Why I Rejected My Software Engineering Offer At Amazon 

This is my favourite jobless youtuber

4:21 So you get criticised for allegedly not following the wiki and when you do, you also get criticised. I love management like this.

The employee turnover rate at big-tech companies is crazy, at 50% to 70% turnover rate. That is an absolutely insane number for highly skilled labour. When the average tenure is between 1.6 to 3 years, despite having the highest salaries and best benefits in the market (in the world), that is a symptom of a seriously unhealthy work culture and industry. It's also interesting to note that the median age at big tech is less than 30 years old. If I only gave you these statistics, and asked you to guess which industry it is, most people would probably guess the fast-food industry because that's how bad those numbers are. Unsurprisingly, Amazon is amongst the worst, alongside companies like Apple, Meta and Tesla. It seems to me from my "European perspective" that they just want a steady stream of naive worker-bees, fresh out of university, who can pass the leet-code interview, so they can work them to the bone for 18-36 months until the employee get's burnt out, dissolutioned with the industry and quits. The unfortunate thing is that this is slowly transpiring in all OECD countries.

This was incredibly informative. Coming from Wall St for a decade, and then finally moving to opening my own tech co, your analysis of the work environment is exactly what we all know for big tech nowadays, but few speak about. In short, this vid “says the quiet part, out loud.” In sum, my assessment on your decision? Two words: well done. The rest of the world needs people like you. The big tech firms can churn and grind out 22-25 yr olds as much as they like… committing professional burnout runs on these people, with zero consequence. As for your bit regarding the stock options… I chuckled a bit coming from Wall St. These guys have the turnover rate as a well substantiated piece of data right under their thumb. And they know it. Wall St knows it and the big tech owners know it. And there’s an Actuarial Desk Employee somewhere who knows exactly what you just said… but he’s not doing what you just did… “speak the quiet part, out loud.” Well done 👍

well at least we know something which isn't your favorite thing

You highlighted a couple of very interesting ideas, especially the point about risk on taking shortcuts and management ambiguity.

What you learned is that there are people who will not say "I don't know." when you ask them a question. Working with these people is not easy. (Especially if he or she is in your chain of command.) Sometimes you're better off just to ignore them, and look for answers elsewhere.

Fascinating. Of course , as an intern it’s maybe difficult but if my employer wouldn’t provide me with a machine to do the actual work I would just tell them sorry I can’t work like that the machine is too small. And I can t remember any employer that then wouldn’t give me a better one. From family company to corporation. And then AWS had the audacity to write in the review that you wouldn’t use an IDE if they didn’t provide you an appropriate workstation. What a shit show.

Wow your experience at Amazon really stresses me out

Oh man! I get why seasoned Java developers would be triggered by seeing you code Java on a command line. They're trained for auto complete and pressing buttons and that too isn't their fault since Java as a language I find is barely usable without an IDE. Anyways you certainly seem to have taken a liking to Jeff Bezos with that hairstyle of yours, coincidence?

"...get every last requirement nailed down..." Umm.... that's a good thing? 🤣 Definitely sounds like you made the right choice. That sounds like a horrible work environment!

Amazon is my favourite version of Severance.

I've heard from others that Amazon isn't a great place to work as a software dev, so your experience isn't especially surprising. But that said I guess on the plus side at least none of your direct managers came from sales & marketing.

I hear those stories and feel like a unicorn. My team is very supportive of each other, even if we don't always agree, we don't have micromanagement, sure our PO is lacking some technical information but he trusts the rest of the team to cover that. It's a job on a giant Corp that's owned by a government, so everything moves likes molasses - the move from our old hosting platform to K8S took 1.5 years too long. Oh, and people don't like Bash, for whatever reason 😢. We're moving to "The Cloud" 'soon' enough (I bet that's taking another year, at least, before we can even think of starting to move 😆)

Most of the things you said still relevant when i worked few years back

This is my favourite thumbnail

One thing I know I’m bad at is speed. Often I’m way to cautious even though usually the solution I think of first is the one I end up using. I think part of it is that I love the feeling of having a solution “in the bag,” so looking for other potentially better ones allows me to extend that feeling. So I could have learned a thing or two from Amazon. That being said, I don’t know if I could do ten years even if it meant millions.

