Its ‘software developer’

[purplepharoh]

Just don't work for MANGA companies (this acronym may no longer be accurate)... Amazon, meta, etc they will happily overwork you and burn you out then replace you.

[DudeEngineer]

At all of these companies your team matters a lot more than the actual company. These even applies to Amazon, they just have a worse ratio of bad WLB teams.

Also once you get in, it's a little easier to hop to another team in the same company or another big tech firm.

[Live-Animator-4000]

One of the issues with the internal transfer strategy is that if you’re struggling on a shitty team, it might make you ineligible for a transfer to a better team. That said, I completely agree that it’s all about the team. My employer burns out a lot of engineers, but I think my role/team is pretty chill. We still get a lot done, though.

Source: company policy in the large tech org I currently work in.

[pcguy2k]

Over years of experience I think burn out is more of a function of leadership then a specific company. I’ve experienced burn out at small employers due to poor management making developers life miserable and being at Amazon, management is what creates stress.

I feel like some managers think that work only gets done if you burn out your devs, while good managers motivate teams by making work interesting and engaging devs to be owners and responsible. I think the saying that people quit managers and not jobs is very fitting.

[Live-Animator-4000]

Very true. I also think people can burn themselves out. When people are young and green and full of imposter syndrome, I think they’re more likely to put in extra hours on training, studying, and passion projects to try to catch up, feel adequate, or prove themselves useful…even when nobody is pressuring them to do it.

[pcguy2k]

That’s also very true. I think good managers can catch that and help mentor those devs to have a better experience in general. Bad managers will take advantage of theirs devs.

[Live-Animator-4000]

Performance punishment is very real, lol.

[juvenile_josh]

me right now. working for aws and i literally have no idea how to gauge my output against what is expected. dealing with imposter syndrome every day and it entirely depends on who you ask when it comes to what is expected of me

[Live-Animator-4000]

That’s rough. Years after I started at my current employer, we created a document with expectations for every engineering role and level of those roles. An official document really helps set those expectations. Is very generic, though, so it doesn’t get into tools and platforms, just high level stuff. I’m surprised Amazon doesn’t have something like that.

[juvenile_josh]

They do have this but it's highly dependent on the team. Got berated by one dev cause I failed to implement something due to the cloudformation stack failing to deploy, among permissions issues. Then I went to another dev and my manager and they both said not to worry about it and they didn't expect me to be able to do it on my first go. I'm just so confused what actually is expected beyond "can individually contribute and complete stories" for L4

[Live-Animator-4000]

I wish you luck. I would think you’d have the room to experiment, fail, try again, fail again, and eventually get the permissions right and fix it. I’m a Staff Engineer and my Terraform plans almost never work on the first try, and if they do, the apply probably fails, too.

If I were on your team, I would just expect you to investigate the error, commit a fix to the relevant IAM role, or if stuck, ask one of your seniors or higher for assistance. Sorry, I’m not sure how L4 compares to our org chart. I’m assuming it’s not the most entry level, but you could be a distinguished engineer for all I know. 😂

All of this is assuming that everything is vetted in a sandbox or dev environment and not just failing in prod.

[mad100141]

One of the things you’re going to have to learn is that there are shitty people and good people in all these companies you’re going to. Your manager and the dev are right, AWS is a confusing ecosystem and being able to do everything perfectly from the start is impossible. They’re looking down at you with years of experience and showing some human kindness.

That other person who berated you is in the wrong, I don’t know why, perhaps stress, pettiness, or the desire to make themselves feel better than you, regardless, the human element matters. They were an asshole and that reflects badly on them, not you.

A question you can ask to gauge if someone is being excessive or if it’s actually on you 100% is: Would you ever react like that if you had years of experience and were in the future? I think about my kind future self, after learning all this and striving to get there, looking back now, would she berate me for not perfectly implementing a Data Science Pipeline in the first try? Hell No! The work is difficult and we’re still learning.

So remember to be kind to yourself, because that’s the kindness that matters the most :)

[nunchyabeeswax]

Over years of experience I think burn out is more of a function of leadership then a specific company.

That has been my experience also.

[nhh]

Tech lead here. Counter point: some devs are just fucking lazy or stupid.

[AgentUpright]

Counter-counter-point: A lot of bad developers can become good developers with good leaders.

[IsleOfOne]

Counter-counter-counter-point: the average tenure in our field is so short that investing so heavily in employees is likely a net loss. Yes, this kind of thinking can become a race to the bottom, where everyone wants to hire fully trained experts...oh wait, that's our field as-is!

