Comment by pknomad

Comment by pknomad 10 months ago

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Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days? Every now and then I get a ring from a recruiter gauging my interest and sometimes I get the itch to just to go through the process so that I can have a FAANG in my resume.

I've heard from others that Amazon could be an amazing place to work, citing fantastic colleagues and work opportunities. But then again, Amazon doesn't claim monopoly on those and one has to assume the risk of working for a place that churns people out and has upper-level management that are hostile to IC's needs/wants.

Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

tdeck 10 months ago

If you work in Seattle it's one of only a few options. A lot of folks in the Bay Area (including former me) don't understand how much of a monoculture this place is. There are really only 2 major places to work as a software engineer and very few startups or small companies. Nearly every SWE I meet works at Microsoft, Amazon, Google, or Meta (the last 2 have smaller offices here).

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  • dymk 10 months ago

    Google and Meta have thousands of SWEs and multiple buildings up here, I don't know if I'd call that a smaller presence. Smaller than the bay area, sure, but still a major employer.

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    • tdeck 10 months ago

      I agree with you that they're not small in absolute terms, but I think these offices wouldn't make the mental list of top 4 tech employers in the Bay Area, and there's a very steep drop off after that. Maybe it would be better to say it feels like there are 4 big employers and almost nothing after that. All of this is hard to research - I tried doing some googling for numbers to validate my gut feeling but I wasn't sure how reliable they are.

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      • kenjackson 10 months ago

        Seattle metro is also a lot smaller than Bay Area metro -- and the Bay is probably the densest of all tech areas.

        That said, Seattle does also have a good collection of "minor" companies, such as PACCAR, Expedia, Zillow, Tableau, F5. And I think Apple also has an office in Seattle (although probably really small).

        Unless you want to work for one of the "brands", there are some good choices in Seattle.

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        • eitally 10 months ago

          Yeah, for sure. After all, it's a Tier 1 city in the United States. It's just different in the Bay, but it's different than anywhere else in the world.

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  • irrational 10 months ago

    Not as much of a monoculture as Portland. Portland has Intel (where they are in the process of laying off tens of thousands of people), Nike (where they just went through layoffs and aren't hiring), and... not much else.

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    • red-iron-pine 10 months ago

      Portland is a lot smaller of a place than people would think. Outsized cultural impact. Seattle too, though Seattle has kept pace as MS and Amazon skyrocket.

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      • no_wizard 10 months ago

        I'm not so sure, other than Nike, Intel, a small Google office and a couple of other satellite offices I've seen, I don't feel the tech scene here is very big. Soo many companies cratered over the pandemic and it didn't really recover, and now Portland Metro has real visibility and desirability issues, and Oregon itself as a state hasn't exactly made it easier to get business up and going here.

        I'm actually worried, as a resident of the Portland metro, about this, because I'm getting closer and closer to the point where my salary is large enough that fewer and fewer businesses can employ me just at my current compensation let alone raises etc.

        I'm actually worried I have a large set of golden handcuffs on my hands here

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  • forrestthewoods 10 months ago

    Theres more to Seattle than that. But Amazon and Microsoft are HUGE so they are a very disproportionate amount of the people you’ll meet.

    The upside is you don’t have to live in the Bay Area! Couldn’t pay me enough to move down there.

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  • lelandbatey 10 months ago

    I think there's tons of companies in Seattle, but the sheer size of Amazon and Microsoft skew the distribution massively. I've spent my whole career so far ignoring the big companies you mention. There's lots of engineers working at the big names but there are also hundreds of smaller companies in the area.

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    • tdeck 10 months ago

      All I can say is that while there are such companies you never seen to meet them. In the Bay Area we have tens of thousands of people at Google, Apple, Salesforce, etc.., but I would constantly meet people from random smaller and medium size companies and it doesn't feel the same here in Seattle. I think this is partly due to funding and partly due to how people seem to be more risk averse here.

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  • pknomad 10 months ago

    Hah! That jibes with my experience. I've applied for few startups in Seattle back in 2018 and every interview was prefaced with - "our engineering team is made up for ex M$ and/or AMZN".

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  • packetlost 10 months ago

    This makes me sad because I've been trying to move to Seattle from Madison, WI for years and was hoping the startup market would be better out there

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    • quasse 10 months ago

      I made that exact move two years ago and I've gotta say, I actually miss the Madison tech scene.

