake or miscommunication in requirements can be costly and affect hundreds of customers.
I have made mistakes as a contributor to a popular company sponsored open source project. Even that caused headaches beyond the scale I was use to dealing with.
When I started in AWS, I watched customers implement hack solutions for themselves because it would take our team too long to deliver a proper solution (so hard to give specifics on HN :) ). That was the hardest thing for me to handle. The mindset is what works best over the next N years, not what works best for a set of customers right now.
Honestly that is the right mindset. Early adopters know they are early adopters and will have to work around problems.
I think the take away from this conversation, for anyone still following, is that a lot of developers (like myself) want to move really really fast. AWS has processes in place to prevent this movement from breaking customers. While it is so annoying for me, it really is a win for customers.
That seems excessive, but I don't know what area you work in. Does your team need to spend that long? I have heard of that happening within Amazon, but then people vote with their feet and move to a team that doesn't spend four hours in sprint planning.
> Many many folks inside Amazon say it has a startup culture.
I've spent roughly as much of my career at startups as I have at Amazon. It's a bit of a mix bag. Having worked at start-ups that had to spend time doing undifferentiated work (just getting automated deployments, for example), it's in some ways nice not to deal with that, and yes, you have to follow The Process for that to be easy. I sometimes see people taking chances and acting quickly on new opportunities. But yes, I also see people not taking chances when the cost of doing so would have been small. Then again, I once worked for a start-up where you had to use a particular template for a design document, and you had to produce a project plan that 6-month long projects that was accurate to the hour. So... I think it's hard to make generalizations.
I’ve always strived to “live in a position of f%%% you” (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=xdfeXqHFmPI). Why would I let a company “burn me out”?
When the pay/bullshit ratio gets too low, I send my always updated resume out, review my “career document” to prepare for behavioral/informal interviews (I don’t do whiteboard coding interviews), talk to people in my network and I get another job.
Before my current job, I was a dev lead and then the de facto “cloud architect” at smaller companies. My current job is much less stressful.
[1] currently my official title is not “software developer”. But for all intents and purposes, I still develop user facing software along with a crap ton of yaml, HCL, diagrams and PowerPoint slides.
Like, you refuse them or the positions you apply for don't require them?
I stayed at one company too long from the time I was 25 until I was 34. By the time I left, I was very much an “expert beginner” - I was doing old school VB6 in 2008 (discontinued in 2001) and C++/MFC/COM programming (ask your kids). But at 34, I had developed soft skills and knew how to talk to business people.
From 2008 - 2018, I both modernized my enterprise dev skills and learned how to solve business problems. I also got lucky and always seemed to get connected to managers, directors and CTOs who were new to their company and needed to solve business problems. Most of my “interviews” were casual semi-technical but mostly about process/development improvements even as I stayed hands on.
By 2016, I belatedly discovered “the cloud” when the company I worked for as dev lead wanted to “move to the cloud” and they hired “consultants” who were really just a bunch of old school Net ops folks who knew how to do “lift and shifts” duplicating and on prem architecture to AWS and of course costing more. As I learned more about AWS, I knew I could bring a unique set of talents as someone who knew both the infrastructure side and the development.
I found a job at another company where the then new CTO wanted to pivot the company to being “cloud native” and sell access to micro services to large health care companies.
I talked through my proposals after listening to him and I led the effort over the next two years.
Then at 46 a recruiter from Amazon Retail reached out to me about an SDE position. I was not interested in being a software engineer at any large company, not interested in relocating “after Covid was over”, nor was I interested in doing the leetCode/DS&A monkey dance.
She suggested I apply for a role in cloud consulting “application modernization” (really just software development + devops using cloud services) in Professional Services that was fully remote. I had the tech skills, the project leadership experience and the customer facing experience from working at small companies. My interview was all behavioral besides a little AWS techno trivia as part of the initial screening.
So in reality, I just fell into a specialty where companies are more interested in my ability to solve business problems than reversing a binary tree on the whiteboard.
Capital-P-Policies get followed. But there are a lot of lower-case-p-policies, more what you might call guidelines, that are not. Sometimes, for good reasons! There are examples of things Amazon does that try to encourage individual judgement, trusting the people in place. But there are also examples where we think we know what the right process is, but for whatever reason (prioritization, we haven't figured out the right way to enforce it, scaling challenges) it's not as strictly followed as outsiders might assume.
Article with links to further information on UnRegretted Attrition (URA) rate: https://archive.ph/dI92l
On my first team, we managed internal tools. Our customers were other people at Amazon, they submitted tickets to us directly.
For some teams at Amazon, there is at least a filter through some sort of customer support to handle certain kinds of issues. You are still on-call, but it's not like you are interacting with customers directly.
