186 points by aws_throwaway 3 days ago
Any SDEs who are thinking of leaving Amazon over the 5-day RTO announcement, what are the best options for WFH flexibility, interesting projects, quality of colleagues, and salary? I'm a DB-focused SDE3 in the Seattle area, but am open to general systems programming projects, with 0-2 days/week onsite.
I know someone at IC level there who hasn't done actual work in many months. There is literally no work because their old team was cut and they haven't found a new one yet. They are just collecting paychecks until an eventual (hopeful) layoff and severance package.
Some VP's still need to show headcount to justify their own jobs?
I believe this could happen, but find it hard to believe it would last a few months. The systems would auto-assign them a manager. That manager would be getting reports on their productivity, and would have them in their list of people they have to give ratings to. At this point they would have gone through a mid-cycle stack ranking.
Unless their current manager is colluding with them, they would have been ranked into a pip by now.
It's tempting but not really compatible with my personal sense of integrity. I don't judge others though since Amazon has zero integrity.
FWIW, there are lots of comments here calling you a sucker (or saying words to that effect without the name calling), and I'm here to say the opposite.
I think it's good that you have an independent sense of what's 'right' and 'wrong' for you to do, and you follow your internal moral compass on big decisions in your life. Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with.
I'm really torn here. It feels like a good thing for society if everyone has that attitude of "do the right thing".
But I also feel that it's important not to be naive: the sad/harsh reality is that there are people and bodies and organisations out there who will exploit others, and will use their gains to further carry on exploiting.
Now obviously, "exploiting" here is paying huge salaries, shiny offices etc. but I think HN is generally in agreement that Amazon is one of those organisations that regularly oversteps the mark with employee rights/respect.
If we accept that, then I have a really hard time shaking the idea that responding to them making employees lives hard by continuing to perform above average is no different to appeasing an alligator.
What if employers exploit employees because they know there will always be employees who respond to it like this? It kind of makes sense. If we accept that, then all of a sudden "I'm doing the right thing of working hard for my own moral compass" becomes "I'm helping the bad guys because, because it makes me feel better".
Again, I'm aware that thinking about this in terms of "exploitation" and "suckers" is a little extreme, but thinking about it in terms of incentives: isn't this person letting their moral compass incentivise a behaviour they object so much to that they're looking to leave?
edit: for clarity, I do hugely respect working hard for personal motivation of "doing the right thing", and I have taken this approach before. But when I got older, and reflected, I concluded I let my own ego enable things which make the world a worse place, which is a bigger no-no for me personally. It does need to be balanced off against falling into an almost paranoia of "is this person/group just trying to exploit me".
> Your personal integrity should not depend on the integrity of who/whatever it is you're dealing with
I disagree, because sometimes your integrity might justify their behavior. People do bad things because they think they're good, and they think they're good because people tell them via their actions.
Being a good employee tells amazon their employment policies are fair, and they should continue them. Therefore, IMO, you not only should be a bad employee - you have a duty to be a bad employee.
100% agree. Never compromise on what is part of your character build. It's not about them, it's all about you, your mental health, and your career trajectory.
Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
When I command my computer to remove a file, I don’t think about the morality of destroying things. I issue the command and it does it. And I know my computer doesn’t care about personal integrity as it churns through its instructions. Amazon works the same way.
These companies are all lawn mowers, just like Oracle. A lawn mower just cuts grass and does not deserve or respond to things like integrity and personal honor.
While it may be comforting to think you're just sticking it to "Amazon", if you look at almost anything you're doing, you're going to see other people who are really at the other end of this apathy. Whether it's co-workers you're blocking or giving half-effort to, customers being ignored, or the new engineer that is neglected.
Is there some purely "amoral object like Amazon" stuff that's part of it too? Sure. But at least in my experience, folks who are just phoning it in cause real stress for coworkers and others, and that definitely relates to personal integrity.
> Personal integrity should not ever be in play when you’re talking about amoral objects like Amazon.
Personal integrity must always be in play, or else it means nothing.
Integrity is as much about the kind of person you want to be as it is about the beneficiary of your treatment.
Don't sell yourself short.
Reference:
"What you think of Oracle, is even truer than you think it is. There has been no entity in human history with less complexity or nuance to it than Oracle. And I gotta say, as someone who has seen that complexity for my entire life, it's very hard to get used to that idea. It's like, 'surely this is more complicated!' but it's like: Wow, this is really simple! This company is very straightforward, in its defense.