      Seattle is basically a great place to work for a satellite office of one of the tech behemoths, but the actual hacker / enthusiast scene seems to have pretty much dried out. Seattle's Linux user's group died in 2020 and never came back, as an example.

      Madison had much better makerspaces and more of them, despite being a much smaller city. Madison was also small enough that you ended up connected to a lot of really smart people coming out of the university's CS / biomedical departments which seemed to sustain a pretty vibrant med-tech startup ecosystem.

      Edit to add: If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.

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      • tdeck 10 months ago

        > If anyone in Seattle does have meetup groups they enjoy, I'd love to hear about it! Hardware, electrical or software; I'd be up for any of them.

        I'm looking for the same thing, maybe we can compare notes!

        I've been going to the Capitol Hill Tool Library lately, which is my local makerspace. The space is small but they have a lot of traffic and people are generally very friendly and helpful. Also they have woodworking tools which I would never have in my apartment.

        In terms of makerspaces specifically I imagine the limiting factor is rent. When rent is too high you end up with a smaller space and less cash left over for equipment.

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      • packetlost 10 months ago

        That's very interesting to hear. I wonder if Madison has a Linux/Unix users group. I 100% agree on the makerspace front. I actually worked with one of the founders of The Bodgery for awhile, despite not being my thing it sounds like a great place.

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      • tstack 10 months ago

        Not exactly Seattle, but the Bellevue library has a makerspace — https://kcls.org/bellevuemakerspace/

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        • quasse 10 months ago

          Oh nice, the access to a professional quality sewing machine is a cool feature. I do some hobby upholstery and using my homegamer Singer is a real limiting factor.

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      • pnathan 10 months ago

        Look up the Seattle Rust meetup. Its still around.

        The whole Seattle scene imploded in 2020.

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      • tomrod 10 months ago

        Died in 2020 due to Covid, or just died?

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        • quasse 10 months ago

          Looks like covid to me, the meetings just stopped being scheduled and never came back afterwards.

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    • tdeck 10 months ago

      It's all relative and I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison, it's just not pervasive like it is in SF. Also we as an industry seem to be heading into a funding trough, only AI promises are keeping the bubble afloat.

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      • packetlost 10 months ago

        > I imagine there is more startup energy/funding here than in Madison

        Probably, but also costs are quite a bit lower (they're much closer to Denver CoL if you can believe that). We have a pretty good amount of startups and a lot more "bigger" non-tech companies than you'd expect.

        I agree on the funding trough, but I think that's really the macro-economics at play. Midwest is pretty well shielded from that, so I'm kinda happy I'm here for the time being.

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    • drewrv 10 months ago

      Startup market is fine, there are just fewer big companies than the bay.

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  • aurizon 10 months ago

    A Newco, or even a startup with a good shot that both with a WFH culture will have a good choice from these 'newly imprisoned' folk = might well lead to change of heart - When you have them....their hearts/minds will follow...

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  • Klonoar 10 months ago

    Apple has a very small office here too.

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    • steelframe 10 months ago

      If by "very small" you mean two 12-story office towers in South Lake Union, then yeah.

      But note that Apple is on a similar glide path as Amazon with respect to return-to-office.

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      • Klonoar 10 months ago

        Ah, you're right - for some reason I was thinking of the pre-SLU one that just had some CloudKit team(s) downtown. Completely forgot they have the SLU one now.

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matrix87 10 months ago

> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

People on blind say facebook is pretty similar with the hire to fire culture

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  • eitally 10 months ago

    I spent 8 years at Google (Cloud) and have lots of friends in the revolving door of AWS -> Google Cloud -> MSFT/Azure. I've been long convinced that MSFT has the best management and offers the most predictable corporate culture & behaviors. At least on the Azure side, comp is on par with both of the others, so if I had options for all three I'd definitely choose Microsoft.

    Meta pays better but it's too long a drive from where I live to put up with the reduction in WLB.

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    • VirusNewbie 10 months ago

      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!

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  • alienthrowaway 10 months ago

    Meta is not similar to Amazon at all in broad company culture. It's not even close. The RSU vesting schedule differences are one hint.

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  • VirusNewbie 10 months ago

    I have not interviewed at either company, but Meta is known to be harder to get into and pay quite a bit more than Amazon. I imagine they treat their employees quite a bit better as well, though i'm sure expectations are still high, like they are at all FAANGs.

