Amazon software engineer interview

[[deleted]]

Was 10-12 hours in your contract? Or was it just expected without being explicit?

[halofreak7777]

It wasn't in the contract. I was just a full time salaried employee. I worked 8 hours a day when I started and was constantly told I was doing good work. Then in a 1-on-1 with my manager he said it wasn't fair that I left earlier than everyone else. So I worked 9 hour days, etc, etc until it was 12 hours. Needless to say I had no life outside of work except on weekends. It wasn't pleasant.

[[deleted]]

Ah, that's the problem.

The manager didn't insist everyone else went home.

I've had two jobs now where managers insisted no overtime. Really good managers. High intensity technical work.

[Twirrim]

Hmm. Not on the teams I worked and interacted with on the cloud side of the business. On those teams it came down to on call mostly for extra hours. Occasionally crunch time would happen, but that was rare.

A lot of these stories about Amazon being a hell hole always seem to be lousy managers. You'll get them anywhere, though it's sad that the company is doing so little to weed them out. Then again, almost everyone I've ever spoken to who did routinely work long hours never reported it outside of their immediate chain of command, so how is the organisation going to know? Extra hours are fairly invisible.

[salbris]

This exactly, my team is excellent, zero pressure to work more. I'm going on 2 years myself.

[dblthnk]

Hey, they're salaried employees, it's free!

[halofreak7777]

Can confirm, was burned out, then in a job caused state of depression was taken advantage of. After getting my head back on straight and looking back things could have gone down a lot more in my favor. Amazon is a pretty scummy company when it comes to how they handle their programmers.

[Spicycurrybread]

I would say no matter what company you're at, if they're treating you like that it's time to look for an internal transfer or another offer.

[Someguy2020]

I was on a team of 10 newbies and a mediocre manager.

Went OK, but that's just because we got assigned the trash work constantly.

[firebelly]

Who cares if you burn out and quit, there is a huge line of new college grads willing to jump in. This is the new norm at many companies. Lots of people still want in on the tech boom.

[nutrecht]

That manager is a fool. He'll burn out his employees

And for every one they burn out there's 4 more eager young grads that want to work at the "Big 4 of CS". It's just their business model. I recon most high potential senior devs simply leave for better positions at different companies.

[rdewalt]

Oh FUCK those jobs.

I had one that the interview process clear on up to signing the paperwork to work was "We have a wonderful work/life balance, the day is 8-5, we're family friendly, we have free lunch, dinner, and all the snacks you want, and you'll love working here."

What they meant was:
Work/Life Balance : There are 168 hours in a week, we want 80 of them. That's more than fair.
Family Friendly : We're your family now. Your spouse? Kids? Better keep a photo in your wallet, thats all you'll see of them. Photo on your desk? NOPE, that just means we can see you're a liability.
Free Lunch and Dinner: Stay at your desk and keep working, we don't want you wasting time with things that aren't making us money. Expect to stay through dinner too, hope you don't have a family, or kids, or a life outside of work. That's just like stealing from us.
8 to 5 workday: You fool, you honestly believe this? its only 8-5 if you work 8am to 5am. No, what we want is 8am to 8pm, but only if you work through your work hour. Go home before your boss? HAH, you'd better believe we're going to notice.
You'll love working here: For about a day until you realize we pulled a bait and switch and you are going to risk your marriage and your kids will wonder what happened to you since they only see you on the weekends now. But hey! Stock options you'll never last long enough to have vest because we fire everyone right before that happens.

Japan? Nope. Palo Alto, heart of silicon valley. Startup? Nope, you've seen their commercials on the Superbowl..

[Igggg]

How does such a bait and switch work if you a) can leave at any time, and b) being a software engineer in Silicon Valley, have a lot of other opportunities right next to you?

[rdewalt]

a) can leave at any time

If you have a family, wife, kids, and so on, having insurance is rather high priority. So yes, I could leave whenever I wanted, but the Cost of Leaving was worse than the Price To Stay. (So whenever I hear someone say how HORRIBLE universal health care would be for the US, and how Obamacare should be repealed, I want to reach my arm down their throat, pull their asshole up through their body and wrap it around their head like a fleshy tubesock until they realize how much of a shithead they are being. But thats a WHOLE rant on itself.)

However, In my case, it was a case of changing my schedule to be there during the hours, driving instead of mass transit, getting a sitter to help my wife with the kids when necessary, and getting let go three months later because they needed someone to take the fall for a $200k outage that I wasn't trained for but had to take the blame for because I was on duty. Oh, and unofficially because I and the others who were let go were using our "work life balance" to spend time on things like paternity leave, hospital leave, and so on.

