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Comment by thesuperbigfrog | Hacker News Reader

I worked there as a Software Development Engineer (SDE) from 2007 to 2013.

At that time, SDEs were paid on a salary basis with additional compensation in restricted stock units (RSUs) that vested in the future based on how long you stayed with the company a.k.a "golden handcuffs".

SDEs worked about 50 to 60 hours during most of the year, 70 to 90 hours during an oncall / pager duty week, and 70 to 100 hours during Q4, the holiday season leading up to Christmas.

The pay was really good, the people I worked with were brilliant and amazing, and it was exciting to build awesome systems and see them make a difference in the company's operations and capabilities. At the same time, it starts to wear on you and your family after a few years. I am glad I did it, but it's not the type of job most people can do for more than a few years due to how much it requires and impacts your life.

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AWS here. This varies wildly by team and doesn't match my experience at all. I've been on 3 teams over 6 years in 3 locations (though none in US so maybe this is why? #AmericaNo) on aws and retail.

I don't know anyone that works 60 hours regularly. 50, maybe - you know including lunch.

Oncall for the vast majority of teams isn't extra hours, just strange hours. But if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.

I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week? If you went through that I'm sorry, I suspected our Ops org is psychotic, but that is too much. Still, i really have to wonder if you are exaggerating since the other 2 numbers were dramatically. Or you got an Outlier team.

My org crunches for reinvent, sure, but what company wouldn't with a massive yearly conference where/when most of the products are launched.

I was in Seattle the whole time.

It was common on the team I was on to work about 10 hours a day in office and then go home and have meetings with our sister team in India and some follow-up work with them. The sister team was working on standing up an automation service to reduce some of our "manual" work and help reduce the oncall burden, but it took nearly a year and a half for that to happen.

>> if you get paged at night people cover for you the next day.

That would have been nice. We initially had to provide 24-7 coverage for a week during our oncall rotation. After the sister team in India stood up, it turned into 12 hours a day and a hand off to an oncall engineer in India who would cover the next 12 hours. Both "tag team" engineers would cover a week together for the oncall rotation.

>> I didn't work on a Q4 peak team but your math is psychotic. 100 hours is 14 hours a day 7 days a week?

Our service directly supported order fulfillment. Therefore it HAD to stay up at all costs, especially during Q4.

Granted 100 hours did not happen often, it was usually closer to 70 and mainly consisted of getting everything ready for Q4 and load testing it all to make sure that it was solid for the tremendous holiday volume. Remember, this was BEFORE the retail website had fully transitioned to elastic scaling. All the supporting layers and configuration were pre-scaled manually based on the previous year's peaks plus the expected increase.

OMG, that's really horrible! 90-100 hours a week equates to 7 days a week, 13-14 hours a day with commute not included during entire (or bigger part of) Q4.

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