This company is about one man, his alter-ego, and what he wants to inflict upon humanity -- that's it! ...Ship mediocrity, inflict misery, lie our asses off, screw our customers, and make a whole shitload of money.
Yeah... you talk to Oracle, it's like, 'no, we don't fucking make dreams happen -- we make money!'
...You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle."
> amoral
I thought you meant ‘immoral’, and do believe that word is probably correct, but objectively ‘amoral’ is accurate according to https://www.vocabulary.com/articles/chooseyourwords/amoral-i...
Seems ironic to be working for a company without integrity, drawing a salary ie your livelihood from such an organization while believing somehow your personal integrity is not already impacted by doing so. The two seem incompatible to an outside observer.
Integrity doesn't vary based on the actions of other people.
A better move would be to use the networking opportunity to find other high-performance people who don't like the BS, and form a productish-consultingish worker-owned co-op to replace the soulless, erratic corporation with a more stable, humane environment.
I’ve heard if you are on focus when you quit you may have a lifetime ban on ever coming back anywhere in Amazon. Is this correct?
I filed a formal complaint Brian O was breaching fiduciary duty in the 10-K and was subsequently fired unceremoniously for my “performance” by two directors on a call the next morning.
Amazon tried to hire me back 6 months later, from multiple recruiters. My former manager and I had a good laugh that somehow I wasn’t blacklisted.
I wouldn’t worry about it, too much.
Amazon always needs bodies. So whatever ban there is, they will “make an exception”..
This may also be the case for URA (unregrettable attribution?). Someone I know left just short of two years for personal reasons, was never put in PIP/Focus, and then they tried joining a new team after and was told when they left their manager put them as URA, which prevents them from coming back. I've heard it can just be a year, though.
Unregretted attrition, which means you no longer work there and you're not sorry about it.
Which means you are the one with the power in the negotiation (the party with the most power is the one who needs the other the least).
So they have a codified sour grapes rule to punish people who they don't have power over? To punish people who weren't begging to please continue being allowed to work there? That is actual insanity right there.
A thought experiment, something you may not want to hear. Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time? Also, while you are at office 5 days a week, how about try to get to the next level before you switch? Many will leave (just like you are planning to) and hence it will be easier for the long timers to get promoted in an environment where there will be a lot of inflow of new employees at all levels.
I am not suggesting that this is the right way to think about your situation, but that it is 'another way' to think about it. Who knows, you might end up profiting from this adversity. Wish you all the best!
It’s not always that easy. Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working, and can’t trivially reorganise it back to full time.
I am one of these naive people who expected happy home office forever. It bit me hard, because I bought an old house outside of big city and spent the time I would need to commute renovating it. The return to the office happened, I quit. The other place was weird. It advertised generous home office ruling. But under very special manager home office was forbidden. It was just too stupid to file a complaint to HR and I left. So my construction site was stuck for 1,5 years and it was very stressful.
Found by accident a job near my home. Small company with private office for me and unlimited home office ruling. Use home office only when I am ill. During this period I found out, that I absolutely love my private office and hate daily commuting and open offices.
I remember being surprised during the pandemic just how many people were uprooting their lives and moving to remote locations. Even though there has been a trend towards remote work over the previous decade I always thought there would be a bounce back and some of those people would be stuffed.
That seems like it was a mistake. WFH was supposed to be temporary during the pandemic. Not sure what people were thinking…
> Many people over the last few years have reorganised their life under the expectation of continued hybrid working
Why should an employer bear the burden of an employee's own poor decision making?
> A thought experiment
> Have you thought of playing along and see if you would actually like going back to office full time
That is not a thought experiment. That is a "uproot your whole life" experiment.
“Hear me out, what if you might like sticking your hand in a blender?”
I genuinely miss seeing my pals at work and eating lunch with the gang. I genuinely do not miss the commute, the struggle to get things done with a million distractions around me, not having my dog sleeping in her basket underneath my desk in my home office, and seeing my kids before and after school.
There, thought experiment concluded. I didn’t like it.
Comparing working from the office to sticking your hand in a blender is such an absurd hyperbole that it completely discredits your argument.
It is not "uprooting your whole life" to go back to working in the office, unless one was so foolish as to move away from the city their job was in. And yeah in that case it sucks balls, but I don't imagine most people did something that foolish.
