Comment by pknomad

Commenting to myself:

This looks interesting and relevant:

- https://github.com/projen/projen

- https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/devops/getting-started-with-pro...

- https://projen.io/

Looks Amazon official. Okay, I'm hype, this will be fun to play with.

Ian finished last week :(

Pipelines, BT and Isengard are absolutely what I'll miss the most as well (I handed in my resignation notice last week, prior to all this RTO2.0 kerfuffle)

> One of my biggest gripes was that "make a good marketing opportunity at Re:Invent" seemed to become more important than "release beloved software that makes the lives of our customers easier" by the time I left (not that I was working on anything for reinvent in my final years there).

Was this something you knew was coming or did this behavior surprise you? I realize enshittification really ramped up over the 2010s but I have a hard time last remembering when I expected a company to aim for customer satisfaction over squeezing more revenue. Maybe tiktok? (Which has since enshittified in many ways.)

The rest hurts a lot, though. It's not fun to watch the culture of a company you once had pride in sour and rot.

When you talk about docs at AWS, do you mean internal documentation or the public one?

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> We got semi-scolded by a senior engineer from a neighboring team because we didn't "seem very busy"

What the hell? Hope you told him off, not his job or his business. Weird.

> line management was unable or unwilling to invest in fixing root causes of operational issues.

Sorry for an obligatory: there is no such thing as a root cause.

That said, that matches my general experience too (I left about 9 years ago). Unless the S-team specifically calls them out for any particular metric, it's not going to get touched.

Even then they'll try and game the metric. Sev2 rate is too high, let's find some alarms that are behind lots of false positives, and just make them sev3 instead, rather than investigate why. No way it can backfire... wait what do you mean I had an outage and didn't know, because the alarm used to fire legitimately too?

That major S3 collapse several years ago was caused by a component that engineers had warned leadership about for at least 4-5 years when I was there. They'd carefully gathered data, written reports, written up remediation plans that weren't particularly painful. Engineers knew it was in an increasingly fragile state. It took the outage for leadership to recognise that maybe, just maybe, it was time to follow the plan laid out by engineering. I can't talk about the actual what/why of that component, but if I did it'd have you face palming, because it was painfully obvious before the incident that an incident was inevitable.

Unfortunately, it seems like an unwillingness to invest in operations just pervades the tech industry. So many folks I speak to across a wide variety of tech companies are constantly having to fight to get operations considered any kind of a priority. No one gets promoted for performing miracles keeping stuff running.

It's the toil. The soul-crushing expectations. The "I'm surrounded by people and yet I've never felt so alone" kinda experience, where your co-worker may be nice, but there's not enough level appropriate work to go around.

Then you learn how long it takes for that "420k" comp to manifest (typically about 2-3 years from hire if all goes well, longer if the market is down). At least your annual increase in time off is looking good by then!

Well, assuming you make it that far. Whoops, did you forget to document how awesome you are and insure your manager sees it too? Or just make a 'blameless' mistake during an oncall rotation that made everything in the UK available at a steep discount? Sorry, ______, guess it's PIP time. We hope you succeed! Just don't look too hard at the success rate.

And then, your average successful tenure of 3-5 years is up, and you get to look back at the intense stress, distrust of your boss/coworkers, impact to your relationships, and the toil on your family. Suddenly, the offers pouring in are looking better and better, even if the comp isn't as great.

FWIW, the first 3-6 months tend to be great though!

The base is: $284.1K. If you can make it 4 years where the average employment length is a year you can make that $420k. But it will require 16 hour days, luck and some high degree political skills.

It's like big brother where someone on your team will be pipped each quarter and you need to make sure it's not you. When a teammate asks for help find creative ways to make them look bad.

It's not interesting, it's preposterous to think that you can make that money and just kick your feet up every day and twiddle your thumbs. Yeah, there is going to be fucking stress. That's why the pay is so high. My non-FAANG job is 100% constant stress day-in and day-out and I don't make even half of these comps.

From the same website, other FAANG offers more. For quite some time while I was there, my peers with the same industry experience were earning 50-100% more than myself at Google and Meta.

Also keep in mind Amazon is headquartered in Seattle, which is far from a cheap area, and of the 5 submitters to levels.fyi for sde3 Seattle new hires in the last 6 months, the range is 250k-425k.

