Comment by supergeek133 4 days ago
The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
Amazon takes every minute they're willing to give, they're successful and consistently promoted/paid more.
This is also why I'll never work at Amazon. Haha.
It's crazy to me that more people don't realize this. You're working crazy hours, have no meaningful hobbies or life outside of work... and for what? No one's going to remember that you built some nice feature in some bit of software in 100 years, or even 20. Enjoy your life, enjoy people and community and activities. You can still get paid incredibly well as an engineer, more than enough to live comfortably, and work a normal 40 hour week (or less).
People prioritize weird shit.
It depends on how many years you do it, and how early. It's quite the trade in your 20s: Think of the freedom and peace of mine an extra couple of million in the stock market can give you. Then you slow down, celebrate, and know that you can let that money make more money on interest than you do from work. Reach the mid 40s? The pile has grown than enough to retire very comfortably.
The trick is that you have to know when to stop. I have a friend who ended up traveling with an oxygen machine, because she worked 80+ hour weeks for one too many months, and ignored a pneumonia.
I've been reading books about the history of computing, stuff like "The Soul of a New Machine", "Showstopper!" and "Revolution in the Valley" -- all these people working massive unpaid overtime. I guess some of them got stock options. Part of me wishes that I could care as much.
If you're married/kids it usually happens by 35. If you reach 'enlightenment' after that you can't cut back easily (wife and kids accustomed,even maybe feel entitled to expensive private school etc etc), and if you do your family will often simply divorce you then the judge will impute your income for CS and alimony at the high amount you made before. If you scale back, they put you in a jail cell, take away your licenses, your property, and revoke your passport.
Not to judge too much, but that sounds more like the outcome of a crappy relationship rather than a universal experience.
Not exactly related, but ... I will admit, I'm occasionally mind-boggled by family court. Male rape victims have been made to pay child support because its not the child's fault that his mother was a criminal.[1][2]
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermesmann_v._Seyer 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forced_fatherhood#United_State...
I think it might be a bit of a post-scarcity thing. A bit like how we don't cope well with the easy availability of lots of macronutrient-dense foods that exists in many developing nations, and our physical health may be suffering for it.
Similarly, once upon a time people needed to work whenever work was available so that they could secure the resources they'd need for times when it wasn't. That may still be the case in some industries. But in tech it's not like that. If anything it's the opposite. Extra work tends to just create even more extra work, which won't necessarily be compensated because you're salaried. Sure, you might get a raise or promotion, but that's not guaranteed. The reward mechanism uses gachapon mechanics. Which works out great for the company's owners in exactly the same way that loot crates are more profitable than more honest forms of game design. Whenever I see people sharing anecdotes of that one acquaintance of theirs who was a tech workaholic and was handsomely rewarded for all that extra work, it puts me in mind of a billboard for my state's lottery that says, "Only players win." Or the motivational dreck that MLM companies like Herbalife feed to their members. People seem to have trouble recognizing a scam when there are some token people for whom it actually worked out well.
And no, it's not healthy. The High Price of Materialism by Tim Kasser is about 20, 25 years old now, but summarizes a lot of the research on this sort of thing as of that time. Long story short, you get caught up in chasing the dragon.
Exactly. I want a wife and kids and a family, and for them not to hate me. Work has always got to be secondary to that.
I think the time spent being a workaholic (I did it a little myself early on) is sometimes helpful to really increase your skills quickly. But eventually you hit a sort of skill ceiling and it's increasingly not worth it, especially considering the things you are giving up.
Nobody at your funeral is going to be giving a heartfelt and tearful speech about how great a developer you were. Ordinary people honestly don't give a shit and neither should we besides just being generally competent and able to perform our roles.
I think it's encouraged due to milestones always being set with unrealistic ECDs, so every project is always behind and there's always urgent security fixes to 'catch up' on (I work on an AWS microservice as an L4 SDE, and joined 2y ago, for context). So you work in the off-hours thinking you're 'catching up' to the work you've 'missed', when in reality that is just the expected velocity to keep pace, and being 'caught up' is an unreachable goalpost.
I personally just learned to hide lack of progress on one task behind the urgency of another new issue, or keep tasks as vague as possible so that I can slow down on some days and speed up on other days. As a result I don't think I work crazy hours, but there's just a constant, fatiguing pressure of the feeling of 'I should be catching up on work right now'.
And I only recently realized that it's degrading my ability to enjoy any time at all, whether its PTO or just after work hanging out with my girlfriend.
This is my first eng. job though and I can't tell whether its better or worse in other places, and I tell myself it's probably better than the hours required at a startup. And I feel bad complaining to my friends when they're almost all unemployed or working gig jobs. /rant
This is actually why I’m skeptical about the complaints about Amazon
I’ve never worked there but I feel like I could? The complaints sound like a baseline level of toxicity seen in many places, I have the discipline for and others dont
Amazon would still be the last of the big tech’s I would choose for those reasons, the worst vesting schedule, and RTO, but it definitely sounds relatable
>> The friends I have that work there that love it are absolute workaholics.
This is a very important distinction.
At some age, you're going to have the money and whatever else you want and suddenly ask yourself why you're working so hard when you already have everything you need to be happy. This hit me a few years after I turned 35 and started asking myself was it worth it to have a really nice mountain bike, live in a state that has some of the best trails and the best I can do is get out six times a year because why? Because I'm putting in 50-60 hours at an office for a company that will cut me loose whenever they feel like it.
I realized if I didn't start focusing on my own happiness and stopped using all my energy to prove what an awesome developer I was, it was going to end up very lonely and very unhappy. I was also leery of burning out again like I did a few years earlier and had covered it up from my bosses and co-workers.
I feel like its a crossroads everybody arrives at in different times in their lives. For me, at 35, I felt like I had wasted so many years burning the candle at both ends and for what? Nothing that was going to make my life better. Even a few years after making several changes, I still look back with regret it took so long to see what I was doing to myself.