Amazon only changes things when it has to, and only in a lip-service kind of way. There was a flurry of discussion and proposals when the article was published, but it's all died down and we're back to where we were beforehand.
Compensation, culture, and perks are infinitely better at Google, Facebook, Lyft, Uber, etc. All of them start vesting your stock monthly after 1 year, whereas Amazon has a ridiculous vesting schedule (5% after year 1, 15% after year 2, 20% every 6 months thereafter). Not to mention the awful 401k matching, no free food/drinks, terrible drab offices, etc. All in the name of "frugality." Leadership claims that our competitors waste their money on these things, despite all of them being insanely profitable with higher employee happiness and retention.
I'm working on moving to one of the above competitors now. I recommend avoiding Amazon, even if the role you've been offered sounds cool.
I never found the NYT article to be even slightly representative of my time at Amazon, and the group I was in at the time made additional changes to help improve morale that really worked. I believe you can find a good, or bad, team to work on at Amazon, and I assume the same is true of other big companies too (I have worked at another big company and it was true there too).
Despite being refurbished their work space looked very basic and clinical, but at least there were good views on the higher floors. No free food, just tea and coffee.
The package they offered me was pretty poor. Salary was above average for my skill level, but zero perks. No share options, no flexi-time, and a PRSA pension scheme instead of a real one.
I asked about perks only to be told they weren't offering such generous packages at that time. I found this odd as I didn't contact them, they found my details on LinkedIn and approached me. In those circumstances I would have expected some perks to sweeten the deal.
I declined the offer.
It's sooooo important.
Of course, that's just me. I'm not saying you should be deprived. I like getting a free beer or two on Thirsty Thursdays but if I were a recovering alcoholic I would hate it.
https://steveblank.com/2009/12/21/the-elves-leave-middle-ear...
Sometimes financial decisions that are seemingly rational on their face can precipitate mass exodus of your best engineers.
My last company was in an office park in the middle of no where and I don't drive. There were no stores within walking distance either. So if I felt like having a snack or something to drink that wasn't water I'd be SOL. So it was nice that we had snacks and drinks available and made working in such a remote spot much more tolerable.
Sounds pretty terrible to me. When are you supposed to enjoy life if you are in constant competition?
I’m starting to get the impression, though, that if I want to be happiest as a Big Tech Co. engineer, I really just need to work at Google.
Also, caused by years of neglect and patchworks, whatever teams deal with basic infrastructure (DNS, load balancing, corporate infrastructure...). Though none of those are in Seattle anymore, IIRC.
What school did you go to? Went somewhere similar.
My school recommended 3.5 hours of work outside of class for every 1.0 hour of lecture (roughly equivalent to credit hours with rare exception). For the minimum full-time load of 12.0 this equated to 54 hours a week (12 hours of class, 42 hours of outside). 18 credits was 81 hours a week all in, and this was expected. 100-level classes were typically less but my junior year particularly it was pretty much spot on.
The comp is decent. It doesn't match google/fb but it's better than a non tech company. I have a target of ~170 total comp as an SDE II with just under 4 years of experience out of college. This is my last year of my initial stock grant so my take home is quite a bit over 170.
I've never seen anyone cry at work. Closest was a guy that got pip'd, but he was genuinely struggling. I can/could see glimmers of truth in the NYT article but I've never seen it that bad. That said, I am aware that tech (SDEs in particular) tend to be treated a bit better than everyone else.
One possible, yet perhaps overlooked, side-effect of the NYT article is that very driven engineers have self-selected to work at Amazon. Compared to my past workplaces, I feel there are far fewer people just punching in the hours for a paycheck, but I am not sure if this is specific to my team or division.
I hate you so much. I have been clawing and scratching my way to $100k/yr for over 20 years and I am still nowhere near it. I do more work than my peers, my peers come to me when they need a solution designed or created, and I am the go-to guy when someone has a technical question of any kind. I work for a company you are all familiar with, no matter where you are in the world.
I am getting fucked. Hard.
This is honestly lower than I expected. I have friends who are new grads at Facebook that make more than that with 0 years of experience.
Amazon's also re-instituted bell curve attrition goals with little warning to managers (1-2 weeks before annual reviews in my org, and percentages only in the meeting itself). The last few months have been a special breed of stress that I hadn't seen at amazon in my 7 years prior.
I left earlier this year to a much less stressful position.
And in that phrase, "Human" is the adjective...
Working in the role has taught me so much about how shitty it feels to be treated like a commodity, if I ever make a transition to management, one of my top priorities will be treating human beings like.. human beings.. just make sure the sprint gets done on time.