> unless one was so foolish
Making decisions is not foolish, even if they disagree with your idea of how they should be made. I quit my previous job over RTO, leaving a great team at a cool company. It was a conscious decision with pros and cons carefully weighed.
seems more like very smart to do such a thing - but sometimes even smart decisions just don't work out.
If you're willing to take lower pay, there are a lot of good options out there.
I took a nearly 50% cut about 5 years ago (a few months before the pandemic) to join a smaller company with a much less stressful environment and a very flexible WFH policy, and I don't regret it at all.
That's a US perspective right? I don't think that exists much in Europe?
I just got a 3 month freelance gig (Netherlands) and even that requires full time on-site for absolutely no reason other than "boss says so". There's also a housing crisis going on and they wonder why they have an open vacancy for literally 6+ months.
I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
That's probably because you're a freelancer, which makes it a point for negotiation business to business.
Employees have a legal right to work from home, so far as is reasonable in their circumstances and their employer's. There is legislation and jurisprudence on that, which makes it a lot less soft than it at first appears. The boss can't just say 'no'.
> Employees have a legal right to work from home
Sorry but that’s a fantasy. I live in Germany and that is 100% not the case here. You might be able to negotiate it if you are an especially valuable employee but normally no chance
"Employees have a legal right to work from home,"
We're just making shit up now, huh
If we're doing anecdotes, my company in NL lets teams decide on their work schedule, and most people choose WFH 3/5 days, with some people (myself) doing full remote except for some Fridays (Vrijmibo FTW :) ), and some people doing office every day.
Which to me is the sane option.
As long as we are sharing anecdotes, I can share mine from the Netherlands as well. Employer sanely leaves it to the team to decide how often to work from office. My team decided to work from home but meet at office atleast once in 2 months. There are other teams within the company that works practically 100% at office because they like it, and it makes their job easier.
I do know atleast a few other companies where I worked at or have friends working at in the Netherlands with similar WFH setup.
Yes, US perspective. Many employers here are similarly persnickety about being on-site, but there are also some good ones that are open to remote work and a few that are fully remote.
It's been 10+ years since I did freelance, but I was fully remote then too, FWIW.
> I guess it's better to watch it burn than to allow WFH.
i guess there are a lot of companies have not yet found a way to manage wfh for overall satisfaction, which massively burdens morale and hence they face the decision of doing something or watch it burn.
Former AWS here.
I mentioned unionization on my personal social media account and was approached by legal that I should “consider my public statements about my job carefully.”
It is well known that Amazon hires organizations like the Pinkertons to break up unionization efforts at all levels, even going as far as to bait union supporters into signing fake union interest forms on false pretense and then attrition-fire individuals who signed by giving them no hours, pushing them into ineffective or frustrating conditions, PIPs, etc.
The actual answer to your question, besides the fact that all of us SDEs consider ourselves exceptional at our jobs, is that there are a lot of people whose immigration status depends on their job. They can’t strike.
For that and other reasons, Amazon knows they can do what they want.
I would love for labor to get a win, but it’s easy for me to say since I don’t work at Amazon. Someone else should bell the cat.
I just joined Amazon but I’m definitely on board for unionization. Just need to figure out who else is. It seems like the real solution here is a collective unit to bargain with management to say no 5 days is not necessary. And probably get some other benefits too. But given amazons anti-union tactics in the warehouses I can’t imagine they’d be friendly to a corporate union either
>Idk why Amazon employees aren't unionizing over this
Because the people most likely to unionize are exactly the people Amazon dosn't care that much about. If you are a star performer, you are paid gobs of money and treated like royalty. If you're even a decent employee, you make tons of money and are given lots of leeaway.
It's the rest who are the loudest complainers.
Because the vast majority of Amazon employees love the paychecks. In the end, private company = private rules.
Also, Amazon is never going to count hours, so people are going to do the same thing they are doing now - come in for a few hours and peace out.
You join a union, or you join a different company. Or you threaten to, at any rate.
Understand your leverage: job marketplace bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to do the latter, while structural bargaining power stems from your willingness and ability to strike and/or engage in sabotage.
The film industry unions famously pushed to centralize all of the industry into a 30mi radius in LA (TMZ- thirty mile zone) [1], so it's totally possible to push for location-specific policies.
The Alphabet Workers Union has been fighting against RTO mandates for a while now, AFAIK. Not super successfully, but they've gotten some extensions and delays a few times.
