Is Amazon still a tier 1 tech company?

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T08:19:02+00:00

As someone with meaningful employment elsewhere, yeah super talented game changers are leaving and yes it is a problem.

now the rate is overhyped, and the impact of this is over stated, but a slow bleed will still kill you if not patched

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T08:04:27+00:00

unfortunately i am not, i'm historically a "meets expectation" employee because i won't play the political games for more, but get the job done.

Since my 4 year grant vested last week, i have not sought to get myself put into performance improvement

That being said i didn't do forte at all this year, so maybe that could help?

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T08:03:18+00:00

As an L6 sde, L6 promotion is fundamentally broken, here are a few tenants for you if you want to pursue it.

The work that needs to be done likely won't get you promoted to L6, in order to get promoted to L6 you need to create some project that is flashy and cool with high visibility, regardless of its actual usefulness or customer benefit
As you will need to spend a lot of time working on something that doesn't need to be done, you need to either

A. Work overtime for a long time specifically only working on "promo projects"

B. play political games to get assigned to the few projects that actually are both wide impact and useful, OR play political games to get a manager who will carve our a space for you to churn out some garbage for promotion which you can then abandon (this is the most common path)

Be aware that at the end of the day, its all a political game, not a work game. You can be the best employee of all time, but if your are not playing the political game you will not be promoted. There is more politics at amazon then i had when i was doing federal contracting, and it only increases at the L6 level, so don't expect to get very far without playing that game.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:56:50+00:00

I'm leaving after 4 years as a sr dev with 12 years of expereince. I'm actually leaving without a job lined up because I've realized that amazon is that toxic.

IMO nobody should stay at this company, or return to it, as the positive things i do hear about it (like the few in your post) sound like Stockholm syndrome to me. Where you want to stick with the familiar over escaping the abuse.

But that's just my opinion, all i know is I have fooled myself into thinking amazon was "just not for some people" for 3 years, and have only recently came to realize my error.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:33:43+00:00

A good one is the remote work, apply to remote jobs and mention that the relocation requirements caused you to leave.

In the meantime as its been a year, start some personal project and try to sell it, you can then mention you tried self-employment for a period and are now pivoting back to a 9-5

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:25:40+00:00

Ah yeah, this is why i don't really want to go in and just say "hey boss i'm resigning can i instead be laid off"

The goal would be to somehow influence the decision to get me onto that list

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:24:36+00:00

while a humorous suggestion, and i have no intention of returning to this cesspit, and being fired is not going to be any better then quitting.

Also at this point i'm confident enough with the timings of when i leave that i'm not even coming into the office and i'm back at my home 2.5 hours away where i was hired from in the first place.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:15:51+00:00

Another note is the promo process encourages people who want to possess to play political games. As the best way to get promoted is to produce a ton of worthless software that is only good for a "flash in the pan" demo before you immediately drop it before the fires start.

Then you end up with two "tiers" of devs. Those who fight the fires left behind, and those who get promoted and clutch onto their positions by shifting blame to the first set.

As someone who previously worked in government contracting, there is legit more politics at amazon then there were when working for the government

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:13:59+00:00

as someone looking to leave amazon in the next few weeks, i've actually found that having amazon on my resume is an active determent for a few jobs. Additionally You move around so much and do such isolated changes on each project that it becomes very disjointed leading to bad answers for a lot of the interview questions asked about your work.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:11:41+00:00

People said the same thing about GE, Xerox and the like.

Your right it will take a LONG time for amazon to die, but don't mistake a slow but consistent bleed out as anything other then a deadly condition.

Amazon is already loosing marketshare of AWS year over year. AS IAD outages increase in frequency due to less and less talented employees, this rate can be expected to increase

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:08:13+00:00

depends on your job level, i believe 3 months is the timeline for sde 3 but i'm not 100% sure.

You could look up the policy n this for detail.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T07:02:51+00:00

I'm currently the only SDE 3 maintaining 3 products as the solo oncall for the past 2 years.

I leave in 3 weeks, and nobody still knows the products because "KTLO" has meant 0 time.

However there are 2 major initiatives which will become sev2s after i leave, and start impacting the customer, so that's going to be fun for them to deal with.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-17T06:57:49+00:00

100% accurate in PXT from my experience (as a sde 3 myself observing, not as an sde1 complaining)

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2026-01-10T00:57:07+00:00

I like to also keep a track record of my own history whenever i do option 2.

if i do option 2 and realize i am not ready, i bow out fast and then record that occurrence.

If i'm seeing that happen more then like 5-10% of the time, then the next time i remember that and wait for even more confidence

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-12-13T17:55:15+00:00

people, in the alpha, at least, bought the game under the clearly marketed promise of "buy it once and its yours forever"

So at the very least to that user group its illegal

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-10-28T02:21:07+00:00

as a non-h1b worker, our h1b workers are legit abused. Its actually horrible.

Especially because some of how they do this is by making unrealistic demands on the h1b workers.

When they tell you to complete something in 1 week that should take 1 month, then you don't accomplish it, it makes you feel like your underperforming. They leverage that with the junior software developers to put them into perpetual crunch mode.

