Translation: Zhou Lu

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Why I left Amazon after only 5 months. My sad personality reminds me of my desire to have a good time as an Amazon employee.

I joined Amazon on January 28, 2018. About three weeks later, my favorite wife landed at Vancouver International Airport and arrived in my city with our cat. Our biggest concern at the time was our cat. The 18-hour flight from Tel Aviv to Vancouver was a huge challenge for any small animal.

Thankfully, nothing unusual happened to the cat. In fact, it recovered quickly and was already playing around in our Airbnb apartment. As expected, the weather in Vancouver has been rainy and foggy, but picturesque, a far cry from sunny and vibrant Tel Aviv. We are very happy, the 6 months of preparation before coming here was well worth it!

How I got in.

It all started back in June 2017 when I was working for rollout. IO, a small start-up company that developed enterprise security feature management systems. It was around that time that I decided I needed to make a change. I do have six years of Intel experience and I know what it’s like to work for a corporation and I don’t like it. Instead, I applied for a job at Amazon in Vancouver at a big job fair organized in Tel Aviv. It sounded like a good adventure, and I was sure it was the change I wanted.


The hiring interview process is very standard.

The first was an online coding challenge – algorithmic problems similar to those you find on the Internet… Coding Challenge site (easy, unprepared)

The second time was a video call with HR. I asked some closed questions about basic cs architecture knowledge, BigO symbol, algorithm name and terminology (simple, no preparation required).

The third time is face-to-face communication, details are as follows. I was initially told THAT I had been screened remotely and scheduled for a face-to-face interview. So I decided to take the interview very seriously – I prepared for it for about 3 weeks, and I spent about 2 hours every night practicing CS questions. I read Cracking the Code Interview. I hated it. I felt it was not very well written and a waste of time. I know I’ll never need that knowledge.


I graduated from MIT, which is quite a big academic institution. In college, I did see very smart people, but not very good at basic algorithms for tree models and big O algorithms. In my time at other companies, I’ve seen people who didn’t have advanced degrees but went on to become brilliant, successful engineers. I’ve interviewed a lot of people while working for Intel and Rollout, and I strongly discourage coming in unprepared, but I decided to talk to them for a while.

I’ve read 3-4 articles written by former Amazon employees about their hiring experiences and interview processes, and based on my experience, I think I’m well prepared. On the day of the interview, I met a total of 4 Amazon employees — exactly as expected — algorithm questions, system design, architectural design, data structure questions — and surprisingly, the questions were not too difficult. They were all very polite and official, and one man was a little different. Every interviewer will ask one or two questions about work behavior.


Two weeks later, I received an email confirming the interview. In the first Skype conversation, I was told THAT I was eligible for the SDE1 role, and I really didn’t know what that meant. After some online research, I knew that this was the “graduate” level – a bit of a shame, I had about 10 years of industry experience, but I thought I could have done better in the interview. I talked myself into taking it anyway and decided to ignore the title, and if I’m as good as I think I am, they should realize that pretty quickly and get promoted pretty quickly, right?

The recruiter explained the process to me, and we didn’t talk about compensation or anything like that. And he didn’t tell me about the next scheduled Skype call, and I didn’t get any emails or explanations. (This is very common for Amazon recruiters).


Two weeks later, I was contacted by another recruiter who reminded us of our preparations for the move. We started talking about relocation subsidies, compensation. – The original proposal was terrible. I looked at average payouts reported by other companies on Glassdoor and mapped out my strategy for the upcoming negotiations.

The recruiter mentioned a system that doesn’t allow certain thresholds for certain roles to be crossed, and she said there’s another team here that approves the proposal, and that’s all she said to me. After three rounds of negotiations with Amazon, I agreed to join the company because the salary I signed was 35% higher than my original offer.


Negotiating was hard – I did some homework, but still felt uncomfortable when it came to salary, and the recruiter was an amazing negotiator – and I’m sure she had this conversation many times a day. So I think it’s important to learn how to negotiate!

I asked what exactly I was working on: who was the manager, how many people were on the team, what the technology stack was used for, what the engineering practices were.

The recruiter put me in touch with the hiring manager. I finally got some information about the actual work – it was the first time I had a basic picture of the job. It is the Java-centric Amazon e-commerce payment team. They have real commercial projects, tech stack is Java-based, CI, testing, code reviews, team activities…… It looks good. Then I signed the draft contract.


Five months at Amazon

In addition to being very excited about moving to a new location, I’m also very interested in joining Amazon and exploring the company as an insider — it’s one of the great tech giants and I want to know what it’s like.

I met a lot of very smart and talented people at Amazon, and they were great people. They are made up of companies from all over the world — China, Argentina, Pakistan, Ukraine, Turkey, Russia, Israel, Vietnam, Hungary, Germany. Later I found out that it’s not uncommon to have such a multicultural group of professionals in Vancouver (which looks like the center of Canada).