Take into account that an L6 who started from L4 normally has the scope and competence of a Staff engineer at Google, it makes sense to me.

If all you wanted was money, you could do even better by going into finance or OpenAI and work your life away until you can't anymore. It's just not sustainable for most people long term, no matter what the pay is, which itself is less than many contemporaries in the same "class".

After you get woken up by pages enough time you really start to question the monetary value of sleep. You will also miss life events such as birthdays, helping friends move, your child’s sporting events, etc.

Being on-call at these companies is equivalent to making work your first priority in life every few weeks. That is a big sacrifice.

It’s no exaggeration when you witness two new engineers cry on two different calls because they are not getting any support from the more senior engineers and are at risk of being pipped.

From what I could tell, the equivalent level (in terms of scope/responsibilities) at the other FANG companies pays more. So even if you are just after the money, it doesn’t seem worth it if the others are also willing to hire you at the comparable level. Of course, there are exceptions - like there’s some managers I would follow anywhere, or some projects are just that exciting.

No

What happened to Microsoft and Alphabet does not seem comparable to Sears, GE, Boeing, and IBM. The latter group have objectively declined in terms of profit and potential.

MS/GOOG are still earning near record amounts of net income with fat profit margins, and have a higher than ever market cap.

AMZN also, so far, has pretty rosy numbers to back it up. They’re profit margins are relatively tiny though, so the executives are focusing on increasing those to match its trillion dollar market cap.

It is the reason Amazon shareholders enjoy a $2T market cap rather than Walmart shareholders that only have a $650B market cap.

I've never been truly impressed with an Amazon product. Is Amazon's engineering culture really that strong?

>Engineering companies success because of their engineering culture.

What current companies do you consider to be both successful and have this culture now?

It's brought up a lot on HN. Heck, the evolution from 'fun, small, engineer company makes through product then everything changes when it becomes larger, more corporate' is almost a Hollywood cliche now (films like Blackberry, tv like Halt and Catch Fire).

The software equivalent of a The Onion article..

Omg CFN guard! That was such a load of BS!

> even though the majority of the time was spent on HTTP calls?

I'm not sure why this detail is relevant. The CPU it consumes is still CPU. Hypothetically, if a rewrite saves $100 million annually in compute, why does it matter that the majority of its time isn't spent in compute? It's still $100 million.

There seems to be an argument here against markets, energy use and entertainment. While criticism is legitimate, little there is related to tech specificially and it is more a complaint against the construction of modern society from the 1700s onwards.

That’s a pretty cynical view. In essence, what you’re saying is “all the things you care about are not things I care about and/or actually despise.”

And that’s OK - you don’t have to work at Amazon! But the implication is that the OP has the “wool over their eyes,” so to speak, and I think that’s unfair. They’re allowed to love their job and find it impactful, even if you don’t. :)

It’s possible I misread this somehow, so if that’s the case, apologies in advance.

What do you do that is so pure it doesn't have externalities?

The problem isn't that you shouldn't care about your company, but that caring about your company is going to be far less important in your day to day.

And yes, your team is one decisions away from being ripped apart, or you are one manager change away from being very sad. I'm sure many of us have been there before: From top of a stack rank to bottom due to a manager change, with minimal in-team changes.

So you can try to care about your manager as little as you want, but the changes will happen to you eventually. Embrace that you are going to have to change teams or quit companies, because no love for your company is going to help.

If anything, what this should teach is to aim for a specific level of company growth: Grow too fast, and you might as well be at a different company in 8 months. Grow too slow (or shrink!) and there's no advancement, and it's all internal politics, as the L7 who has been here for 10 years is probably not leaving, because they know that nobody else would hire them at that level.

Everything is ephemeral though. Not just your team at work that you enjoy, or a team at any workplace that you enjoy, but everything. So don't worry about crossing that bridge until you come to it. There's no good situation that is a sure thing to continue indefinitely, so enjoy them while they're there and then be prepared to make moves if they end.

Yea, words like "driven" and "relentless" and "urgency" betray the reality: It's probably a pressure cooker with constant, needless hustle and urgency. Agree with OP: It's not what most people are looking for out of their work.

