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Good call. I’ve been on vacation all week and it’s been glorious. No one bugged me thankfully.
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Sep 17, 2021 04:15
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freeasinbeer posted:Do you get paid over 160k? I’ve heard/seen offers where that’s the hard max. Last year AWS paid me $245,000. When I started Amazon stock was at $150 so I got paid at that rate, four years later stock was at $1500 so for the first time in my thirty year career I was at the right place at the right time. I gotta say I think that ship has sailed though. Stock is supposed to hit $5000 but it’s been hovering at $3200-3500 forever. Agrikk fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 06:13
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CLAM DOWN posted:To me, a huge negative to Amazon (and why I would never work there) is the ethics side of that insanely evil company. How I feel about working for Facebook or any petro company, which I rarely express because it sounds hypocritical. I have vague ethical concerns about some big picture scaling issues, but one of the frustrations about working here is so much press coverage is lazy or low-info. GreenNight posted:What’s the big negative about working at Amazon? The hours? Freeasinbeer gave the points I commonly hear about SDE life but I'll share my perspective from one of the two big IT orgs in the company. Hours are a nonissue: it's actually the best work life balance I've ever had. I went from a bunch of small/mid enterprise jobs where the buck stopped with me, to a place that has oncall rotations, an incident response team, etc and I can take two-week-long vacations without a problem or not think about work on the weekends. Most of the ICs work 40 hours and switch off. OT over 50, or working >6 days in a row, is flat out banned. Downsides? FC environment, and lack of office space in recently constructed FCs Shift rotations and 5AM maintenance windows You get pretty good at incident response cuz the architecture is bad (but improving) Everything is abstracted behind an internal web interface, so you wouldn't be exposed to some pretty universal IT standards. If you want to stay an IC, moving past a midlevel ~100k support role into infra engineering is tough. I think it's an opportunity for someone who's either starting out or who wants to make the jump into management because either way, it's an IT org that knows it has to grow talent internally and that's rare. You can promote fast, they pay for every cert on earth, they pay for bachelor's degrees now for L1-L4. Any L5 Eng who expresses interest in management and is even halfway decent with people is going to get a shot at managing a building (which might count as a downside for that team). I know numerous people who went entry level to >150k in <4 years, and entry level is 60k+ now.
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Sep 17, 2021 06:24
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Dick Trauma posted:It was just five hours after I left work before the replacement I.T. team called me for help. Well that's one of my Top 10 favorite posts on SA. Dick Trauma finally gets a win. To think we were here to see it.
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Sep 17, 2021 06:46
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I'll echo that. Do I wish the billionaires in this company would make FC life easier for the workers? Absolutely. Do I see people crying at their desks? Never (But that's because I'm nowhere near the Bezos/Jassy circle, where I hear from those in that circle that it can get very insane). I also have those vague ethical concerns about some of the big picture stuff, but AWS remains the insanely profitable red-headed stepchild of the Amazon families and is left pretty much alone to do what it needs to do. Getting from L5 to L6 is a really big process that can sometimes make you doubt that you should even work here, let alone getting promoted. I went through the L6-L7 promo process and it burnt me out so hard that I'm still recovering from it and am wondering if I should boomerang or try again in a year after I've had time to build my portfolio of sexy projects. On the flip side, my work/life balance is fantastic. I have time for two-a-day workouts, pickup/dropoff kids at school, go grocery shopping. In the summer I do my job from the beach midweek. I regularly take three weeks off every summer to travel simply by saying "I'm taking these three weeks off" to my manager who says "Make sure the on-call rotation reflects that. Otherwise, cool." The rest of the year I take my PTO and no one bats an eye. When I'm not on call, or not on the clock, I'm really off the clock because our on-call procedure is rock solid and custom built by my team to fit our styles and people respect being unavailable. I collect a decent paycheck, I work my own hours. I get treated with the assumption that I am a professional adult who is capable of handling customers who spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on AWS without being second guessed. If I see something that's broken, I'm empowered to fix it. If I feel like experimenting with a process or a technology, I'm encouraged to do so. I'm currently trying to build a call center for my house using Amazon Connect just because. I'm load testing the various storage offerings for my customer because I'm curious about how each behaves and I want to show my customer the results of my work. I might write a whitepaper about it and show it around. I have a couple of patents in my name (that AWS owns and pays the registration and maintenance fees on). Also, Dick Trauma posted:It was just five hours after I left work before the replacement I.T. team called me for help. This is awesome.