Also, since teams at Amazon tend to be small, the amount of things you are on-call for tends to be however much your team handles on its own. I know of other companies in which the oncall covers areas in other team's code bases - this is not the typical setup at Amazon.
Generally, we don't have SREs. Software engineers usually understand best how their software works, so we get faster mitigations, and they are also incentivized better to not write buggy software.
Maybe Amazon can be a good place to work if you're ALWAYS able to be a solid performer but god forbid you're going through something in your personal life that temporarily impacts your ability to deliver.
Screw any CEO's on here reading this who are forcing their workers to return without considering what is best (for the business and for the employee).
You’re right, the conversation has become toxic and your comment is a great example of that. It’s also not in the spirit of HN’s rules.
I experienced both "toxic" and "fantastic" work environments at AWS, during my 6 years tenure. I'm not surprised other can find Amazon "toxic", but I know that there are good people there, and good teams, and good job opportunities.
Also, I used to pretty much work ~90% remote, back in 2008-2014. My boss(es) never had anything against that. The "remote work" policy is influenced by the company, but it also depends on your boss and team.
I think your assessment is way too polarized against working at Amazon. My 0.02.
Well, they can be honest about it, "we have no plan...", or they could potentially lie or be ignorant about it, like your current employer might be, and change their mind down the road.
I'm also a remote worker living in a small town. But I'm a realist as far as understanding that this might not last forever. Perhaps it turns out there's a competitive advantage to office work after all? If so, can't blame companies for wanting to return to those conditions.
There will be plenty of remote work but the articles about death of in office are exaggerated. In a recent informal poll of a top VC startup CEOs (via a private mailing list) many were bragging about how they went back to the office and the benefits they are seeing as a result. However, this is an unpopular opinion you won't see on twitter.
Finally, if someone can hire you in the middle of nowhere they can also hire folks in South America which is a huge engineering demographic and currently underpaid. Same timezone. They can also more easily hire people in different timezones like India or Eastern Europe. Because of that, I do expect over time salaries of in person to diverge from salaries of remote work.
Remote work may still be a great value prop for people like you, but as I said don't pretend everyone is moving to remote work or expect the same benefits as those living in major urban hubs and showing up for work in person.
That doesn't apply solely to Amazon, or even the rest of FAANG. _Any_ company, even those currently remote-first or remote-only, are just one CEO change away from an open-plan office.
I manage customers expectations so I don’t overwork myself.
I wwas initially contacted by a recruiter at Amazon Retail about an SDE position in mid 2020. The recruiter said that the expectation was that I would relocate after “Covid was over”. I was about to say no thanks and keep working as your bog standard enterprise dev with my big house in the burbs in the southeast.
We kept talking and she suggested with my background I apply for a fully remote position in AWS Professional Services and the rest is history. But in the grand scheme of things. It’s one of many jobs I’ve had.
It's not as if the small group of people at the top determine everything else about the company: they only hire the people directly below them, and their influence decreases the further down you go. I think the larger determinant of a company is the business it is in, since that determines at large what people the company is attractive to and which it tries to hire.
I don’t think it ever really slowed like it has in the US. Then again inflation is only just starting to ramp in Australia. New Zealand doesn’t really have an excuse.
Singapore seems pretty healthy too.
I've had to tell recruiters straight up that they can't fill that position and never will in Australia/Canada/New Zealand because anyone who could do it is already doing it in the US for x5 the salary they are offering here.
If only the US had a functioning healthcare system I'd move back there too.
As a percentage relative to healthcare maybe (say $10 generic drugs instead of $2) but if you are getting $100k more a year who cares ?
Australia has a hard cap on how much you can be charged for. I lived in the US when I was a teen under the most gold plated of plated plans and after a protracted hospital stay that was over $2m we still have over $100k that was not covered after the company lawyers spent months fighting with the insurance lawyers. Things have only gotten worse since then.
In Australia the same thing cost $2k out of pocket.
That works if you're happy living near the office. It fails for anyone who wants to live far away.
I did actually commute in about 50% of the time at a previous job. It wasn't really sustainable long term.
(My nearer office is a relatively easy commute though I don't go in there either.)
Guess that's a good reason to put off bringing people back in the office. Just one day your work accounts are disabled, and the direct deposit stops coming.
Partly because of public cloud, open source, and the sources of revenue of the large firms, there are other exposures (especially ad spend in the case of a number of the big firms) but financial relationships within tech seem a lot ore loosely coupled today.
For a while I was running the whole IT and software development of a biotech company for 10 bucks an hour. while my peers went on to be manager at Best Buy shift to other non-tech related roles.
I lot of people I knew ended up exiting the industry and no small number of them ever really got back on track with their careers.
One of the world's largest tech companies slowing hiring from a decade of absolute torrid pace of recruiting is not at all reminiscent of the dotcom crash. Yet?