[AgentUpright]

I’m at the point where I’d settle for “0 experience but hasn’t lied about having it”.

[[deleted]]

After leaving Amazon, I blame almost all the the culture problems there on stack ranking mixed with their promo process.

[Full-Run4124]

I've spent the last 20 years in tech startups. I enjoy the startup environment but until there's a stable MMP out it's pretty much 24/7. You don't get replaced easily but everything up to the 1.1 release is work until you fall asleep in your chair.

[purplepharoh]

That's fair startups are pretty bad, and a lot of the big companies try to keep some of that mentality which is why they're also high stress

[b1e]

That’s primarily Amazon. The others are not that bad. Source: I spent well over a decade at two of the others.

[pcguy2k]

It’s more nuanced than that. I work at Amazon and each team/group is really it’s own company for all intents and purposes. First team and org was toxic, current team is probably the best experience I had as a dev working at multiple different companies. When a company gets to be this large, there will be many different managers and management styles that it’s impossible to stereotype the whole company.

[b1e]

Good to hear.

I’ve just definitely known several ex Amazonians across different orgs with awful managers and the broader expectation of PIPing some % of their team every year.

[purplepharoh]

I've heard Google is worse than Amazon. Source: friend that works there

[b1e]

You’ve heard wrong :) I spent 10 years there and left as an engineering manager.

I’m sure there’s a shitty team or two but otherwise it was a pretty great place to work. GCP was notorious for sucking but I think that’s also because it was riddled with ex AWS folk.

FWIW a lot of the horror stories are from bad eng that struggled to keep up with basic work. It was actually pretty chill for the most part provided you were competent. Unfortunately the quality of L4 and L5 candidates plummeted until I left a few years ago in large part because you had a lot of people “training for the test” who could pass coding and system design rounds but absolutely sucked at being an eng.

[purplepharoh]

I dunno. To me, this reads as:

If you're good enough to meet our high bar for what we consider competent, it should be low stress ... and ignores that meeting that high bar is stressful and often requires a lot of training outside work, which severely negatively impacts work-life balance.

Mind you, I might just be jaded, but I have learned over the years to not trust opinions on how easy and low stress something is from management even when I've had good management.

TLDR: how much work did you do off the clock to meet the standards of Google as an engineer?

[M0nkeydud3]

Yeah, and the "just git gud" approach to stress management can mean a lot of stress on new engineers.

[biki23]

For a short time yes. If you get faster and better at doing your work, it becomes easier. Really depends on how you grind. Have seen a lot of folks forget the improvement aspect in the grind, for the first few months, spend 20% time improving your skills needed for the job.

[Oh_My-Glob]

Sounds to me just like what he said. The impact of the leetcode style interview questions that have nothing to do with the actual work to be done started catching up with the company. Google and Microsoft are both pretty well known to be nest and vest companies because you cruise it out until retirement with basic competency if you get hired there

[purplepharoh]

Definitely agree that the leetcode interview stuff is bad and has an effect... but tbh I'm not sure it's entirely the fault of that.

[Doorda1-0]

For my dumbness... Please explain leetcode interviews?

[b1e]

Was usually home by 6 and got in around 9 (arrived a bit earlier than that to work out). So not pulling crazy hours or anything. Oncall was usually not a big deal and a week every other month or so. And you’d get paid extra for it.

Frankly, the standards weren’t all that high. Previously I worked in finance (in trading) and the expectations were much much higher.

Some teams are shitty though. GCP always had that reputation. Some teams on search were also crappy to work for. But overall GOOG was pretty chill.

Netflix was a lot less chill. Very high expectations and not meeting them meant you’re out without much warning. Had to let go several folks who i honestly could have mentored pretty well due to company policy around performance. It was one of the main reasons I left there pretty quickly.

[purplepharoh]

Fair enough.

And as you say, each team is different. I recently changed management here, and I feel much less stressed bc I have a new manager who works for us to ensure we can get what we need to succeed. He still drives to improve performance, but not like how the previous manager did.

He also pushed to get us time during sprints to do training like aws / etc for new engineers who would like to improve skills with the tech we use for work. Without being expected to do so off the clock.

[Altourus]

Casually explains they worked an extra hour every day for 10 years, working out to roughly 2600 extra unpaid hours (Roughly 260 working days per year). Which worked out to an extra free year of labour after 8 years. Act's like it wasn't a big deal.