I ended up joining the team in Amazon’s consumer division — the part of the company that runs the online shopping business (more or less). I’d be happy to share more details about the team itself, but I’m not sure what the limits of the NDA are. All I can say is that this is a classic, old-school, Java-centric, “and hence invented” Amazon stack tool (internal toolset for source control, managing dependencies, CI and CD). There weren’t any really bad operating loads, or ugly legacy system issues to support — it was a very “sane” team.


I was so overwhelmed by online “corporate culture” training on leadership principles that wasted as much time as any other company that I felt I was joining a religious group and being brainwashed.

It is said that every employee should follow the principles of leadership in their daily work. Used properly, these principles can actually make a lot of sense. Over time, I’ve found that the most common case for these principles is to be creative in finding the leadership principles that best support the situation.

  • Did your idea go down well with someone? Then you have to earn trust.

  • Want to prove that a particular solution works? Then you need to show that it’s in line with the principles that the customer is obsessed with.

  • Trying to convince someone to do a boring job? Adhere to the highest standards.

  • Looking for a shortcut to your job? Innovate and simplify it.

It took me about a month to get used to the environment. At the same time, they are very helpful and friendly. The manager is very demanding but friendly.

Our team’s products are heavily dependent on other services, and subjectively dependent on what Amazon calls the “away team” schedule — especially when you need to change the source code for a service run by another team.

It was a terrible experience – the other team had neither the environment nor the motivation to support you, proposed changes were put off, and debating issues in endless meetings with naysayers was a huge, huge waste of time.

I ran into some minor problems with my engineering practice (see my previous article). I was impressed with some of the internal tools (CI, CD, build tools) but disappointed because they were actually good, but not good enough compared to the current developer experience that modern SaaS companies offer.

I do see a lot of managers working hard to create a good environment for developers – both mentally and technically. I was actually surprised at how long it took to “check” the team’s health. I didn’t stay with the company long enough to see the results of these processes, and I didn’t like its methodological nature. I have a feeling that many processes are done because they need to be done rather than because they need to be finished.


After two months, I can say THAT I am an active team member, I am responsible for myself, I work hard and project deadlines are often challenging. I didn’t write a lot of code. Time is allocated as follows:

20% of the time is spent writing code and 50% is spent on coordination such as writing/reading documents or emails and some SMS conversations. The remaining 30 percent of the time is spent face-to-face with colleagues discussing problems. I guess I could redistribute my time, but given that I’m not very productive with Java (it’s not a major tool in my past experience), I don’t have amazon-specific experience as a team member.

My manager once mentioned the “Amazon way” when discussing engineering practices and business decisions. I think it’s used to remove an unwanted change or suppress an opinion without a real reason. It was a challenge for me to deal with the “racism” and “realism” I faced at Amazon, especially when communicating with top engineers. – Senior software engineers and “bargers” – Those who believe in “tribalism” approve important design and architecture decisions, implement company policies and become role models or authorities with deep knowledge of a particular area.

My manager told me I hadn’t earned trust – people didn’t trust my judgment and I needed to build a good relationship with decision makers. I agree with you. But this is called “politics”. I feel like my daily life is full of toxic culture — trying to cover up your flaws, trying to control everything, trying to only do projects that will help you advance, resisting ideas, blindly following process without being able to distinguish between what’s important and what’s not.


Over time, you begin to want to use the “art of acquiring principles” and see others do it in conflict situations, trying to find an argument that supports your own.

I did successfully promote some architectural and design solutions. It’s important for me to feel the impact of my work environment (and I think it’s important for every software development professional). However, it was not a pleasant experience, it was painful – mainly mental. It’s been four months since my first day on the job. My impression is that I have enough data to reflect my work experience at Amazon.

I talked to colleagues and friends, and I wanted to test my observations. I’m afraid I might make a mistake. – All in all, these jobs are quite practical and there are many RS units to be determined. In addition, I can’t legally do any other work because my work permit only applies to employment at Amazon,

Five months later, on my first day at work, I left Amazon.

Leaving the Amazon

Here are some of my main observations that have convinced me that Amazon (or at least the team I work for) is not a good place for me.


(Lack of) technical challenges

The main algorithmic/coding/intellectual challenges I face fall into three categories:

  • Handle technical liabilities for other systems

  • Strict adherence to policies or standards

  • Fight the internal development environment

In fact, there are very few impressive problems that need to be solved to find effective solutions/optimizations/security enhancements. It will take me 3-4 years to reach a level of “trust” that will expose me to challenges of different sizes and impacts.


Ability to lead

I mentioned that I met a lot of talented and smart people at Amazon. However, their division into “successful” and “important” people in the organization — i.e., SDE3, “naysayers” and managers — was not the “role model” I was looking for.