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Sep 17, 2021 07:03
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i have a cute little saying i bring out whenever someone asks me why i don't work at aws: when it comes to amazon, it's better to be the customer
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Sep 17, 2021 07:42
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Everyone I've ever known (not a big number, but more than one) who worked at Amazon doing white-collar stuff like software or IT has said it's a good gig. The labor issues aren't there, they're in stuff like warehouse or delivery. I'm not telling anyone not to work there, and lord knows I buy plenty of stuff from Amazon, but the thing under discussion is not what people have a problem with.
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Sep 17, 2021 10:05
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Honestly I would say the feedback on AWS has made them more appealing as an employer than they were to me 2 pages ago. It's not the job for me as it isn't my skill set or something that appeals to me to learn more about, but if that was I would count it in something I'd aim to work towards having previously written them off. That being said I currently work in a 24/7 environment where the buck stops with me, so just having that team around you and the ability to switch off in such a big environment is probably really reassuring.
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Sep 17, 2021 12:16
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mllaneza posted:Well that's one of my Top 10 favorite posts on SA. Dick Trauma finally gets a win. To think we were here to see it. It was a long road but all of you helped me reach the end of it.
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Sep 17, 2021 12:22
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Dick Trauma posted:It was a long road but all of you helped me reach the end of it. We’re all really happy for you. You deserve this! Go kick some butt at your new company after your vacation.
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Sep 17, 2021 13:03
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Agrikk posted:Last year AWS paid me $245,000. Wasn't it a few posts ago that someone bashed FAANG employees for being incredibly greedy? Agrikk, learn complacency for gently caress's sake man. Look at what you're saying! I'm normally discouraging complacency but lol. You have effectively won capitalism. e: Are you a team lead, managing people, or pure IC? Inner Light fucked around with this message at 14:58 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 14:51
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I'm IC. Over the course of my career I've been a manager, a team lead, and about two years ago I applied for a manager role here. I didn't get it and I am sooooo grateful that I didn't. L6 managers here are simply roll-up/pass-down workers who deal with their team escalations and HR stuff. They also create their own projects but no thanks. Not my cup of tea. I work with a couple of really good ones, but yeah, not my cup of tea. Greedy? I've never once complained about my salary.  The work sometimes, but never the salary. My next goal is to arrange it so Mrs. Agrikk can retire any time she wants, while paying into the kids' college funds and maxing out my own retirement. Of course, she can do that now but I'd like to do it with no hit to our lifestyle (see: three week vacations).And complacency? Years and years back I decided I was really good at my job and that that fact should be good enough to float me along. But (to extend the metaphor) I took a couple of rogue waves across the beam that almost sank me. That was a learning experience that right-sized my ego and told me everyone is expendable. Sure, I'll optimize and automate the gently caress out of my job to keep my working hours as low as possible  . But I won't get complacent on the job.
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Sep 17, 2021 15:45
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 re: greed and FAANG I was mostly making a bad joke. Continuing to learn a lot from your posts and the thread about how to make better choices. Being really good at my job while keeping a healthy work life balance is a key goal.
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Sep 17, 2021 16:09
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Inner Light posted:Having a healthy work life balance while keeping my job is a key goal. ftfy
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Sep 17, 2021 16:46
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What's the go-to modern management book. Still The Phoenix Project? My friend is in way over his head. He's a good engineer but a poo poo manager, and my talks and suggestions only go so far. Help me help him, please, my sanity can only take so much more of this.