I mean I know a few people who seriously do want that type of culture. They want to work 60+ hours a week and they want colleagues who arent to be punished. Amazon is a good fit for those types.

Beware of generalizing behaviors and qualities based off people races and origins. This is what is called racism and is frowned upon or illegal in many places.

If it helps you, I have one counter example handy: I have had an excellent Indian manager.

The chances of your having a manager of Indian descent are higher in tech compared to other professions. That's a function of the 'ingestion pipeline' that's built through the US education system (H1B through higher-education). In a high-expectations field (tech), coupled with a high-expectation company (Amazon), folks who manage to stay back, tend to be seen more, and will be rewarded by being managers (till Peter Principle kicks in). Most middle managers in exacting teams (for products like AWS) are likely to be demanding.

My hypothesis is that a part of what you're observing is just some form of 'survivorship bias' - changing jobs with visas isn't easy (been there done that) so folks are more willing to 'bend' to the culture being driven internally than just moving out (esp. with the long wait times).

At some point, its hard to distinguish the people from the culture, and what came first, but that's a different conversation.

heard similar things about challenges getting a lot of near-shoring tech (chip fabs, etc) set up in MX

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an outsider can't.

...but you definitely can once you're in.

I wouldn't go around bragging about not caring about people I spend 8+ hours a day with for years on end. It's not the good look you think it is, and you haven't reached some modern level of enlightenment here.

Good news. L8 is now the new 7, thanks to rapid promotion in Amazon in the past few years, so the ratio is probably 3%, give or take. Joke aside, it's a fact of life that resources tend to concentrate to the top of a large company. For instance, partner engineers in Microsoft also enjoy great life. The real good news, though, is that wealthfront's CEO already gave actionable solution: join a blow-out small-to-medium company. The rationale is simple: what matter is growth. With growth comes challenging problems, career opportunities, talent density, and potential financial reward. That is, don't join FAANG, find a younger future FAANG. Of course, it's not easy, but it is definitely actionable and viable.

the "unvested stock" thing is largely misunderstood. you have a target compensation number, and every year you get new awards to keep hitting that. if the stock goes up fast, your effective comp is higher than planned in the short term, but you get very few RSUs in the subsequent rounds. unless the stock goes up like a rocketship for many years in a row, your comp converges to slightly above target in the long term. although it has a strong psychological effect on some people, it's usually not rational to wait around for unvested shares.

I'm not sure about those particular services, but in general the ground breaking and foundational things at the FANG and adjacent companies were convinced by people at much lower level than L7. It was a lot of L5-6 folks who then went on to be 7+ many years later.

Well put.

I agree with that, I think earlier in the timeline there was enough work of large scope / complexity / impact that it was obvious and self-fulfilling (ie: go work on big customer ask / initiative -> get promoted). When the influx of middle management came, people started looking for ways to stand out and carve out their own teams under themselves. Multiply this across the entire company..

Same here - seen it happen most strongly once the company switched from a growth (OrderProductSales optimization) approach to one that maximizes cashflow. Basically a switch from explore to exploit mindset - which cynically can be directly connected to "enshitification" as a philosophy. It's done a number on me since I originally joined the company due to it's "peculiar" culture - something that has long since died.

I do appreciate the other major theme of the announcement today: removal of bureaucracy and pointless layers of management. I'm hoping this will lead to a collapse of some of these silly little empires/kingdoms that L7-L8s have built up for themselves in the past 6 years.

But they are using the property, meaning it is keeping its value. The whole point of RTO, so that investment funds, landlords don't lose money they put into commercial property.

Really people forced into office for no reason should at least be given share of the gain they make for the owners.

I'll just do what I do now. Go into the office (I am fortunate that I live maybe 15 minutes away), card in, spend 30 minutes there so it detects my computer use on the network, then go home and work from there. Or, I just won't go in and keep doing my work until they call me on it. My work can easily be done 100% remote and most of my coworkers are in other countries, so it is crazy that I need to go into an office.

Well, the other outcome: it's moot because the employers don't have enough teeth to enforce the mandates.

They're not firing workers who simply ignore the mandates and continue to work remotely anyway. Cutting workers with institutional knowledge and experience is a bigger loss than whatever lesser productivity there might be from not being in-person. Workers actually have the upper hand here and they're using it.