The software engineer profession is becoming like traditional factory workers, only this time they have ping pong tables and free snacks. Also the salary is very high. But the downside is that you are still at the bottom of the pyramid.
Had projects cancelled on a whim without an actual replacement/reason.
At Amazon, I wasn't a person, but some resource.
Some orgs were fine, most are not.
A manager from a "no jerk policy" org told me there is a culture of cruelty in Amazon management, and if he played the game he would have been at a higher level.
ymmv.
I've seen employees driven to tears at two companies, and both of them were wretched to work for.
It became my barometer of whether the company was a good place to work for.
I really like working for companies in finance. They're generally laid back and the pay is decent, not great.
They would not describe their work culture as laid back.
Previously, the anytime feedback tool had you, at any time, give anyone else in the company feedback (positive and negative) in the form of "Situation, Behavior, Impact". What happened, how did the person react, how did it impact me. It went to the person's manager and into a record somewhere. At the end of every year, you were asked to give additional anytime feedback to you entire team and anyone who asked for it. Managers read through all that feedback, summarized and gave you a full year end review that was the source of a lot of my personal growth.
The NYT referred to this as "ratting out your coworkers", so now that's gone.
Instead, there's a short, stupid and less-than-anonymous version that takes about 5 minutes and is done just once per year. Your manager doesn't read any of that feedback before they give you your year end review and pay changes, but they do give you a verbatim copy of what was said- you can figure out who said what pretty easily.
The problem was that 1% of the managers were sociopaths who abused their power. The response was to increase their power.
But I'm still here, for some reason.
Edit: no, let's be fair here. I'm still here because I like what I do. I like the problem space, and I like the people I work with.
Other comments on this post indicate that Google and FB pay more than Amazon, but I'd probably have to take a sizable pay cut to work elsewhere.
There are other companies besides Amazon that say this. Because of this, it can't possibly be true. The only way to know for sure is to brush up your resume and see if you can get some better offers. Don't take your boss's promise that you're well paid. They can't possibly be objective about it.
They purposely break up teams that get too big in order to keep with the idea of "two pizza teams", that is, a team small enough that two pizzas would be enough to feed everyone. The team and managers set the tone of culture at this level. At the next level up, the smaller teams coalesce into the upper org headed by a vp or whatever. The upper management here and the team managers sets the culture for cross team interactions.
It can therefore be possible to be on a good team if your managers are proactive and shield their team, but managers also have a ton on their plate and are beholden to the same power structures that are attempting to grind them into dust.
There was one manager that was beloved by all in the org because he took care of his direct reports - he saw the writing on the wall and jumped ship to a greenfield project in a different org. A bunch of senior engineers followed along shortly after.
But yeah it does sound a bit crazy to me as well. Perhaps some of their employees are there on work visa and don't want to risk them and their family having to relocate to another country again. But I don't think that's the case for all the people whom complain.
Overall, I've been happy with my choice to work at Amazon. Compared to most other tech companies I've worked for, the hours are predictable and not that intense. Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry. I like what I do. I like the projects I work on. I like my coworkers. I'm happy with my compensation.
In terms of perks, there aren't free lunches every day, but most orgs that I know of have some budget for a snack shelf. There are also other perks though - there are are opportunities to learn from other software engineers in the form of tech talks, internal conferences and the like. There are also opportunities to learn about the business side as an engineer.
I've generally found other people at Amazon very willing to help. I've had people outside of my team review designs and give feedback (and I've done likewise for other teams). I'm currently working on a project that's required me to reach out to a bunch of different teams to get input on how to approach a problem, and all of them have either accepted a meeting invite or responded to my email with the info I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time (a couple days).
Amazon has 14 Leadership Principles, and I've found that people mostly take them to heart. For example, it doesn't mean that you can use "Insisting on the Highest Standards" as a blank check to refactor your code to the point that it's immaculate, but it does mean that most of the product people I work with get that tech debt is a real thing and slows down product development at some point, and they will budget time to address tech debt when given suggestions by engineers.
Most of the people who have left our team in the past 12 months have left to go work on other teams. Some of them left to work for a different org, some because they wanted to work in a different office.
Amazon's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and most of the things that are frequently raised as issues on HackerNews are, in my experience and the experience of everyone I've talked to at Amazon, generally not issues.
I would like to point out that this is just objectively wrong. There are many employers in our industry that do not impose crunch time, and who view crunch time as indicative of poor engineering practices.
Maybe your statement came out wrong, but I was surprised enough when reading it that I felt compelled to let others know that this is not reality. There are lots of good employers that practice sustainable development practices in our industry.