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Sep 17, 2021 16:53
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I am a HUGE fan of the whole concept of "Below the Green Line": https://www.stevezuieback.com/blog/below-the-green-line-theory-to-practice/
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Sep 17, 2021 17:01
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Agrikk posted:And complacency? Years and years back I decided I was really good at my job and that that fact should be good enough to float me along. But (to extend the metaphor) I took a couple of rogue waves across the beam that almost sank me. That was a learning experience that right-sized my ego and told me everyone is expendable. Sure, I'll optimize and automate the gently caress out of my job to keep my working hours as low as possible I've been at enough government jobs, that I've seen long term complacency and the long term effects. People who graduated with a CompSci degree 20 years ago who dont know anything beyond Windows Server 2003. These people would be totally helpless if they ever got let go. They know how to do one thing and thats about it. If you throw any new technology at them they throw up their hands in the air and just outsource the work. I never wanted to be like that, and I'm always paranoid that I'm going to lose my job (probably from starting my career right around the last recession) so I try to cert up and lab whenever I can.
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Sep 17, 2021 17:38
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Internet Explorer posted:What's the go-to modern management book. Still The Phoenix Project? I'm a huge fan of "The Mission, The Men, and Me" by Pete Blaber. It's a military slant and history of early War in Afghanistan but the leadership principles apply everywhere. It's hella engaging. Here's a quick primer https://adamdrake.com/notes-on-the-mission-the-men-and-me.html George H.W. Cunt fucked around with this message at 17:45 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 17:43
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BaseballPCHiker posted:I've been at enough government jobs, that I've seen long term complacency and the long term effects. People who graduated with a CompSci degree 20 years ago who dont know anything beyond Windows Server 2003. Let me walk you through the series of emotions I just went through. "I hope I'm not like that when I get to that point." "Oh gently caress, it's 2021, I graduated in 2001 with a Comp Sci degree. gently caress you time!" "Wait, I'm working on micro-services and cloud platforms so hurray! I didn't fall into that trap."
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Sep 17, 2021 17:45
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bull3964 posted:Let me walk you through the series of emotions I just went through. I mean I'm 10 years in now! I have to remind myself that server 2012 isnt new anymore haha. I once worked with a guy at the county government level who would literally come into work with a book to read. All he would do is occasionally check his email, and forward or re-route a ticket. EVERY.SINGLE.DAY. Instead of getting rid of him the county would just hire more people and hope they got someone that would actually work or knew what they were doing.
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Sep 17, 2021 17:49
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I think things have more or less remained the same or similar from how they were ten years ago, but from 2001 to 2011 or around there were very drastic changes.
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Sep 17, 2021 18:04
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I've been there a few times: 1989 - poo poo DOS and NetWare won't be around forever with this OS/2 and "Windows NT" thing. Maybe routing and networking on token ring could be my jam. 1996 - poo poo, token ring sucks rear end. I'll be a SysAdmin for Windows 95 and a hybrid NetWare / NT network 2000 - gently caress all of this poo poo. Y2K? Layoffs? I'll be a loving bartender. 2002 - gently caress I'm drunk all the time. So how about this Windows 2000 SysAdmin poo poo. 2006 - Routing, switching and a CCIE for meeeeee! 2008 - I loving hate networking and gently caress the CCIE lab exam. Maybe I'll manage a team of SysAdmins. 2011 - I loving hate people. Back to being a catch-all Systems Engineer. 2014 - gently caress. Datacenters are going away and there's this "cloud" thing. What is AWS anyway? Present - gently caress everything. I'm going to run marathons, travel with the wife, play my bass, and watch my kids grow up to be kick rear end human beings. 
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Sep 17, 2021 18:24
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Just to keep AWS chat and me-chat going, I spoke to the recruiter. Their offer is 142 base, 77 bonus split unevenly over 2 years, and 32 RSU shares over 4 years. 1st year compensation is 190. And that's without me negotiating at all. I assume I can get more RSUs if I ask? That's truly an obscene amount of money. I have to run some calcs to compare total comp at my current job to this one, but if I make it just the first year alone, I think that's like +40k. And working at AWS is, I think, a career making move I really don't know what to do 
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Sep 17, 2021 19:11
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Happiness Commando posted:Just to keep AWS chat and me-chat going, I spoke to the recruiter. Hey buddy, big time congratulations on your offer. Have you checked out our thread just for this yet? https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3768531 I would uh, negotiate and then take the hell out of it, but that's just me. What area of AWS? e: Oh nevermind, I just saw you mentioned TAM
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Sep 17, 2021 19:14
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EDITED.