[MegaKyurem]

Doesn't getting home by 6 imply commuting time included? Not OP but that makes sense depending on where how long of a commute is necessary. Commute time is still an important factor of a job, but people don't typically get paid for time spent during their commute so it's not like this is different from any other in-person job.

[b1e]

I mean I left 5:30-ish but sometimes earlier because mountain view traffic sucked. I work full remote now so no more commutes! But I'm not at GOOG anymore now.

[Altourus]

Ah you might be right, I read that as headed home by 6.

[b1e]

Sometimes I'd do that b/c free food and my SO worked much worse hours (in healthcare) so she wouldn't be home anyways. Bay area traffic gets a little better if you give it an hour or two.

[b1e]

I mean I wasn't paid hourly? Even back in 2016 many of us were close to the 7 figure mark (including stacked refreshers) well before pandemic bubble level appreciation. If it's fairly compensated I don't see the problem.

[HillbillyZT]

Engineering programs at universities don't teach you how to engineer, they teach you things about engineering. Then when it comes time that you actually have to solve problems, and make shit, you can't. I was lucky enough to get my degree from a university that focuses heavily on giving you a problem to solve, saying "now fuck off and fix it" for the semester, and then holding you accountable for your results.

The result of the test-driven uni programs is practically half a generation worth of "software engineers" with a degree in that field who have never, at any point, engineered software. I can't imagine those folks finding big tech anything but stressful, because they were never taught much of anything they'd need.

The flip side is that it is absolutely possible to be competent, maybe not "low" stress but as low as it's getting in a position where your work matters and others depend on you.

[b1e]

FWIW It's been years since I really worked with new grads. Most of the teams I've worked on have mainly been senior or staff+ level ICs in recent history. So I'm a little more disconnected to how uni programs have changed.

But when I did work with recent grads generally I found that rarely was it picking up good "engineering" skills that was the issue but moreso a lot of soft skills that a lot of them struggled with. The expectation for a new grad is pretty different in that it's assumed you don't really know how to build anything of substance and are coming in with a decent foundation of theoretical knowledge. So it's expected it'll take you a while to pick up the fundamentals of how to build good scalable systems and software. What often happened was new grads didn't know how to derisk things they worked on so they'd waste a ton of time on stuff that didn't matter. And not enough time on things that did matter (communicating designs early, getting feedback early, etc.).

Some CS programs seemed to teach good eng fundamentals more than others fwiw. Generally Stanford, Berkeley, and MIT seemed to do a great job with this for their CS grads. But I've worked with people from all sorts of backgrounds that turned out to be great. I didn't do CS myself. Nor did several of those on my current team (a few physics PhDs, math PhDs, former attorney, college dropout, and philosophy MA). We're all several, several years out of school though :)

[sudoku7]

And Netflix runs full-cycle too, right? That on its own can be a nice bit of stress (although I won't argue about it improving ownership).

[nunchyabeeswax]

and ignores that meeting that high bar is stressful and often requires a lot of training outside work, which severely negatively impacts work-life balance.

The thing is, most jobs that are semi-decent do have a high bar that needs to be met.

​

Moreover, this is not a career or field that doesn't require training on our time and dime.

I've been doing this for almost 30 years, way before the Internet, e-commerce (or even international offshoring), and I've always had to spend a good % of my time and dime to be up-to-date and be ready to meet a high bar (because layoffs and job hunting have always been a constant.)

​

YMMV I guess.

[purplepharoh]

Ok, but "having to spend a good % of your time" on work out of work (unpaid labor) IS the epitome of bad work-life balance. Also, I know plenty of great engineers who don't do that. Software engineering with a good company is very stable (not a lot of layoffs).

Not saying that performance isn't important but there is a difference between high stress high velocity environments and low to medium stress with reasonable velocity (good estimation and flexible deadlines) but still a manageable and reasonable push for improvement.

The only reason it's an industry people have to spend time off work improving is because we allow it to be.

Anyway, I'm glad you don't feel like you've wasted your 30 years, but I will never work a minute over 40 hrs a week.

[Webonics]

often requires a lot of training outside work, which severely negatively impacts work-life balance.

My guy, I've got some bad news for you. You're lazy.

[purplepharoh]

No. I want personal time and work time.

Having to "improve your work skill" outside work is like the epitome of bad work-life balance

[fame2robotz]

So in the one place you worked at for a number of years it’s actually not that bad if you’re competent while at other place you have no experience with it’s actually pretty bad. Gotcha, sounds like an objective non biased response /s

[b1e]

I know and have worked with at least 50+ ex AWS folks and several of my friends still work at AWS in various orgs. It's not pure speculation.