Reading this thread, I'm having a very hard time understanding why anyone would want to work at Amazon (other then the somewhat high salary). Judging by responses to many of the parent comments, I'd say that others seem surprised as well. I hope this surprise reflects the abnormality of the practices described in this thread because they are not as common in the industry as you suggest.
This is categorically false. Might be true for small startups, but most established companies do not ask a lot of engineers during crunch time.
Everyone likes to pick those nits. I also work in the retail org at Amazon and have only had a crunch time twice in the almost 11 years I've been here (and it lasted two to three weeks both times). Software is hard and planning its implementation and development is hard. Get over yourselves and accept occasional imperfections in the process. (If they are _not_ occasional in your work environment, consider that a suggestion that you get out--Amazon or otherwise).
Anyone saying Amazon is uniformly this or uniformly that is as full of shit as anyone saying it about any other company.
People who read these threads and decide "well, now that I've seen this, there's no way I'd work for Amazon" are doing themselves a disservice, just as much as if they substituted any other company for "Amazon". Collect your data; talk to people that work there--you will get a variety of opinions. Bash-posts on HN and Reddit suffer from severe confirmation bias.
People that like working at Amazon and have had an overwhelmingly positive experience (like me), often don't wade into these threads because separating their signal from noise is really tedious and we have other more fun things to be doing.
If people have complained on similar lines throughout on Hacker news or NYC article or other sources, that means there is a pattern. Maybe you have been fortunate enough to not have experienced some of the misery faced by others, but please follow amazon's most important principle of being data driven and think about it.
Remember that when you're reading the news (here or elsewhere, since rarely is news generated on HN) you and your outrage are being used for marketing (and possibly furthering some other agenda).
I agree with your closing sentence about being data driven and thinking about it--getting out of the news bubble and using your own brain to analyze something is good.
They used to give us a weekly task which was never supposed to complete if you work even for 60 hours/week. Thus our whole weekend was ruined in completing this task.
I have got a mentor who himself can't able to complete the given task so he gives his some of his work to interns.
Amazon is a great place to learn but not for the work.
I have worked in Amazon for many years now in India. Jeff himself doesn't seem interested in taking work culture seriously. I have never seen any interviews of him after NYC article where he accepted that something was going wrong and needs to be fixed. Instead he turned the whole debate into work-life harmony rhetoric.
In India, the situation is far worse than US. There is less transparency and more opportunities by senior leadership to rule with an iron fist without any accountability. Concerns are suppressed instantly. One might have been an excellent employee for couple of years but for some reason if you are not on top of your game for even a quarter, you will start hearing complains from everyone and the situation can go upto PIP (Performance Improvement). The culture completely lacks the emotion of "Let me help you". It is heavily influenced by politics and survival of the fittest which might be fine for a small period but takes a toll on you in long term. Probably this explains why attrition is so high in Amazon.
Cultural norms in the US apply in the US; cultural norms in India apply in India. I've generally found Indian managers and developers to approach the work entirely differently than their US counterparts. Not a negative--just an observation.
There does seem to be a pervasive undercurrent of "if I do good work on my team here in India, I can get out of here and go to the US as soon as my promo goes through". This sentiment naturally comes out in behaviour on teams and around coworkers.
2. In my case, it did not. I decided my happiness/wellness and health (physical and mental) were more important.
As for the work environment, like in all big companies, it really depends in which team and project you land. My team and adjacent teams are full of respectful people and work is pretty good. We're building some "large scale" systems, and technology wise it's pretty cool. But I've heard stories from people in other teams where they were relegated to doing oncall and fixing bugs. I also know 1 person that didn't make it through the probation period (he was in one of those oncall teams). The company is big and has a lot of different projects, so YM(will definitely)V. I've had to interact with a lot of different people across the company and my impression is overall positive.
In terms of work load, it's not light. At the same time, right now, it's not that high, but that will probably change once we're closer to the deadlines. I enjoy it, it keeps me active and not bored at work. I know people who do 8-17 (1 lunch hour) EVERY DAY. Pretty much everyone around me works 8-9 hours. The teams around me are also very flexible with remote work (a lot of us work remotely 1-2 days a week). In term of the actual work, me and my team have had to design systems, write documents (the 6 pagers, design reviews, etc), and we're implementing them. A lot of technical freedom. I also hear manager refer to people as resources and I dislike it - not sure why/where that terminology comes from, but I think it's something common inside and outside the company.
Yes, perks are pretty much non-existent. No snacks, no free lunch/dinner, no gym, just water, fruit, and coffee. Heck, not even free tshirts and the employee discount is ridiculous. But if that's what you're looking for in a company, then I'm sorry, you won't find it here. Yes, you'll also get stack ranked at the beginning of the year, and getting promoted to SDE3 is not easy.
