Working at Amazon vs Google

Sharing my experience working at amazon and google as a software engineer.

#neetcode #amazon #google

[TKollaKid]

Amazon sounds like hell. My friend worked at AWS and they wanted him to work 7 days a week, 12 hour days. He has a wife and kids, ended up just quitting and is much happier now.

[moshmosh]

Sound like google earned their reputation rightfully.
I would rather work for them at half the salary rather than working in the sweatshops of amazon

[_____case]

I worked at Amazon for less than a year. They staffed my entire team with new hires led by a manager who was spread too thin and a TL who was a company veteran but yelled in meetings on multiple occasions and in my opinion didn't really give us proper technical direction.

[goodstuff]

I'm science manger at Amazon, we have been forced to fire people to meet >6%. These number was not the percentage of putting people to focus, it's the number to let people go, e.g., I need to fire at least one people out of 10 people at my team every two quarters or even one quarter if there is new instruction from "leaders". There is very little which I can do. We also need to rank the team members performance every month to decide who will be put to focus. When something bad happen, the senior leadership willl definitely find one lower level manage or engineer to take the blame. The culture is just so toxic. Thinking about twice before you joined the company. I also plan to record one video related with this when I quit.

[-_____-]

1:00 that's a normal time IMO. You can study runbooks all you want, but the fastest way to learn is to be behind the steering wheel if that makes sense. My oncall rampup at AWS was similar, although we were always told if we didn't know what to do we could escalate.

[chenlim]

“Was Google cool? Yes. Was Amazon cool? Weeelll….” LOL 😂

[Creator-ql]

I work for Amazon; it's okay. I mean I'm still with the company 7 years later soooo🙈

OMG everything you're saying I just wanna comment on lol; Tribal knowledge, big issue in my team too and we've had tons of meetings about it. Still the same.
Speed over Quality; same thing, so true, you can't imagine the nonsense that's happening because of not focusing on the quality first.
Automation!!! I die a little bit everyday knowing a bot can do 60% of my job but isn't.

[ZZPiranhaZZ]

I work at Amazon, but not in the US. The culture here is really good barring all the issues that are occurring because of the state of the industry. The oncall in my country is only during the work day, so you're not expected to dial in to a call at 2am like a lot of other teams overseas. I agree that a lot of manual work exists, but I found success in automating a lot of it and it was one of the things that led to a promotion within about a year for me. The issue is that the only 2 big tech companies we have here are Google and Amazon, and Google will have maybe 2-3 open mid level engineering positions over the entire year, to work on managing legacy software rather than shipping new stuff.

[mikkeljensen]

Surprised that google cloud is so bad compared to AWS when the quality of work is higher. guess they just work on the wrong things.

[gradientO]

That explains why we see a lot of people with less than 1 yr exp in Amazon

[tune]

I like amazon and learned a lot during my internship there but would probably be fairly stressful as a fte there

[epotnwarlock]

i don't care what the pay is, I'm not working "on-call"

[AGMI-pnv]

Amazon is good for business in problem solving, Google is for product research work, Microsoft is good for national and international delivery.

[me]

This is going to sound super niche, and I don't know how big of an audience you have for this is, but would you ever consider doing content on scientific programming?

I'm a PhD student working in the intersections of materials science, chemical engineering, electrochemistry, and molecular physics. More and more of the work I'm doing is requiring building and running code to simulate physical and chemical systems, and while it doesn't pay as well as these Fortune 500 tech jobs, it does contribute directly to developing better solutions for problems in structural materials, energy, and environmental rehabilitation. Oh, also, we still use Fortran.

[hellowill]

My company only does oncall for mid-level and higher. NO way new grads go on-call lmao.

[john_youtube]

i've got horror stories about amazon lol, what an awful time
made a good stack though

[blueicer]

Google not paying employees what they're worth for the google brand name attached to their CV feels counter intuitive. Like yes you will attract people who will be willing to work for less but those same people you attract will likely use google as a brand to get more money from other companies like amazon, willing to pay more. Therefore it benefits everyone if you pay people what they're worth. Perhaps google does take care of their employees however.

[esteban]

Was at AWS for 3 years and it was so awful. Once I had enough experience I jumped ship to Google lol

[huhuboss]

What does it mean to work "on call"?

[aznstride]

You been there for 1 months bro. You don’t know enough to judge that “on-call” is bad.

First off, it’s team-dependent. Some teams rarely have anything for on-call perhaps because it’s mostly research-focused or some other reason.

On-call just means you’re working on tickets during work hours and not “sprint work”. And after hours, yo have a pager and you get paged when an alarm goes off because one of your team’s app is F”ing up. If you understand how everything works; you can fix that issue or better yet, identify the bug and patch it so it doesn’t alarm again for example.

Having software engineers as on-call is an incentive for teams to code their apps properly without bugs so it rarely fails and so it doesn’t page them in the middle of the night