Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ActorNightly | Hacker News Reader

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>The way they skimped on wages

Levels.fyi is pretty accurate and while they do not pay as high, they certainly do not pay low.

> benefits

No issues here. They have 20 weeks of paternity/maternity leave now, fully paid.

>work life balance

very generous WFH during and after the pandemic, lots and lots of teams with no complaints about work life balance.

>accommodations, vacation

Vacation is on par with other big tech, and again, wfh is very lenient.

> It's no surprise they are having trouble hiring.

All big tech is having trouble hiring, because they need qualified people, and those are hard to find. CS turned into one of those fields that people get into for money, and a lot of people think that they can approach a technical field by simply learning patterns and regurgitating them. May work for some turnkey web app shops, doesn't work for big tech.

Anyone considering a role as an engineer at Amazon... Do your research, but not in online forums where there is no accountability.

Wages at Amazon were based on explosive stock gains, now that the stock has leveled off, you'll see what Amazon intended to pay engineers. I was part of comp planning, the numbers are lower than you think. Every year I was trained to tell engineers that their take home was higher than expected.

Amazon's benefits are simply worse than peer companies. They've mostly fixed their parental leave, but they still only have 9 sick days a year. Their 401k match is paltry. The office perks are non existent.

Wrt work life balance, how many engineers are oncall? Are they paid extra for their oncall shift? Are they expected to work more than 40 hours if that pager goes off? Also, Amazon is a date driven company - aggressive targets are set and you will be pushed to hit those dates.

Vacation is paltry. Last year, Google employees had something like 19 paid holidays and 20 days of vacation (minimum). What's a new hire at Amazon getting? I guarantee it's not ~40 days off a year. And I already mentioned the limit of 9 sick days.

And WFH, does Amazon allow folks to be full-time remote if they want? Can anyone, at any time say, "I'd like to move to being full time WFH"? If not, the policy at Amazon is hardly "lenient".

You are cherry picking against Google, which tends to be the best in the industry in terms of salary/hours worked. If your goal is to optimize this, then by all means go work for Google.

Doesn't mean that Amazon is a bad place to work. It has its benefits, namely being able to change teams/location easier than big tech, and the delegation of how the team is ran to org managers which are more in tune with their engineer requirements.

Also WFH exemptions in Amazon are pretty common even before covid, with reasons like "i have to take care of my kid" that are well accepted, because it comes down to the manager and the skip manager for this that are generally interested in having qualified people stay on.

This doesn't address stack ranking and PIP. Any employment that intentionally puts your continued relation on a chopping block to keep you in a precarious situation isn't an ideal working condition, which now includes Google. I get the idea of trying to manage slack but the fact is, all humans need some slack in efficiency and improving labor efficiency indefinitely isn't realisitic nor is a culture most want to work in and it's caught up with AWS. At some point, you're simply doing your labor force a disservice and just sitting around cracking a whip for no good reason.

I was a manager at Amazon, I was told that every cycle between 5 to 10% of the engineers in my org needed to be put on PIPs to meet quota.

I heard Google has a good work-life balance. Any changes at Google of late? Like 10% pip?

Attrition needs to exist for any big company. There is a percentage of engineers that manage to make it past the interview who then get complacent and stop caring.

While I get that people need leeway to improve, its important to remember that a) doing this on company dollar is not a given, b) FAANG positions pay significantly higher, and c) being employed at FAANG for any amount of time is a big boost to your resume at is.

Also, in general, if you are blindsided by a PIP and you aren't in some niche out of the way team with politics involved, you probably should not be working at FAANG.

Amazon has a forced curve, meaning an org with generally well performing engineers can be forced to put 5% or more on a PIP.

One small correction, they offer 20 weeks paid for the parent who gives birth and 6 for any parent that doesn't.

That's a pretty big correction, given the time off other companies give to parents. Google and Meta give months to each parent.

I got 12 weeks as a male at my mid size tech company. Vacation is "unlimited", which is often kind of a bad deal, but I do take about 6 weeks a year. Not sure how many holidays we have, but they just added several day off this year. I've been here for a while though so my pay is probably quite a bit under market despite promotions.

Last I heard, Amazon starts you with 2 weeks of vacation and 9 paid holidays. Google and Meta are more like 4 weeks and 12+ paid holidays.

I think Amazon is on par with BigTech when it comes to software engineering, though the way they treat their workers in the warehouses has really hurt the overall reputation of the the company.

It’s not just warehouse workers, there was a pretty infamous article from the NYT about the office workers:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-...

The money quote that I find telling:

“Nearly every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk.” - Person in books marketing.

What kind of environment are you building if entire teams in BOOKS marketing are getting so stressed they’re crying publicly at their desk?

Reading the stories is just unreal and that article was from 7 years ago. My public perception is that it has gotten worse. You can go on blind and read countless stories about people that were hired to fired, gaslighted into thinking they’re terrible workers, PIP galore.

The only confounding thing to me is that Amazon doesn’t have the same reputation as Oracle in the tech scene.

I've interviewed a lot of Amazon folks at my current job for software engineering roles. The one question they've all asked about my current company is how is the work-life balance. I don't get that so much from candidates who are coming in from other firms.

This is why people should stop watching news, because its all pretty much agitprop these days.

Amazon has no major issues with worker treatment. Sure, there are bad managers and shittier places to work, as with any big corp, but overall most people are content with work int the warehouses.

How do I know this? Prior to COVID, unemployment in US was at a record low, down to the frictional levels. Warehouse positions are entry level jobs. If it was bad, people would just quit, and take another job somewhere else. But not only did people not quit, Amazon was able to hire enough to roll out Prime 2 day and 1 day. Turns out, people like the high starting wage and want to work at Amazon.

> Amazon has no major issues with worker treatment.

Now I know you are astroturfing.

Well the hiring process still seems rather insane; there are tons of companies who might pay a little less or the same that have a more sane process. There is no shortage; the hiring process is broken.

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