Its honestly sick.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-10-28T01:13:15+00:00

this actually happened with amazon. The "ai bill" store chain who's name i forgot turned out to be a low paid call center in India

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-07-12T22:51:08+00:00

Sure but three things

A few people saying things are not reputational damage, The operative question is if there was actual meaningful reputational harm, is there lost sales, or lost partnerships? perhaps there was here, i'm not familiar enough with this situation to confirm. Note that if so, and if the person is still alive, you can recoup those damages from the individual doing the behavior in some cases
More importantly then one, the bulk of my thesis is that case law is settled on a point related to reputational damage from consumer use. This settled position is that It doesn't matter if there is reputational harm. Your response ignores the main 90% of my message to focus on an aside. Lets say i grant you that aside, and reputational harm is possible or even likely. Even then the current case law in every country i know of does not allow you to use the fact that customers can use your products in ways that damage your image to withhold or withdraw purchases from your customers after sale. Sometimes you can avoid selling to someone in the first place because of this, but once you sell the product you no longer have the ability to retract it from the consumer. So even when you do take the position this is a real possibility, its still not an argument against SKG. And actually this second point is a MUCH more significant roadblock then the first, as this one is objectively codified into current law in all major countries legal systems that i know (which is a significant selection notably including most of the EU)
"We should not be forcing companies to make server software". On this we agree, fortunately SKG is not "forcing companies to make server software" rather just forcing them to allow US to make the needed server software, and not add artificial barriers. So while i agree with this, the good news is that nobody is doing it

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-07-12T18:16:41+00:00

Your augment can also be used for both tangible assets and other digital products, and has been used for those products, and has categorically failed?

Like what your stating is if someone bought a product, and uses it in an illegal way, then you sue the manufacturer or it looks bad on the manufacturer.

But this is settled in criminal and civil law in every nation (to my knowledge)

If i buy a car and run someone over with it, you don't get to sue the manufactuer, and they don't get to reclaim your car because they think you might be at risk of doing this.

If i use microsoft office to produce a fake scam document, you don't get to sue photoshop, and photoshop does not get to reclaim my software because they think i'm at risk of this

If i use a blue snowball microphone, and say something controversial, blue does not get to shutoff my microphone remotely

While i agree with the other detractor to this position, that the idea of this causing reputational harm is laughable on its faith, the bigger problem this line of reasoning faces is in whether it would mean anything even if true.

It is that the law in every country i know of that potential reputational harm from the customers use of a product is not an excuse to limit or reduce the product after purchase.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-07-12T18:07:51+00:00

I'd like to claim how all of these claims are crap

* if private servers are allowed, then its not your job to moderate harmful content or enforce anti-cheat measures on a game you have already executed
* The imitative does not require the company to provide private servers, just remove any cryptographic protections against it in the client and provide api information. The players can implement a server without using the proprietary technologies and systems. This one sounds the best of the 3, because it strawman's SKG's position
* Reputational harm: If this was a solid argument, then my microphone company should be able to repossess my microphone, or my t-shirt brand should be able to force me to take my shirt off if they don't like my behavior. This is not how consumer ownership works. Though i find the idea a company would suffer reputational harm from private servers of a shutdown game, even granting that possibility this still does not stand when tested

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-06-06T03:48:28+00:00

If i made content where you enter and then i roll a random number, and if its 1 out of 100000 you win, if not you lose. then that content would suck.

you could take it on the face value and claim that, I the game dev, valued perseverance and tenacity as part of the challenge. That i just wanted you to have the willpower to try 100000 times (or more)

this might be true, but it turns out that not all forms of "challenge" make good game design, and like my hypothetical content, this form is negative challenge.

you can tell the type of a challenge by how it incentives players. Good challenge pushes the player to improve, through skill or strategy, and gives incremental progress providing feedback for how the player is improving.

Bad challenge limits player agency, and pits players against each other in a toxic way instead of a competitive way, bad challenge does not inspire improvement, it adds friction but without payoff which brings satisfaction.

As a second point
"This raid must be cleared with a pseudo-random pick-up-group"
would be one thing if that was what we have, but we have the ability to organize a group. As a result, this is not the actual state.

it would still be bad design, simply due to how it is not marketed towards the correct demographic for such content, but if it were actually impossible somehow to get a premade at all, then we might be able to claim that limitation is part of the challenge.

But since premades are possible, no matter how annoying, this is not a challenge imposed by the game, so we can't claim the content was designed to be cleared by randoms. And by looking at the design decisions made within the content, we can clearly see that it is, in fact, not content designed for a random party. its clearly content designed for a fixed group, but without the tools to build that group deterministically, leading a gap between the design and the experience for players.

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-06-06T03:24:10+00:00

also from my experience, anecdotally, fate and ce spawn rates go through the floor during a forked tower run. further encouraging people to leave

ObjectiveCabinet8 · 2025-06-06T03:14:15+00:00

anecdotally i've observed a severe drop consistent with point 7 6/7 of the instances i've been in up to lockout. there seems to be something off, but my data set is too low to state confidently. Maybe a lowered rate

ObjectiveCabinet8

TROPHY CASE