One interesting thing, at least around me, the vast majority of people seems to be 30+ old. From the teams around me, I think no one (apart from me) reads HN. People come from all around Europe (and some from Asia).
I love it here, and have for the entirety of the time I've been here. There are some minor changes I would make if I could wave a magic wand, but I can't imagine any workplace is perfect, and when I say minor, I really mean it.
I don't really have a lot to say about things as they relate to the New York Times article, because the workplace described in said article was never even remotely close to the experiences I've had.
I work on a fantastic team, and I work with some amazing teams. Some of the smartest people I've ever met. I don't see myself leaving the company any time soon.
But yeah, the talent here is good since hiring talent is cheaper here compared to US. If you have to pay 170k$ to hire the best in US then in India you'll be able to hire the best at 50 LPA which is about 70k$.
I have been part of many interview panels and they haven't been any easy interviews as such.
I have not worked at Amazon, but I have seen worse types of workplace culture in some cases over my career.
And since this platform here allows more than one person to answer a question, it is totally valid to just describe your own, personal, non-objective experience and let the reader make conclusions based on the sum of what they are reading.
In an org consisting of hundreds of thousands of people, "culture" is a pretty local phenomenon.
The Amazon experience is entirely dictated by the team on which you land.
and more topics on the same site
(And an ad-infested blurb on Bezos's follow-up: http://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-bezos-responds-nyt-repor...)
My team was rarely in the office before 10:30 or after 6, even during crunch time (we launched our feature during my internship) but i did see code review responses at odd hours sometimes.
I enjoyed the project a bunch, and while my coworkers werent the most social bunch they were pretty smart and effective. I did pretty well and exceeded managers expectations for my project to get a return offer.
I shopped around a bunch after and interviewed at all the companies I could but got rejected by all of the top ones (FB after phone, Google after onsite, Airbnb and Cruise after coding challenge..) so I ultimately picked the return offer despite getting a 3 other offers in the fintech space because I liked the project and location at Amazon.
Does that mean I’m a happy camper? Fuck no. My total comp for the first year is only $145k out of undergrad with a base of $106k. My friends at places like Google, FB and Cruise are making more like $180k-$230k by comparison. Perks are also nonexistent.
The worst part, though, is knowing that i have become stuck in a company with a significantly lower hiring bar. Im honestly terrified that the value on the resume will decline over time and i will never be able to get into a more prestigious company. The idea of being relegated to a 2nd or third tier company has been eating at me, and comments on places like CSCQ, Blind and this AskHN nearly drove me to suicide before.
Your attitude is extremely concerning, you have a lot to be proud of career wise already, and you seem unable completely unaware of that. You have a solid base to build on and you could end up anywhere in a few years.
Amazon didn't hire you because they have a lower bar than anywhere else, they hired you because someone was impressed by you and wants to give you a shot. Extend them the same courtesy at least.
I think you need to seek psychological counselling ASAP, but until then stay away from Reddit, HN etc, as far as I can see your perspective is completely warped by the dishonest way that people present their own professional image, usually because of their own insecurity. Consider why people come to HN to brag -- it's likely because they aren't getting praise anywhere else.
Even if the hiring manager won't, it's a fairly safe bet that the filtering stages prior to it landing on a manager's desk will be looking at those things. Have you never been approached by a recruiter talking to you about how excited they are about "the Netflix guy" or the "Stanford woman"?
At the lower information density stages in the hiring pipeline, broad generalizations are still important.
This isn't a very healthy outlook. By that I mean using prestige and income level as your optimization function isn't a great way to achieve [fulfillment / joy / making life worth living]. I'm not trying to preach a specific optimization function but I hope you'll talk to people you trust to get some objectivity about what is [healthy / unhealthy] for being a fulfilled, long term contributor to society.
I don't know what the extra $55,000 is. An expected bonus? Some rough guess regarding future value of stock options? Retirement fund matching? You didn't make the distinction for your friends.
Where I am, your standard of living can be had for $90,160 with a base of $65,910. The needed pay drops by about 38%, yet the likely salary drops by only 17%, meaning you'd be better off. It's like my dollars are almost 50% better than your dollars.
That is typical. Pay is generally higher in costly places, but it usually falls far short of the change in living costs.
Only if you're living paycheck to paycheck.
It doesn't make sense to adjust your savings rate (or loan repayment rate) by cost of living.
To illustrate, assuming you're living off of your base (a single 20-something can probably do better though), you're comparing saving a $39k bonus or a $24k bonus. That's over a 50% difference in savings rate.