Have you had a conversation with your manager?
If the policy requires S-Team approval, it could be hard at the SDE 3 level, though it should be much easier at the PE level.
If your Director is willing to go to bat, and you have a track record, it’s not unachievable.
TBH, the policy is likely not aimed you…
Though I will say…back in my AWS days, I did gain a bunch from being able to drop into Mark Brooker’s office and ask questions about distributed systems.
I didn’t get always like it… but I learned a lot from it.
If you have a solid performance argument in your favor, make it and see what happens.
Worse case, they say “no” and you leave anyways.
> Worse case, they say “no” and you leave anyways.
If they say no, for some it puts self-imposed (imaginary) pressure to leave as soon as possible and that can lead to accepting mediocre offers.
It's better to try this only if you are someone who can give enough time for job search in case of a rejection and not rush things.
I quit when they introduced the 3-days RTO last year. I just called few people that called me for years and landed a new job within a month. It also came with the raise, as I was approaching the cliff.
Just pick on of the competitors of the AWS product you're working on.
That strategy comes with a nonzero chance of having unemployment delayed (fired for cause). So if OP chooses that route, he/she better have a bulletproof reserve and a plan B and plan C if it takes longer than expected to get a new job.
I do think that this is a just strategy, though. If you give 100% of what was contracted, and your colleagues know you are all in on the success of the team, your high functioning team can outlast the winds of change from HR, easy.
This is true if he quits too though, which I thought was the other option being considered. If he wants to just comply and keep working there then this post is unnecessary. Being fired would come much later than quitting. In the mean time he can pursue other jobs too while also calling their bluff that they'll reverse mandate like they've done before.
If you get fired from your 6 figure cushy engineering job and need that unemployment, what are you even doing..
There is nothing wrong about collecting unemployment insurance if you’re unemployed, regardless of your previous job or salary.
I don’t know where this mind worm of not using programs that were literally made for these circumstances but you are entitled to use them and should collect them.
The company pays for unemployment insurance, if they don’t want to pay their premium rates increasing they shouldn’t have fired people.
Hi OP I hope you figure this out. As most folks are saying if you’re a talented Amazon engineer basically you’ll have the “pick of the litter”, companies should be fawning over you. I think you’ll be fine finding new work be it at Microsoft or Google or at a bank like JPMorgan or a startup. Of course be sure they do fully remote before applying or during the process but I think you’ll be fine. You’re a SDE3 at Amazon!
Pivoting to an unrelated thing: do you know the PM for Redshift? I don’t want to shit on the team but Redshift compared to BigQuery or Snowflake sucks.
It’s missing features both at the SQL level and the developer UX level. For example the amount of hoops one has to go through to create an external table against S3 of parquet files is far more involved and annoying than say defining one against GCS on BigQuery.
I’ve tried engaging in conversation with Amazon people on LinkedIn or otherwise to no avail.
I just want to know what the roadmap holds and if there will be more efforts to bring it to parity with its main competitors.
I figured it was a long shot to ask but considering you’re a DB focused dev I thought I’d try.
Talk to your manager and try to explain that it doesn't work for you, try and approach it like it's not reasonable in your case to demand 5 days a week - they talk about whenever humanly possible in the memo, I didn't read it in details, but you might be able to sway the fact that it won't work for you your way.
Do not mention quitting over it though, or you'll definitely go straight into the HR crosshair.
If you're done with Amazon, apply to local startups. Likely you won't get the same kind of money, but you might be happier and "you've got that on your resume".
I left Amazon back when the 3-day RTO was announced. Their recruiters periodically ping and ask if I'd be interested in returning. So leaving on good terms will give you options to return if you want.
I haven't seen a recent who's hiring post, but searching for the most recent one can help you find jobs that are hybrid or remote friendly.
Also the startup I went to after I left is fully remote and hiring, my email is in my profile.
Depending on your appetite for risk and in/stability, you should not have trouble finding work at a start-up (FT or consulting). Doubly so if your db-focus touches on vector search.
The timing is a tricky one, though. I personally know folks who were able to demand a premium for their past Amazon work experience but that cachet will fade quickly as people start jumping ship over this stupid, regressive policy.
Unpopular opinion maybe...
Just put up with it for a while -- then leave when a better opportunity shows itself.