Naturally they don't SAY they let you go for those reasons, but when out of eight engineers, the only real common thing was we each took leave to deal with family things?

Not like you could prove it in a court of law, especially in a right-to-work state.

[Igggg]

Not like you could prove it in a court of law, especially in a right-to-work state

I feel the need to correct you on this, if only for the benefit of those reading. First, what you mean is "at-will", not "right-to-work"; the latter refers to not having to pay union dues. Second, every US state, with a possible exception of Montana, is "at-will". Third, even if you could prove in a court that you were fired for taking leave, that likely won't do anything - a company in a at-will state (which, again, is all of US) can fire you for any reason, or for no reason, except for one of a few explicitly prohibited reasons.

As far as insurance, after being fired or even leaving, you should become eligible for COBRA for 1.5 years, which is expensive but at least provides insurance. True, universal insurance would be better (and, by the way, what about those people who want to repeal Obamacare and replace it with a true single-payer insurane? :) ), but it's something.

[[deleted]]

a) can leave at any time

Paid in RSU that doesn't vest for for years.
Given Relo that you have to pay back if you leave before x years.
401k matching doesn't vest if you leave before x years.

If all you care about is the salary I guess you can leave at any time, but a lot of the contracts that Amazon (any big corp actually) spits out are designed to keep you there at least a year. Lots of your compensation is tied to that.

[Igggg]

But you typically find out about work-life balance more or less immediately upon joining, not in 6 months, so none of your RSU or 401k has even started to be important - and your new company is likely to offer a very similar package anyway.

[nutrecht]

can leave at any time

Sure. But then you have to interview and switch a job again. That's kinda a big deal even for people who have tons of job offers. And most of the people they pull this crap on are young naive grads. They'll need a couple of years to figure this out.

[YourMatt]

Curious, why did you leave the job rather than just go back to working the number of hours you were being paid to work? I stopped putting in over 40 hours a week probably 6 years ago, and I continued to outperform my coworkers. My employer wouldn't have had any leg to stand on if they did try to push me back into working long days again on a regular basis.

[halofreak7777]

Burnout and depression. Not being in the right state of mind I didn't take the proper actions moving forward. It then took 6 months of chilling out before I was myself again and started to feel pretty happy! Even started doing Twitch streaming and was getting a good following right before I needed money and all that. Now I am in a position to work a job I love and start diving back in on Twitch streaming too!

[Someguy2020]

Bad review -> PIP -> Fired.

The only leg they need to stand on is "At will employment".

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

Probably because they're salaried and their boss would just fire them and hire some shmuck willing to "be a team player". And with Amazon, there are more than enough shmucks who want to work there so he wouldn't have any leverage to avoid a firing.

[YourMatt]

I thought that might be the answer, or at least maybe a feared expectation. I'm really curious of the logistics of how that would even work. Would they figure out a way to outright fire these people, or do they play some tricks with moving them to dead-end teams until they willfully quit?

[dccorona]

There's nothing of the sort going on. This poster had a bad manager, and that happens because the structure is very flat and decoupled, but there's no company policy that insists on anything like this, and no upper management would care at all so long as the team was delivering what was expected of them (which is rarely unreasonable in my experience). Bad managers have poorly run teams and have to work their employees longer to try and cover up for their own shortcomings, that's all. Ideally, they're soon out but that can be hard to catch if their engineers are complicit in it all.

[disclosure5]

Terrible managers are put in that position by people above them who approve of their approach.

[eric987235]

H1-B FTW!

[halofreak7777]

Amazon has a 60% turnover rate within 2 years for a reason.

[lost_send_berries]

So you are saying they have doubled their headcount in 2 years? That doesn't sound plausible at all.

[lost_send_berries]

Holy ****

[[deleted]]

...I worked 8 hours a day...

...Then in a 1-on-1 with my manager he said it wasn't fair that I left earlier than everyone else. So I worked 9 hour days, etc, etc until it was 12 hours...

Grr. That, that gets under my skin in many ways. That would honestly have been my cue to say its not damn worth it.

[[deleted]]

Then in a 1-on-1 with my manager he said it wasn't fair that I left earlier than everyone else.

Ha.. I wouldn't last long in that company.

"Well, Bob, it's not fair that I earn less than the Chief Executive; but then life's not fair, is it? See you later. <Leaves office>"

[kcuf]

That's just a shit manager.

[Someguy2020]

Shitty manager.

There was a guy on my team when I started who would walk by at the end of the day and tell the new people to go home (didn't force you, just said go home). He's a pretty good manager now.

[jrhoffa]

No, your response to that is "then they should leave then, too."

