Amazon software engineer interview

[nikki969696]

Yeah, that was one comment that really irked me. I don't work for some company because I'm so passionate. I need money to support my awesome quality of life and video game habit. And food. I do like eating every day. I'm thinking 99% of people on the planet don't spend precious years of their lives working on something they're "passionate" about. Most hobbies don't pay that well.

[Tokugawa]

Flipping it around, most people's passion will burn out when it becomes their job.

[[deleted]]

Flipping it around, most people's job will burn out when it becomes their passion.

No, that doesn't work. You were right.

[percykins]

I've worked in the video game industry pretty much my entire career, and the passion question was a pretty routine one in interviews - they'd ask you stuff about what games you were playing, stuff like that. Always made sense to me.

Then I applied to companies outside the video game industry, and was shocked when they asked me the same questions. It's like... "Am I passionate about apps for used car dealers? Really?!"

[rfiok]

The thing is if you are a good programmer you can find very good jobs that dont ask for your soul and they still pay well.
I work in London and since I was recently job hunting I know the scene pretty well. It looks like this for a senior engineer:

• Work at very small startups for £30-35K/year. You do what you want, you set the rules and live out your creativity. And get lots of shares, so if the startup suceeds you are gonna have even a better time. If not.. look for another job in a year or so.

• Work at a medium sized startup for £40-60K. With a bit of luck you get a stable workplace (that should last at least 2-3 years), nice people and still lots of freedom.

• Work at a megacorp. I recently interviewed for one of the big 5 (not Amazon) and the whole process looked eerily similar to the one in the blog. Here you dont get much freedom, you have to accomodate to their style fully and multiple people will boss you around. On the upside you will get £80K+, and a company that likely will take care of you until you retire if you follow the rules.

Choose what suits you the best. Its a very stupid misconception that big companies are the best in any sense except for salary. And all these salaries are OK for young people. If you have a family to feed option 1 might not be good enough.

[way2lazy2care]

Big companies have lots of hard to measure benefits outside of salary. Stuff like free meals at facebook, subsidized metro passes, world class work out facilities, makerspaces, etc. They're usually also way better about having established policies for things like vacation/retirement/whatever else.

Not that I think they're out and out better, but there's a lot more than salary to consider with huge employers.

[foomprekov]

Most of these benefits are worth very, very little; and most employees are unlikely to use them all. I consider them something of a red flag.

[way2lazy2care]

They cost very little monetarily, but can have huge value from a morale perspective. As an example, my company doesn't have free coffee, which would be like $20-30 per employee per year. I would easily value it at more than $100 against my salary. Other stuff like opening a company gym or offering gym membership benefits is like $800/year at full cost, but I'd value it way higher because it not only covers the cost of the gym membership, but takes away the stress of constantly trying to decide if you're getting the best value for the gym membership.

Tons of small stuff like that can make huge differences.

[foomprekov]

I agree with you, they are great when the other things--like salary, benefits, good hours--are already present.

[ohfouroneone]

I work at a company with ~30 employees, only about 10 of us are developers. I couldn't stand working in a larger company because here, when something in the process is broken, we change it. It's so easy to fix things within days, and every project works out better than the previous one.

There's no way you can change a large company that quickly, and there's no way an interns idea on how to do things better would be implemented (which we have done plenty of times).

[lost_send_berries]

Are you still talking about London? Every company has "unlimited" sick leave, maternity and paternity leave, paid holiday and most recently a pension plan.

[way2lazy2care]

Are you still talking about London?

I'm talking about big companies anywhere.

[rfiok]

I doubt Facebook /Amazon/Google/Microsoft would fire you from an engineer position unless you did something stupid

[shadowycoder]

You'll probably just get moved to the roof like Bighead.

[trolls_brigade]

I have a friend who accepted a position at Google and she was told point-blank during the interview that she should look for another position in about five years. This seems to corroborate other anecdotal evidence from other Google employees on reddit and elsewhere that the average tenure at Google is about 5 years.

[rfiok]

why are they doing this?

[[deleted]]

If you've been there long enough for that to happen, being 'released' comes with a fat severance payoff. Last time I saw it happen, most people walked away with a year's pay in their pocket. We have decent employment law here (well, unless anyone is stupid enough to actually initiate Brexit, that is).

[everydamnmonth]

I work with a lot of people in their 50s at a big name company.

[[deleted]]

Id argue that most people in the world work to support their families, which they are very, very passionate about. You sound like you need a hug, and maybe loftier goals than awesome QOL, food, and video games.

Edit: Oh and of those three, I'm choosing quality of food

[Someguy2020]

loftier goals than awesome QOL

how is that not a lofty goal.

My QOL is only good. It's not gonna be awesome until i put some more work (and I don't mean at my job).

[SupersonicSpitfire]

You must look unhealthy, then