I flew more than half the country to work for a financial institution in NY, and enjoyed it for 2 years. I got to see a different part of the country, and racked up a bunch of frequent flyer miles. Another contracted me, wanted to keep me as a FTE, I told them I wasn't moving. They hired me as a remote worker.
Palantir and Microsoft are north remote friendly and based in Seattle.
Palantir explicitly enables sketchy corporations and unfriendly regimes in doing mildly annoying to very bad things.
Startups are a great option. Many are remote, have a super high upside, and have interesting projects you can actually be involved in every aspect of. If anyone is interested in the startup I’m at (Vertice AI), shoot me an email at lukew@verticeanalytics.ai - we’re hiring
Shameless plug, I suppose: https://www.wellthapp.com/careers
Most of our engineers are WFH 3-5 days per week.
Come build systems (TypeScript, Postgres, ElasticSearch, Redis, AWS, Redshift, etc) that improve the lives of the neediest patients in the U.S. healthcare system through the power of behavioral economics.
All companies are returning to 5 days RTO, don't kid yourself. I would just bite the bullet and hold out at AMZN until the job market unfreezes and then jumpship then.
I've been working remotely for 8 years..there are remote jobs out there. Good ones too with good pay. Especially good when you balance for time saved not going to an office and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
> and being forced to be "on the job" for 8hrs a day. Shrink that effective wage denominator.
I'm in the UK and go to the office once or twice a week. I feel pretty lucky that our company is still very ok with remote work. But then, we're a smallish outfit and many of us put in a fair bit more than 8 hours a day. We're not forced to, but we get paid well for it, so I'm ok with that.
Most of it is in San Diego or Boston, really.
I'm not sure on remote devs, as honestly, biotech isn't really dev heavy (much to it's detriment). I'd look at the larger players in the space for jobs there, as they will likely be working in Canada too and may need help with local law compliance. If you're looking to switch things up, compliance is a very boring but deadly necessary sector of biotech that always needs people. I'll forewarn that the pay is less, though the stability is greater too (but not by all that much).
This may be a good site to keep your finger on the pulse of the industry and to find companies looking for talent.
At the end of the day, you are going to take less salary for a greater sense of mission and purpose. It's not as bad as teaching and nursing, but you're on that slide ruler now. Negotiate hard on starting salary.
If you would enjoy a fintech and can readily out engineer the average AWS TAM, we're hiring "Work Anywhere" in the U.S. (preference for Americas/New_York TZ for better overlap with UK etc.). We fly you business class to HQ in NYC area for an Mon - Thu about twice a quarter.
You'd be on a small (4-8) capability or service owning team, including investment strategy (quant, strat, ML, discretionary, etc.) domain lead engineers on same team.
We are small enough 'talent density' is still high, and everyone -- even non dev parts of firm -- is a builder.
If you're entrepreneurial minded, head to your nearest startup meetup/founder networking event and chat to founders. Nearly all the founders are non technical and have the same problem, no tech talent to build their product and no funding to to hire one.
But you could get a significant percentage of the business if you become a co-founder and you would basically have the pick of the bunch.
You probably don't even have to leave amazon if you can smash out a quick prototype over a weekend, then only leave if they get funding and the startup takes off.
This is terrible advice. The non-technical founders who are struggling to find someone to implement their "great idea" are never[0] worth working for. It's not like you'd get a 50% share of the company anyway.
[0]: I'm sure exceptions exist. I've never met one.
Never build a product for some random non technical founder
Tenuous side-hustles don't get grown and built in a crisis to make a living.
It's far better to have a stable 9-5 gig and then build things on the side intending to grow them, or at least let them validate/bake with other income and/or savings to see where they go.
No, Amazon is not a wrapper around Shopify and Easypost
If you did want to try completing with Amazon, mind you, you could start out that way to see if it's viable on a small scale. It probably isn't, but real world experience as to exactly why it isn't is invaluable.
With regard to the post though, it's a useless and condescending reply.
Interesting — what do you make of "start an Amazon competitor" as advice for someone looking to stay WFH?
Is it possible that pointing out Amazon is not, in fact, a wrapper around two B2B SaaS, more polite and conducive to inquiry than just saying it's idiotic and off-topic?
(from my peers) the MO for those who want to leave seems to be slacking until PIP/Focus/Pivot (for the payout) while looking for outside opportunities. There are a ton of companies out there that meet your criteria, but you’ll have to do some digging. YMMV