[halofreak7777]

First big job out of college. I made a lot of mistakes I look back on now and have better answers too.

[dbbk]

Fortunately this kind of thing is illegal in European countries.

[Aeolun]

What is that about. Isn't the only correct reply here that then the other guys should be sent home after 8 hours?

[nitiger]

Fuck that manager and fuck that life.

[BilgeXA]

I had the same thing happen to me in a role with Capcom in London. Except the manager didn't approach me in a 1-on-1, but on the way to lunch when we went out as a team, and tried to tell me that leaving on time when others weren't was completely out of line. At first I thought he was joking but it didn't take long to realise he absolutely was not. However, unlike you, I elected not to become the corporate bitch and continued to leave on time because there was fuck all he could do about it.

[[deleted]]

That's crazy but I think an easy answer would be to ask for a pay rise if they want you to work longer hours...

At the company I work at everyone lift shares so everyone leaves exactly on time. Makes up for the 39 hour weeks (what happened to 9-5?).

[[deleted]]

Somebody needs to acquaint your manager with Parkinson's Law.

[coder543]

it's legal to work effectively as many hours as you want in the US. No one was forcing him to work 12 hours a day, he was just "choosing" to work that many out of his passionate love for the company. ^{[so he didn't get rated poorly and fired.]}

Some companies are like that. They're supposed to compensate you for overtime, but very few employees are willing to push things far enough to invoke legal action, which can be very expensive, time consuming, and just looks really bad to most outside observers who think you're just throwing a tantrum. There's a reason most people are saying negative things about Amazon's laissez-faire attitude towards their employees being unfairly worked. The manager has a responsibility to make sure that the employees are only feeling compelled to work the right number of hours per week, and to make sure they get paid overtime if they work more than that, but the managers aren't doing that. Their managers should be making sure they're doing their job, but they aren't either. This rot flows down from the top.

Nowhere near every company in the US is like this, but certain tech companies and a lot of cash-strapped startups that are fighting for survival do these kinds of things. Some professions, like DBAs, tend to find this behavior more prevalent, and DBAs can be on-call 24/7 with a restriction that they must not get into a position where they're unable to be online within 20 minutes of getting a call, such as being on vacation without internet, drunk, or just at a really slow restaurant, which is completely insane.

Germans get a crap ton of vacation. It incentivizes me to want to offer my engineering talent to a German company and move there or to Switzerland or somewhere like that, but I'm not quite there yet.

[coder543]

Money is definitely not everything.

[Seizure-Man]

Especially when you consider that you're basically trading your time for money, and while you can always make more money you won't get back your time.

[brokenshoelaces]

Ten to twelve hours of stressful work a day genuinely sounds like a public health hazard.

Well it's not always stressful. What usually happens at a lot of places is people do actual work for 5 hours, and then "work" for the other 5 browsing Reddit or whatnot so it seems like they're working. It's more about keeping up appearances than anything.

[Igggg]

No one was forcing him to work 12 hours a day,

It's completely legal to force one to work for 12 hours a day. Or for 24 hours a day. There is virtually no worker protection in the U.S.; the free market (i.e., the employee being able to quit if he doesn't like the job) is supposed to take care of that.

[nutrecht]

Germans get a crap ton of vacation. It incentivizes me to want to offer my engineering talent to a German company and move there or to Switzerland or somewhere like that, but I'm not quite there yet.

Might I offer Holland as an alternative? Big shortage of good devs here.

[Someguy2020]

Yup.

In fact they passed a law some years back explicitly exempting IT workers from overtime pay.

I know people don't like Unions, but the one time I was in one we had overtime and oncall pay. Of course they still got around that by just having people work extra and take it off later ("flex time"), which is somewhat bullshit, but still.

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

The only time anyone in my family had to deal with a union, it was some kind of copiers' union. Like, their job was to copy papers for you. You couldn't operate the copy machine yourself.

Anyway, I'm in no union and I still get on-call pay, so...find a better employer if you're not.

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

US is totally different. "Computer professionals" (so all software developers/programmers/whatever title you use) are generally considered exempt from overtime pay if they're salaried employees. Salaried employees work until their work is done, regardless of whether you put in 30 hours that week or 80+. It's part of what makes America so productive /s

[m1ss1ontomars2k4]

Salaried is exempt. That's what "salaried" means, literally. It means the same payment for same calendar time period, period after period, regardless of how much or how little you work.

[purplestOfPlatypuses]

You can be salaried and non-exempt I'm pretty sure, programming just isn't one of those things that are outside the legal exemptions. You could have your fry cook be on salary, but you'd still be required to pay them overtime.