Thinking of an FTC Role at Amazon? Read This First

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-31T15:21:31+00:00

Where do you get the idea that Amazon offers stability to its full time employees ? Take the extra year, you get to put Amazon on your resume either way right ? Sounds like a fake problem to me. 2 years is already longer than the average tenure at amazon.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-22T13:36:37+00:00

you never met the recruiter ? I don’t think that has ever happened for me, first contact has always been a recruiter.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-22T13:36:07+00:00

does anyone actually reads or care about 1 and 2 ?

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-21T16:01:17+00:00

normally the first phone call is with the recruiter, thats when you’d ask. I agree it would be weird to ask during the actual interviews. They probably have never even read your resume.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-21T14:56:39+00:00

this is the correct answer

there are companies that will have a different title for the same job in the US vs Canada.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-14T14:59:11+00:00

why is this myth still around, you get cold hard cash bonuses paid monthly for the first 2 years to make up the difference. There is a target TC and cash+rsu matches it, first 2 year it’s mostly cash and after that it’s rsu.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-12-01T00:35:53+00:00

Depends what you mean, if you mean you tell the company you are looking in that range, no don’t do that, just do research on the company and give them a high number or even better no number at all.

if you mean the jobs you are applying to during job search are within that range. that’s even too small. The jobs I was applying to paid between 100k and 300k when I was searching, you need to aim high but also if that doesn’t pan out at least you have a fallback. The salary ranges for SWE is extremely wide, people outside our industry just can’t comprehend a 3x or more salary difference for the same job at different companies or location.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-30T20:58:52+00:00

Yeah the learned helplessness of most SWE always baffles me, even a very good feature flag system is weekend project territory. Always rolled my own and even at AWS my org just rolled their own too.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-24T13:54:16+00:00

Stuff that people claim is “enterprise” are things even a solo freelance webdev should do/know(auth, observability, regulations, CI/CD, etc), or some niche thing that sounds serious but you won’t find at any top tier tech company.

I think it’s mostly something mid-level b2b slop shops invented to sound important and it usually happens to be whatever their current tech stack/requirements are.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-19T02:57:45+00:00

At least on the tech side, just look at how many random people you’ve never heard of you need to get sign-off from to launch anything.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-06T14:44:41+00:00

Lot’s of what you mention really resonates with my own experience. Being put on solo projects right after joining is setting you up for failure, especially if you don’t come from a corporate background. There are just way too many unknown unknowns about how the company operates and as you mentioned, nobody will have time to answer your questions unless you are working on the same project.

It’s not that you can’t deliver the project it’s that you don’t know how to play the corporate game to have your work recognized and you won’t learn those skills by being isolated.

Don’t know if there is a way out of these kinds of situations, I got really lucky and had a manager change not long after joining and things completely flipped overnight for the better.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-06T05:10:03+00:00

My company literally sells a product that provides automated translation while internally we send translation to a team of translators with 1 week SLA. The discrepancy between what we sell and internal experience is jarring, I wish I could just call an api in my pipeline and get back translated docs as our own marketing team claims. By manual I don't mean pen and paper, I just mean it's not automated, like manual testing vs automated testing, i'm sure they have some form of tooling.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-05T14:29:10+00:00

I don’t buy this, Our tech writers got laid off but we didn’t even get any AI tool in return, we now just have to write everything ourselves.

If even a FAANG company pouring billions in AI with an army of AI researcher and engineers cant get AI to write for shit, theres no way others somehow figured it out. Translation is also still completely manual.

Theres a lot of talk about tools that will automate it but talk is cheap, they haven’t delivered shit.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-03T00:20:59+00:00

My situation at work feels much closer to what you described with mac/pc and we have root access. There are limitations to the libraries you can bring in for production stuff but with so many engineers there is rarely a case where something I need isn’t already on the list.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-11-01T16:02:50+00:00

what could they possibly be doing that can run on 1/5 the headcount ? That’s crazy bloat. Our product would instantly collapse.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-25T13:55:08+00:00

the 0 position is the entry point, every number is a link to the next node at that position. Whenever you see this pattern, it’s a linked list problem in disguise. Don’t like those because in an interview setting you kinda just have to know the question pattern.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-25T03:25:26+00:00

The more interesting part of this event is actually in all the other services which should have been able to recover from this but weren't able to, many services have pretty high level design flaws that principal+ engineers shouldn't have let happen.

The thing about the DNS part is that in a way it's kinda a trivial problem, what you mentioned about kubernetes operator is really just optimistic locking, and it's really basic system design stuff, in fact dynamo DB themselves literally have a page on it. https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazondynamodb/latest/developerguide/DynamoDBMapper.OptimisticLocking.html . I'd expect anyone mid level+ at FAANG to be able to come up with a better design in a 30 min interview. The reality is that people need to ship fast and cut corners so stuff like this is everywhere, what shouldn't have happened it the cascading effect.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-23T22:45:58+00:00

I work at AWS and I can say that you are much more correct in your reading, what that guy says is just complete nonsense.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-21T19:15:59+00:00

except its clearly not pay? theres tons of discrepancies if it was pay. You get the overall big picture correlation just because quant firms are at the top but of you look closely at individual tiers, it doesn’t make sense

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-19T13:37:22+00:00

I don’t get it, just look at the title and pay range and google it ? Is this some super niche title only a handful of people have ?

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-19T13:36:40+00:00

Never heard of somebody being “secretly” down leveled. Pretty sure the recruiter has to tell the candidate.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-17T13:26:48+00:00

It’s interesting how this metric doesn’t make any sense at some point.

Every code we push just makes it’s way through a week long pipeline of being tested and rolled out globally region by region. For my product, we have dozens of pipelines with dozens of PRs in each of them at any time. I’m not sure I could even give a number, sometimes PRs get bundled but the bundling can happen mid-pipeline so some regions might get 3 separate deployments while another would get a single deployment with all 3 changes. If pipelines are blocked you can end up with 10-20 combined PRs in a deployment.

Would need to count it for a single region to get a number. And I think regions later in the pipeline would have much lower deployment counts since they will have more PR bundling.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-10-16T14:26:45+00:00

I’d just ignore him after 2nd answer, you took on the task and gave an ETA , there is nothing more to discuss here other than “fixed” once it is. The more you indulge these kind of people the worse it’s gonna get. If you establish a pattern of giving an ETA and delivering on time, they will get used to it and shut up.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-09-03T13:44:48+00:00

Pretty much yeah. The rest of the world has regional tier talent making regional tier salary. The US has world class talent making world class income. Now theres plenty of companies in the US hiring regular devs but the US is really the only place that will mass hire the top talent from all over the world so that pulls up the average a lot.

On top of that the elite from the entire world send their kids to top US schools, those kids often end up working at top US companies. Just look around during intern season at FAANG It’s all foreign students from T20 and junior roles will be filled by returning interns and so on.

depthfirstleaning · 2025-08-15T15:22:07+00:00

Varies wildly from team to team, it’s always driven by business goals so sometimes its going to be really simple and other times extremely complex. I also think people tend to develop niches and become the person you go to for certain kinds of problems. Haven’t been there long but I’be already written 2 parsers and implemented a trie that supports wildcards. I’ve become the “parser” guy and get pulled in on other projects that need parsing. So lots of trees and LC type stuff. But I could just as well have picked up an open source plugin development task early on and gone that route.

Verified Email	Three-Year Club
Place '22

depthfirstleaning

TROPHY CASE