It's like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy - the companies are saying "I declare RTO" but nothing happens.

The joke is, this is what it comes down to: a question of who has the most negotiating power. It’s not a question of what’s best for the employees. It’s not even a question of what’s best for the company. It’s all about who has coercive power.

Market competition will decide which school of thought is right. IMHO, technology companies with stockholders will eventually have to explain why they spend so much money renting huge-ass random buildings for no good reason, and why their asses are being kicked by other companies that don't encumber themselves similarly.

The problem here is with multiple tens of thousands employees in IT/Software field in Amazon and their pay pretty close to top among employers at that scale, executives remain absolutely convinced no significant churn is expected.

Further to that point people who are indispensable and absolutely want/need remote work have their managers and even 1-2 level above in confidence to get their demand fulfilled like always before.

This leaves majority of employees who hate these rules but no leverage or wherewithal to get what they want from management which has no reason to listen.

> Will they strike out on their own and become freelancers who work on their own terms

A few of course can but to most no one including Amazon will pay that kind of money for writing API which calls API which calls API.. This is what most people do at the end of day.

Retirement sounds most reasonable for people who have earned and saved enough and not trying to reach or compare to earnings of directors, VPs and above.

Well there you go. I've found I'm happiest on small, focused, and competent teams, but justifying my own employment constantly sounds like it would be a great way to burn out fast.

Until they don’t.

“The Department of Justice estimates that American police officers shoot 10,000 pet dogs in the line of duty each year.”

https://scholars.unh.edu/unh_lr/vol17/iss1/18/

> I don't see the value proposition.

Apparently kids LOVE the shit out of them... them and Fortnite. An assload of kids paying a couple (or couple dozen (and some Twitch/whatever streamers paying several hundred to a few thousand)) bucks a month adds up.

Based on what little I've seen of it, it all seems like budget Garry's Mod to me... which is something that I bet that kids these days have never heard of.

I think Meta overall has better people and more homogeneous in the quality, it makes coasting more difficult and leads to a grinding culture.

Amazon on the other hand, is toxic but has corners, so the coasting opportunities exist and some of the orgs are incredibly bloated with not too much to do.

If you can take it, PTO was one of the better parts at Amazon if you were tenured. I think it was

- 4 weeks (20 days) of PTO if you were there for 6 years or more, plus

- 6 "personal" days

- in Seattle at least, 3 sick days

Holidays were pretty bad (I don't think MLK jr day was a holiday until like 2021), but personally I'd rather be able to chose my own time off than have random enforced "rest days/development days" and enforced week long vacations when all the hotels and flights are full or pricey and traffic is terrible.

Come to think of it, some of my best work was done in the quiet times of Christmas/New Years when everyone else was gone and I was thus left without distractions. Lots of fun prototyping and project bootstrapping memories.

not sure how it is with mandatory 5x a week in office. i had a good relationship with my manager (aka a lot of trust) and he basically let me do whatever i wanted (aka didnt care if i took days off assuming i was producing enough value) which has been the case for me everywhere i worked. it’s a big company. there’s not going to be one consistent experience.

California at least is 15 days/year the first year, 20 to year 5, then 25/year after

MSFT you need to be Principal 1 to make what an L5 at Google makes, according to levels. Maybe the is lower for Principal Engineer at MSFT?

When I interviewed at Azure (hiring event where I talked to 3+ TLs) I was not impressed at all, which is quite a contrast to when I interviewed at GCP. Maybe I got unlucky!

Considering many shops are just "implement whatever the business people want" and have things silo'd out across many teams, the autonomy to make a thing you work on and support better is hugely valuable. You can get that lots of other places, but it's very hit and miss on the level of ownership you can actually achieve. Amazon does tend toward a very startup-like sense of technical ownership, even if there's little financial tie to the product.

I'd argue that most startups have little financial tie to the product too for all but the first couple of contributors due to all the complications that wind up going into startup funding. If you can only realize any value from your equity with 1:10000 odds, your expected ownership is 1/10000 of whatever you actually got in equity.

I'm talking about tech

Sounds like Dublin. Amazon were crazy aggressive for hiring right until 2022, and are now less aggressive but still hiring pretty actively.

Though how much of that is hiring for expansion and hiring because they churn through people is a different question.

Berlin, bruh