BaseballPCHiker fucked around with this message at 21:34 on Feb 2, 2022 |
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Sep 17, 2021 19:35
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I will if you'd like. But I'm more of a jack of all trades with a security focus. No worries either way.
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Sep 17, 2021 19:43
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Take the job, you can always leave again if you don't like it
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Sep 17, 2021 20:02
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Happiness Commando posted:I assume I can get more RSUs if I ask? Congratulations on your offer! That's great news! Before you ask for your RSUs, make sure you have a ton of data supporting why you deserve more. The first tactic during negotiations with AWS is for AWS to say "We don't negotiate. You take what we give you or you don't take the job." But if you come back with a compelling narrative on why you require more to work there, then you'll get heard. I'm saying heard, not necessarily your RSU request. When I came to AWS I was moving my family to a new city and desperately needed the gig so I couldn't walk away from the offer and they knew that because of the way I was hired. This obviously took away my leverage, but I still managed to get my PTO fully banked at day one which was nice.
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Sep 17, 2021 21:02
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Well that was a weird loving interview. Interviewed with the SVP of engineering, first thing he asks is clarification on which position I'm interviewing for because he thought my resume didn't look like I had a ton of experience in cloud technology. I explained my experience, we talked shop for a bit, and then he ends the meeting abruptly saying "Well that's all for today, we'll talk to you later" or something like that. I went from thinking "this is going terribly" to "this is going well" to "did I gently caress up?" although since it was 3 minutes past the scheduled end of our interview period I'm hoping that he just had to go to another meeting and had a typical IT nerd's level of skill in saying that.
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Sep 17, 2021 21:10
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George H.W. oval office posted:I'm a huge fan of "The Mission, The Men, and Me" by Pete Blaber. It's a military slant and history of early War in Afghanistan but the leadership principles apply everywhere. It's hella engaging. Seconding this. It's amazing book about leadership.
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Sep 17, 2021 21:12
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Had three interviews scheduled today. One was a great candidate, easy decision to recommend he moved forward. Two was promising, but lacked experience. Would have been a shoe-in for a junior role. For now we’re holding on him to see what other applicants we get. Three canceled because he accepted a job offer from Apple. I was disappointed about this one because his application package was the best. Note to some of the goons I’ve exchanged pms with: don’t let self imposed evaluations of skill or experience prevent you from applying to jobs
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Sep 17, 2021 21:20
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Happiness Commando posted:Just to keep AWS chat and me-chat going, I spoke to the recruiter. Congratulations! What were the interview questions like? How to cloud, data structures and algos, sysintervals…?
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Sep 17, 2021 21:27
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Cat Army
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22 Eargesplitten posted:Well that was a weird loving interview. Interviewed with the SVP of engineering, first thing he asks is clarification on which position I'm interviewing for because he thought my resume didn't look like I had a ton of experience in cloud technology. I explained my experience, we talked shop for a bit, and then he ends the meeting abruptly saying "Well that's all for today, we'll talk to you later" or something like that. I went from thinking "this is going terribly" to "this is going well" to "did I gently caress up?" although since it was 3 minutes past the scheduled end of our interview period I'm hoping that he just had to go to another meeting and had a typical IT nerd's level of skill in saying that. When you start talking about SVP positions , the culture behind these hiring can be drastically different depending on the company. Huge mega corps might have more VP's walking around than any of title, but some corps this means a position that is just under C-suite in rank. Sometimes applying for these positions you get some old fart who recognizes that you aren't part of the good ol boys club and immediately dismisses you.
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Sep 17, 2021 21:30
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The Fool posted:Had three interviews scheduled today. Hopefully you land a great candidate. I was heavily contemplating applying but I would have been in the same spot as your #2. I need to do some serious word-smithing on my resume to pivot from Clinical Informatics focused to more traditional IT. I picked up entry level certs for Azure and AWS. Hopefully all that combined with a project or two will land me a phone call.