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steelframe 10 months ago

> What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

If you're entry-level and will put up with anything just to get Amazon on your resume.

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100pctremote 10 months ago

It's the worst reason to end up there, because you have to really want to work there for some qualitative reason to have any hope of adapting to and succeeding in that culture. I always felt so bad when I helped onboard a new hire who said they just wanted to experience working at a FAANG.

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notinmykernel 10 months ago

100% NOT worth it. Don't be fooled by any stories to the contrary. Amazon is a very abusive workplace.

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  • Root_Denied 10 months ago

    The day to day toxicity is highly dependent on your team, manager, and skip. My current team is great, my manager is halfway decent, and my skip is basically invisible to my team in a day to day sense. I've seen a few other teams where it's very clear there's cutthroat politics going on and they're all miserable.

    Organizational toxicity, like the original 3 day RTO and now 5 day RTO change, is the bigger problem. My L8 and L10 both learned of the 5 day RTO change at the same time as everyone else, meaning the S-Team made a decision and didn't give a heads up to anyone - probably because they don't care about feedback or data. Organizational toxicity also takes the form of stack ranking, URA metrics, and changes to promotion requirements over the last year to make them more difficult at all levels.

    I'm coming up on my 2 year mark and more than ready to find something else, but it seems like fully remote security roles are pretty competitive right now.

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darthapple76 10 months ago

In Europe they're one of the biggest tech employers. Relatively low hiring bar, one of the better paying, and generally stable job unless you're really bad.

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  • mathverse 10 months ago

    Never heard of this? Where? What location?

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    • Macha 10 months ago

      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.

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      • darthapple76 10 months ago

        afaik they don't pay great in Dublin. Look to Amsterdam and Berlin.

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aceshades 10 months ago

speaking for myself: i stick around because of the my soon-to-vest RSUs and because they gave me an official remote work exception. both of them are ticking time-bombs though.

1. I've got like $110k vesting this November. After that it starts to dry up quickly. $50k in May 2025 and another $50k in November 2025. After that it's basically nothing, unless my PCS next year comes with some re-up. 2. The remote work exception is indefinite, but i'm worried that if I'm one of a few remote employees on a big team that are all mostly in-office, I'm not going to really get as many opportunities otherwise.

Long story short, I think my time at Amazon is coming to an end soon, but I'm still sticking around for now.

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  • VirusNewbie 10 months ago

    You don’t get yearly refreshers?

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    • Barracoon 10 months ago

      Amazon comp is based on your annual performance review (OLR) and your pay band (level + job family). OLR has 5 tiers: least effective, highly valued 1-3, and top tier. Each of those tiers determines your band penetration.

      Lets say your pay band is 100-200k. A new hire is theoretically better than 50% of their team, so they join at an HV3 and make 180k. If they receive HV3 at OLR, their total comp target (TCT) remains 180k. If it is their first OLR, they are probably not getting any additional RSUs because the cash-based comp of the first 2 years means they are already at their TCT.

      If they made TT, their TCT goes to 200k and they would receive additional RSUs to reach that pay.

      If they were HV2 or below, they would not get additional RSUs and their TC would slowly fall from 180k to 160k or below. If it fell below the HV2 level of 160k they would get some RSUs later to bump them back to TCT.

      Amazon also assumes the stock will go up 15% year over year, so when RSUs are granted over a multiyear time horizon, you receive less based on assumed growth that would make you reach your TCT.

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    • Root_Denied 10 months ago

      This past year they didn't do stock refreshers for most employees due to the rise in stock price. They calculate your total comp with an assumed 15% YoY increase in the stock price, and if it goes up more than that they decrease stock awards to keep you within the expected band.

      I was rated TT this year and got <2.5% base increase and no stock, though I'm still under 2 years so I have vesting through 2026. It still feels shitty though, and part of why I'm looking to leave sooner rather than later.

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toddmorey 10 months ago

There's got to be opportunity to work on things at a certain scale that you can't find elsewhere. Graviton, AWS data centers, etc.

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oneepic 10 months ago

For one person's anecdotes on the culture, read Exit Interview by Kristi Coulter. Amazing read IMO, and it explained a lot of how I've felt at Microsoft and Google.