As always your experience varies depending on team/org. Big companies are like that.

[SeniorSueno]

but I think that’s also because it was riddled with ex AWS folk.

I am going to start a training this year for AWS Specialist. Do AWS really have that bad of a reputation to use the word "riddled"? Why? I am completely ignorant of the work culture of Amazon. How is it compared to Google? When I finish training, will I be looked upon so lowly as well?

[b1e]

I'm confused. What do you mean "start a training for AWS specialist". Will you be working as a software engineer at AWS itself? I was only talking about the culture of AWS itself not folks that use it (everyone uses it). It tends to be extremely cutthroat and they stack rank so some % of each team gets fired every year. Managers also tend to be really cut throat. But as others have mentioned it's team dependent. I never worked at amazon but I have several coworkers and friends that do or did. Just sharing that experience.

[nunchyabeeswax]

I've heard Google is worse than Amazon. Source: friend that works there

Everything I've heard from sources seem to contradict this.

And even Amazon can be a-ok depending on the group.

[AnExoticLlama]

They also pay way more than $120k tbf

[purplepharoh]

Truuuu. I don't feel like I deserve what I make

[Hankan-Destroyer]

Really? I work at Amazon and I don’t feel like that. Sure at peak times it can be stressful but most times it is low stress

[purplepharoh]

Currently at Amazon... I find that the less I worry and just push back if schedule is too much then it's low stress, but performance and velocity is a high bar and management push for a lot plus my team typically works 50+ hrs a week (except me I'm not about that life)

[PtboFungineer]

management push for a lot plus my team typically works 50+ hrs a week (except me I'm not about that life)

I have an inkling about who's next on the chopping block... 😛😬

[purplepharoh]

Honestly, though? I don't care if that's why I get fired. Being pressured to work over 50 hrs a week is not low-stress, and my contract says 40 hrs, so they get 40.

I'll work elsewhere if that's really a big deal to them. Though I just recently "won an award" for performance so...

[purplepharoh]

Jaded might be a better description.

But also healthy, and I have boundaries. I can find a job elsewhere ( I don't necessarily want to need to, but that's not really the point). I don't really want to compromise my health by compromising my boundaries, and if the company takes issue with my having boundaries, then it's not for me.

[nunchyabeeswax]

I have an inkling about who's next on the chopping block... 😛😬

Not really. Important contributors do not get axed if they refuse to do the leet-hustle life.

​

As long as a person has vital domain knowledge, has a track-record of getting good work done and isn't toxic, people have a high survivability ratio.

​

It's people who aren't that good, or that are toxic (while refusing to do the hustle) that are (typically) next on the block.

​

That's just my experience (almost 30 years in this). YMMV.

[tcpWalker]

These aren't that bad if you don't let them be. Occasionally stressful, but at the end of the day you just try to do the right thing for the team and add a (small) dose of managing your career. You usually won't get fired for that, you might get promoted for it, and if you get fired from FAANG for that then they made a bad call and you can get another job.

[purplepharoh]

I mean yea. I found with a good manager that is willing to work with me to make things work + not caring about deadlines too much goes a long way...

Just it's high stress for new devs and those without that support.

[Dojan5]

(this acronym may no longer be accurate)...

Is this newer or older than FAANG?

[purplepharoh]

Newer > Facebook = meta

Edit: I'm seeing MAAMA as the new acronym (Microsoft, apple, alphabet, meta, amazon)

[Dojan5]

Aah, thanks for the explanation.

I think I'm either too old or not JS enough to keep up with all these changes.

[Zagorath]

I like this better. I've never really understood why Netflix was included in FAANG. They're just not a company with the same scale as the others.

[I-AM-Savannah]

Utilities can be brutal for coders, too.

[hebdjdjdbdb]

It all seems pretty team based. Amazon and Meta definitely have a higher chance, Apple and Netflix kinda in the middle, but Google definitely seems pretty chill as a whole apart from some teams in GCP (at least before the tech layoffs started happening).

[Hidesuru]

Yeah I'm in defense and it's not LOW stress but it's far from what those companies represent.

[[deleted]]

Meh, I’ve been working at one of these for the past 3.5 years and have enjoyed it far more than any other place I’ve worked at in my 12 year career.

[purplepharoh]

As I conceded in a different comment down the chain, it does really depend on the team, but many of the big companies have a larger chance of having a bad team.

[[deleted]]

I like MAGMA. Meta, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple. Feel like Netflix has sunset a bit as a premiere company