reddygaru

I work at a well known company in the Bay area. I make close to 380k, subject to market conditions.

I sometimes get bored by doing run of the mill backend work like building APIs, gRPC, etc.

I am seriously considering joining AWS as senior SDE. Is there anything I can learn uniquely by joining AWS?

Hi HN,

I work for a FAANG company. I don't want to sound conceited and I apologize if my first line gave such a vibe.

I have been in the industry for 10 years. Most of which I spent working backend, high scale systems. I understand TCP and how to setup load balancers, think in terms of microservices etc.

But, I always feel some of the distributed systems engineers I work with have knowledge of file systems, concurrency, etc. Recently one of my friend working for a good company interviewed for a sister team. He was rejected. The engineer who interviewed him told me that he was great as a general backend engineer but he didn't have systems knowledge they were looking for.

I feel it is a chicken and egg problem. People don't want to hire if you don't have system knowledge for some roles. And the only way to develop that knowledge seems to be by working in those roles.

When I interviewed I had to brush up semaphores, mutexes, spin locks, virtual memory etc and had moderate luck in clearing some interviews. But I don't use those concepts every day.

I joined a FAANG company recently. The work is very boring and there are enough politics. I feel a bit sick of all this to be honest.

My previous job had more interesting work with half the pay. The company also had good enough brand name.

I feel if I stay in my current role, I will not be as sharp as I was. But I will easily be making 100k more per year which is a lot for me as a single bread earner.