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weezin 10 months ago

> Perhaps a better question is - if one can get an offer at other FAANGs and the equivalents... is there a reason to choose Amazon over others?

It kind of depends on the person. I've seen people go from Amazon to Google and they want to go back to Amazon because they are bored. Some people just thrive in high pressure environments. Also everything is pretty team dependent at FAANGs, you could end up at a bad team at any of them.

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eranation 10 months ago

Been at AWS for 5 years, learned there more in one year than in my entire career. Great colleagues, and I was lucky to have great management (both direct and skip level). Great internal mobility, and (surprisingly, to me) great work life balance. The main issue is that it highly varies from team to team. It is such a large company that asking how it is to work for Amazon, is like asking how it is to live in Europe, YKMV.

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01100011 10 months ago

Some people need the money. I left my $160k/yr job in 2018 because I got a divorce and the alimony payments were going to slowly make me homeless. One of the first places I looked was Amazon. Fortunately I found something better and ended up tripling my salary. Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.

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  • andirk 10 months ago

    > Many non-valley/low-stress jobs just don't pay the same as crap jobs like Amazon.

    Clarify. Your current 3x salary job is better than Amazon, but it's in-valley/high-stress?

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    • 01100011 10 months ago

      Yes, better than Amazon but still a valley job.

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bmitc 10 months ago

I interviewed there a couple of years ago. It felt like I was being interviewed by robots to be a robot. It was openly hostile towards my background and experience, and to be frank, my interviewers didn't really seem to know all that much themselves. One person asked me to solve a dumb and poorly specified game of life thing, and he kept interrupting me while I was proposing a solution with his own thoughts on some premature optimization that my solution supposedly didn't handle, which is the complete opposite of how you should do engineering. It was a complete waste of time, and you have to study and speak to their "principles" as if you're taking a Scientology test. There wasn't a single ounce of humility or curiosity during the interview process on Amazon's part.

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scarface_74 10 months ago

None at all for most software engineers.

For me in particular, it was a remote opportunity (still is as far as I know since it is considered part of the sales organization) and they paid top of band for my specialty - enterprise app dev + AWS.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38474212

Working at AWS was the best thing that happened to my finances and my career.

Leaving AWS was the best thing that happened to my mental health

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htrp 10 months ago

Money.

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  • iosguyryan 10 months ago

    Easily more elsewhere with less BS

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    • htrp 10 months ago

      I expect eventually people will demand a premium for the BS?

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      • relaxing 10 months ago

        I’d love to see a chart of the increasing recruiting expenditures chasing an ever shrinking candidate pool and extrapolate the total size of the pool of suckers.

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      • tantalor 10 months ago

        More like, put in less effort than they would have.

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rvz 10 months ago

Well the many employees at Amazon (and also FAANG) don't have a choice and have to keep up with the high cost of living (HCOL) standards and extreme competition of jobs from those willing to work for less. This is even before mentioning the potential for Amazon investing in robotics (to replace workers).

Additionally there are some on work visas which if at the event of a layoff, they have to find work within months otherwise they have to move back. Amazon is the last one to consider given the amount of employees there (1.5M) which screams the following:

1. Hire advanced roboticists into Amazon.

2. Build and train the robots against the employees in the customer support and warehouses areas.

3. Gradually replace them and do a soft-layoff.

They won't be going after programmers for now, but Amazon will try to find a way to do more with less, given the staggering amount of employees there which is a red flag and motivates them to automate many jobs with robots to reduce costs.

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ghaff 10 months ago

I'm not sure why I would work for Amazon. Had plenty of opportunities to work for other other companies that paid well enough. Maybe not as much, but who cares?

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Der_Einzige 10 months ago

Can we remove Amazon from the FAANG term yet? Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia, or any number of other companies with much better pay/WLB exist.

I don't care about it's historic term for stocks that went up. Today, we use it to refer to the "elite" of the tech industry. The "FAANG" should refer to the tech giants with the best pay/WLB ratios. Amazon is not even close to that anymore, and frankly never really was.

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llm_trw 10 months ago

>Genuine question for the folks over at Amazon: What is the value of working at Amazon (or even just AWS) these days?

I've interviewed with them three times, all before 2020. It seemed like a cult held together by the sunk cost fallacy.

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varispeed 10 months ago

Ask how much they pay and the itch will be gone in no time.

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