That's not to say you should take the higher paying job. There are other considerations besides money, obviously.
The money will come eventually.
Relax. Life is only a contest if you think it is. And it's a contest where you're almost certainly going to get below 3rd place. While progress and peak performance is good, satisfaction with what you have is also valuable, probably better, actually.
Now consider the downside if you're wrong. Isn't it obvious that posting like this is a terrible idea?
People with suicidal feelings often say things that don't make sense to others. That's a consequence of their being—for whatever reason—in an extreme situation. The particular detail they're expressing the most pain about can seem absurd, if you don't know what else it connects to. But if you were to find out what it connects to, you'd no longer find it absurd, nor would you feel annoyed or dismissive, and you'd surely feel bad about hurting someone in that position.
> My total comp for the first year is only $145k out of undergrad with a base of $106k. My friends at places like Google, FB and Cruise are making more like $180k-$230k by comparison.
Heaven forbid someone is making more money than they know what to do with than you are.
> Im honestly terrified that the value on the resume will decline over time and i will never be able to get into a more prestigious company.
Is this a real concern? Surely you can be hired on technical merit. Google hires new grads! And people who only worked at "top-tier" companies still have to pass an interview everywhere.
> The idea of being relegated to a 2nd or third tier company has been eating at me, and comments on places like CSCQ, Blind and this AskHN nearly drove me to suicide before.
That's sick. Not to be insensitive for you, but our priorities in this industry are whack. Surely you can find a meaningful job outside of a megacorp that's bleeding the world dry. Or do you just care about money and status?
I see what you're saying; however, all things being equal, I would want compensation comparable to my peers if we were doing the same job. Why do the same job at two-thirds pay?
My dozens of failed interview loops after 4 years of interview preparation have proven that I do not, in fact, have technical merit.
If I can't pass a new grad loop at Google I doubt I can pass an L3 experienced hire loop.
Call me at -------. I will talk. I will listen. It will be private and not judgemental. I'm not a professional mental health specialist of any sort, but I do feel like when it gets to the point where you actually type out the words like this hearing a friendly voice might help. I'm awake. I'm ready for a call right now. If you don't want to talk today, call me tomorrow, next week, next month, whenever. Write down my number because I can't leave it posted.
1-800-273-8255 <- these people are professionals and can help too.
edit: If you didn't get the number and want it, leave a reply and I'll post again.
I'm sorry about the unhelpful replies some other commenters posted. I don't think people do that on purpose. It's because they can't imagine that level of pain, and perhaps don't want to, because it's scary. So it becomes easier to assume that it can't be true and the suffering person must just be trolling. But it certainly can be true, I believe you, and if the voting on comments is indicative, so do most readers.
Money isn't the answer to most of life's problems. Getting in with the right company isn't the solution either.
These jobs are all just jobs. Garnering the approval of a hiring manager at one of these companies should be an ego boost, but not garnering it is no failure at all. It's not a measure of your aptitude or abilities. It's not a measure of you as a person.
It's very easy to get caught up in the moment and get caught up in the pressure of a work environment and lose sight of what matters.
What matters first and foremost is your own mental health. Take care of you. Nobody else can.
I don't think it's wise but you can't take it from a rando. So I'd seek objectivity from sources you trust. Many get this from friends. Sometimes friends can't provide everything you need.
If you've never tried therapy or are skeptical about it, I've found that the healthy way to think about it is as an objectivity machine. It's a black box for you to pay money (a.k.a use your nice tech healthcare plan) and get a person who isn't incentivized to lie to you or hurt you / is sworn to your best interest. The value they provide is objective feedback about how you're thinking about the world. Your mind's way of viewing things has blind spots; you're limited by what input data you got as you moved through the world. When you're making decisions / synthesizing your experiences it's incredibly useful to get validation data so that you can measure the performance of your brain-model.
^ Also since every black box isn't equal, if you find that a therapist isn't providing the kind of throughput or trustworthiness that you need, you can shop around.
If you think life isn't worth living, please seek some objectivity because it's a rather drastic decision you have to make that can't be made again.
... I think you need to talk to someone about this, because you've got an incredibly distorted sense of perspective, and suicide is never a wise choice. There are always alternatives.
You'll be OK.
If Amazon is your last resort, you are clearly in an extremely (extremely!!!) lucky position and you should reflect upon that. For a lot of people, a "last resort" job is cleaning restaurant bathrooms or working in abattoirs. You've got options that are putting you in the upper-tier of working people.
Maybe they were, you know, working together.
- Hello, I stalked your supervisor, he's in a business of prostitution, you should leave your work.