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Sep 17, 2021 21:58
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Sickening posted:When you start talking about SVP positions , the culture behind these hiring can be drastically different depending on the company. Huge mega corps might have more VP's walking around than any of title, but some corps this means a position that is just under C-suite in rank. Sometimes applying for these positions you get some old fart who recognizes that you aren't part of the good ol boys club and immediately dismisses you. This is a pretty small company and the guy's Zoom profile picture appears to be him on a fishing boat, so definitely not East Coast "You went to what college?" vibes. Oh well, I've got plenty of irons in the fire one way or another.
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Sep 17, 2021 22:02
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The Iron Rose posted:Congratulations! What were the interview questions like? How to cloud, data structures and algos, sysintervals…? Edit: For context, my current title is Sr. Devops Engineer and I'm heavily biased towards Windows sysadmin stuff One technical interviewer had me talk through the homegrown CI/CD pipeline and .NET / IIS stack that I currently deal with at work. That was like two nerds talking shop about how to devops. The other asked me what I considered to be an absolutely bonkers scenario-based question ("In the realm of storage, tell me how you would design an app to stream a solar eclipse to endpoints around the globe") which I think I completely flubbed but said a lot of words about, and then a bunch of trivia about : RAID levels, subnetting, storing transactions in a database, and some other things that really felt like a tier 1/2 helpdesk interview. Incidentally, does anyone know how, in the realm of storage, to design an app to stream a solar eclipse to endpoints around the globe? The closest I got to a coherent answer was 'incredibly low latency storage where the recording device/app is chunking the datastream into small bits of objects, then replicating it everywhere, then the receiving application like a video player in a web browser reads the chunks, cats them together to functionally duplicate the datastream and displays it clientside' but I had a lot of garbage coming out around all of that.
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Sep 17, 2021 22:51
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Happiness Commando posted:Incidentally, does anyone know how, in the realm of storage, to design an app to stream a solar eclipse to endpoints around the globe? The closest I got to a coherent answer was 'incredibly low latency storage where the recording device/app is chunking the datastream into small bits of objects, then replicating it everywhere, the receiving application like a video player in a web browser reads the chunks, cats them together to functionally duplicate the datastream and displays it clientside' but I had a lot of garbage coming out around all of that. YouTube live stream, or if more control is needed Azure has some video streaming services that would accomplish the goal. Video streaming is one of those things where if you are not a video streaming company, you don’t do it yourself. E: addendum, Specifically your real problem isn’t storage it’s delivery. Streaming video is high bandwidth and you need endpoints around the world to keep latency down. The Fool fucked around with this message at 23:04 on Sep 17, 2021 |
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Sep 17, 2021 23:00
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Hughmoris posted:Hopefully you land a great candidate. I was heavily contemplating applying but I would have been in the same spot as your #2. If you have the Az-900 cert and can talk with confidence about iac and ci/cd concepts you have a real shot at this job.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:02
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Happiness Commando posted:Incidentally, does anyone know how, in the realm of storage, to design an app to stream a solar eclipse to endpoints around the globe? The closest I got to a coherent answer was 'incredibly low latency storage where the recording device/app is chunking the datastream into small bits of objects, then replicating it everywhere, then the receiving application like a video player in a web browser reads the chunks, cats them together to functionally duplicate the datastream and displays it clientside' but I had a lot of garbage coming out around all of that. Questions like this don’t have a correct answer (though there are plenty of wrong ones!) and at this level, architecture becomes as much art as science. But if you can reason your way through it like you did (replicating bits, chunking, etc), you display the ability to think on your feet while using previously earned knowledge to craft a solid response. And that’s what the interview is all about.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:20
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22 Eargesplitten posted:This is a pretty small company and the guy's Zoom profile picture appears to be him on a fishing boat, so definitely not East Coast "You went to what college?" vibes. Those are exactly the kind of companies that I would expect more worry for a SVP title.
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Sep 17, 2021 23:27
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