I think it’s interesting your experience was very similar to mine when I first joined Amazon in the office in California. Fortunately the office in Colorado is much, much better and they emphasize social interactions and work life balance

this video gave me some ptsd from my last job. my new job is way better, mostly due to the smaller scale of the company. my previous job was at a fortune 50 company and it was reminiscent of your time at Amazon.

Redshift has been in a downward spiral for years and has become one of the worst documented, performing, and maintained AWS services. If this is how the team dynamic was it all makes sense.

An interesting insight, thank you.

8:59 Is that CLI rizz I hear?

Planning above all else, slow is fast. I’ll say that it’s true there should be a balance, but it’s also true that things are almost never over-planned in tech. Bro refusing an IDE is such a boss move - ignore the feedback, Chad on good sir 💪 With love, from Seattle

I was at Amazon briefly as a TVC. The glazed silence during standups is too real 😂 at a different faang now I feel so much safer (helps that am finally FTE)

Planning above all else, slow is fast. I’ll say that it’s true there should be a balance, but it’s also true that things are almost never over-planned in tech. Bro refusing an IDE is such a boss move - ignore the feedback, Chad on good sir 💪

all on the command line :D

If principles (leadership or otherwise) are on a piece of paper, they generally only exist on that paper and nowhere else. Or put differently, "If you need to repeat it that often, it probably isn't true." Proper leaders lead by example and shape culture that way. The need to put stuff on a piece of paper is marketing, and marketing always is only concerned with making you believe something that isn't true.

This is why I avoid AWS 😂

“I would have been a multi millionaire” Today that’ll get you a nice 1200ft condo within view of The Spheres with enough left over to pay the HOA fees

Amazon is my favorite company to reject.

As far as the IDE thing, could you have developed outside of the VM on the desktop and synced the source between the two? That’s a pretty common approach to solve that problem.

This is my favorite RU-vid channel.

Yeah they tried to recruit me but it seemed like the worst place on earth to work.

18:18 Mhmmmm yeah, I just love it when you have a superior like that....

Working at big tech sounds stressful and terrifying.

Good to you that you escaped such people 😀

It is hard be professional in software development. Every senior will not like you, and if deliver hate you, not see your code before the boss.

Your coworker is my least favourite coworker!

If other teams are diffrent then Amazon has very bad luck loosing oportunity to hire you... Sometimes millions are less valuable than sanity

It's not different other youtubers said they had to do stuff alone so that is BS honestly.

Dear Robert, I want to share a perspective that differs from the majority of reactions to this video. While I understand yours and most people's frustration with major tech companies, I think it is important to remember a few things: First: A company, more so a major tech company, operates in a highly competitive space populated by other entities which lack any resemblance of the ethics which we humans posses due to our nature as a social species. Short of revolutionary musings, recognizing and accepting this landscape is essential for success in today's world; there seems to be no alternative. Second: It should not surprise you that a manager acts unethically or even illogically. The reason is that the manager is not just a person; they are, for better or worse, agents which embody the interests of the company. The company is, once again, a nonsensical entity. It is your job to understand this and act accordingly. You should also accept that the manager might not be the best person for the job, but they are the person who is there, and they were placed there by a (again, likely illogical) process, which must be respected. Third: It should come as no surprise that a company asks as much as possible from their employees, and that many employees comply, more so if the prospect of earning millions of dollars is on the table. This is the nature of the game. It is your task to be outwardly compliant, while inwardly doing what you think is best for you. That is, finding subtle ways to avoid the most egregious demands of the company. Fourth, and most importantly: Embracing these realities can alter your behavior in ways that are both conscious and subconscious. This will be noticed by your managers and some peers, which will give you entrance to a "secondary hierarchy" of the company which is not found on any org chart, a hierarchy which is quite flat and contains people all the way from interns to the CEO: That is, the network of people who are capable of putting their common sense below the company's interests. Being part of this group can lead to promotions and reduce your technical workload since you're contributing in a more significant, albeit different, way. The challenge lies in achieving this status. Having said all that, I wish you the best of luck in your entertainment/educational career, which is surely a more ethical and fulfilling path, where you're already making a significant impact.

Bro its a madhouse only Beff Jezos is getting rich the rest are bored at Amazon. Read the room :)

Bro are you fing joking bro why didnt you put more RAM in the machine bro ?!?!

I am your manager, take ownership, code you produce, I am, working too. Work together?

Can i get an this is my favourite comment

Thanks for sharing your experiences.