Also, I met a lot of senior engineers and realized I didn’t want to be like them… Either professionally incompetent or politically arrogant — these are people who have successfully navigated their careers and been recognized as leaders by their companies (and their culture). What can I say about the company after this? Stress and waste. The five months I spent at Amazon were the most stressful I’ve ever been at work. It comes in many forms, some of which stand out from my own experience

Management pressure on the team (applied by management to management). I mean stress is not healthy — such as reminding you that it’s your responsibility to get things done, even though you rely on third parties to do their job, the “remote team” experience.

Semi-legal business trips to Seattle narrow the gap and speed up the process. Management expects you to be prepared and spend six hours driving to and from Seattle on your own time. Although you are legally only allowed to go to the US for training or meetings, you can drive to Seattle (or take a bus) at 6pm on Wednesday and work in the conference room for the next 2 days to meet the deadline. I see someone doing this…… I was interrogated for 20 minutes by a border officer the other day and almost deported at the US/Canada border because I wrongly said I was going to Seattle to work for Amazon. I could be denied entry to the United States for the next 5 years!

An endless stream of pointless policies. Management sends people to Las Vegas for a 4 day AWS conference, no problem, costs $5000 / employee, but if you want to spend an extra $80 on a nice room for a business trip to Seattle, you’ll need to work hard to get approval.


promotion

When I first decided to take the job, I mentioned that I wanted to prove that I was good at my job and that I could move up quickly. Sadly, it’s not what I thought it would be.

If you just do your job well, you won’t get a promotion. Keep an eye on your chances for promotion.

To be promoted from Junior Engineer (SDE1) to Engineer (SDE2), you will be given a “table” listing the qualifications required for promotion, such as:

  • Write enough code

  • Excellent programming skills

  • Do something supportive

  • Write some documentation, etc

You will not be promoted unless you notice that you have met all the criteria on this form and have good leadership principles.


Simply getting the job done and helping the company grow is not enough.

Edit: I would like to clarify the statements above – “do your job” in the article I mean: do your job in an excellent manner, perform well, and what the reviewer called “exceed expectations” is a misnomer so I feel the need to clarify. I don’t want to “righteously” advance through your work. I want to improve myself by being good at my job and being very helpful. I’m not writing a sales document.

The promotion process from SDE2 to “Senior Engineer” is similar – you get a bigger position and the conditions you need are:

  • Have a good manager

  • I’m part of a great program

  • Promote – oriented, constantly improve your work style.

  • Get good referrals from your colleagues (but not all of them — only the important ones), just like being a politician.

Of course, it’s no different from other big companies, and it’s an industry standard, but I like the idea of being promoted because you’re so good and valuable to the company — the company rewards you with responsibility and benefits.

Compensation, which is a common issue for companies that offer equity incentives as part of their compensation, is even more problematic and manipulative in how companies use equity incentives to mislead employees about their compensation packages.

To be fair, Amazon’s overall revenue is pretty good, at least compared to metro Vancouver. But not as well as other big tech companies.

For example, suppose you get a total compensation of 150K. The composition is 110K base salary (which is mostly due to financial policy income – e.g. mortgage, banking privileges etc.). Note that when you receive a certificate of employment – this is your income level. This is the promised income you get from the company.

A $25,000 signing bonus — that’s how companies get you into contracts. It’s important to realize that bonuses are taxed differently, and in my case, I only see 50% of my bonus in my bank account. Unfortunately, I found out too late.

The 15K RSU is paid at the end of the first working year. The idea is that the success of the joint-stock company against the employee (supposedly expressed in the stock price) makes him work harder to make the company successful. In fact, in such a large company, no employee has any influence on its success, and the stock is highly influenced by global trends or politics. At the time of this writing, AMZN was selling for as low as $1,598. When I was proposed to sign the contract, the estimate was about $1,650. So, in practice, a company will not be able to deliver the promised 150K/year. In most cases, the stock price will go up, but at your next performance review, you’ll be told: “Hey, your total compensation is 190K — look at the stock price, so we’ll only increase the” base salary “by 3% to keep up with inflation”. How would your boss or recruiter react if you said, “I might work full-time?” Also, the longer you stay with the company, the more your income mix depends on RSU. It has worked well for most industries, including Amazon. This is the industry standard, and I think it’s manipulative and misleading.


Abstract

There are a lot of happy and satisfying Amazon employees here, and I’ve met a lot of smart, talented, kind people while working at Amazon.

The company is so large that it is difficult to manage it without strict policies and clear processes. I don’t know if my experience applies to other parts of the company or other teams within the company. Maybe I’m not a cultural fit (well, at least for now). But I do want to write down my observations in hopes of helping others establish the right expectations before joining Amazon as a software engineer.

It may be that later in my life I will change and reconsider this article, it may be that another team within Amazon will be a great fit for me, but right now I think of Amazon as a great and unique enterprise, but just a normal place to work.

Original link: medium.com/@andrewgold…


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