[TruthPrevails]

Hello All,

I was an intern at Amazon this summer and they extended a full time offer. I read Steve's rant with great interest. Since many people in comments have confirmed the points raised by him about Amazon, I am not feeling good right now :( I still have 18 days to accept the offer. I am currently interviewing with Microsoft. I have applied to Facebook just now. Sadly, I screwed up my Google phone screening last week. It was just not my day :( I am confident of getting MS offer. Do you people suggest I reject the Amazon offer? Or should I work at Amazon and form my own opinion? I can always change jobs.

EDIT: I am not able to reply to comments at all! It gives me dead link message. I have been trying for almost 30 mins now. Frustrating.

[maestri]

I was kind of in a similar position a couple years ago. I didn't do an internship at Amazon, but I was considering joining full-time, and was really unsure of whether to accept (I had great offers from a couple startups, which I was mostly focused on at the time, but a friend at Amazon was really pushing for me to join).

In the end, I decided to go with Amazon, thinking like you are that I could always change jobs if I didn't like it.

And yeah, I hated it. Absolutely hated it so much that I quit two months after joining. The problem was that the other startups I was interested had filled the position I'd been looking at (I'm more of a data analyst than a software engineer, and data analyst positions are a little more rare), and now every other place I'd interview at would think I was a total flake. I'd interview somewhere, and I'd have to spend 30 minutes explaining to multiple people why I left Amazon so soon and how they'd know I wouldn't do that again at their place.

I'd have great technical interviews, and I would get told this, but people would be worried about what kind of employee I was simply because of this one mistake I made joining Amazon.

So yeah. Hopefully you'll have a much better experience than me, so that even if you don't like Amazon you can always change jobs, but just throwing my own experience out there as another data point.

[SoftwareMaven]

The lesson here is don't quit two months into a new job before finding a replacement position. "The position isn't what I thought it would be" sounds much different if you are still there than if you've quit. Very few people will begrudge an incompatible match if you are seen as sticking it out responsibly.

[srdev]

Keep in mind that Amazon is a big place, and your mileage can vary greatly depending on which team you are in. Personally, there are some good and bad points with my team (and pager duty always sucks), but overall I'm not discontent. I'm not sure about the pay-scale claims though. I had thought that I was being paid pretty well, and cross checking against external sites seemed to confirm that.

You can also just take the job at Amazon and switch to the MS offer if you get it and don't like what you see at Amazon. Its considered incredibly rude, yes, but our group has had that pulled on us a couple of times.

[skyo]

I did multiple internships at Amazon and now I work here full-time. I love it here. But, like other people have pointed out, your experience can be very dependent on which team you join. Personally, I wouldn't want to work full-time on the team that I did my first internship on. The work there just wasn't fun. But my internships put me in a good position to know which teams suck and which teams are great, and so I chose a great team to join. Hopefully you are in a similar place because of your internship. Did you enjoy your team? If not, did you see any teams that you would like to work on?

[TruthPrevails]

My AWS team was good. I enjoyed my work as an intern. However I was warned that work in the group is operations intensive. I could see that myself in those 12 weeks. As an intern I was not given any operations work. Obviously it will change when I join as a full timer. As noted below I am looking at other AWS teams, Kindle silk browser team. I need to find out about these teams.

[skyo]

Yeah, I've heard that some AWS teams can have heavy operational load. If it's important to you to avoid that, you could consider somewhere in WAP/BuilderTools. That's where I work (so yes I am biased), and in my experience the operational load tends to be pretty light throughout the org. On my particular team we almost never get paged. Plus we get to build neat things in this org (remember how Stevey mentioned that Amazon's "versioned-library" system is good?).

Silk is probably a neat team to look into as well. They're building a cool product, they're still a small team, and they have good leadership. The director in charge of it used to be the head of Builder Tools and he's great.

But yeah, talk to a lot of teams and ask them about the things that are important to you (operational load, current/future projects, code quality standards, whatever other things you can think of to ask) and see if any of those teams sound cool to you. I won't lie and say that every place in Amazon is perfect, but if you choose well I think it's possible to find a great team to work on.

[TruthPrevails]

Just now found out that "no college hires" in Silk team. That sucks! College hires are high on energy and enthusiasm. I don't know why teams would not want college hires :(

[srdev]

At the risk of being slightly offensive, college hires are high on energy and enthusiasm but low on ability to produce reliable code (on average). They can produce a lot of code, but they tend to have blind spots when spotting failure scenarios, resulting in "gotcha!" outages or bugs. Its not a big deal if they have a more experienced developer reviewing their commits, but if you're iterating fast on something that's going to be a flagship product, it becomes less tolerable.

[TruthPrevails]

No offence taken :) I understand your point. Silk was something I was really interested in. Tough luck. I wonder whether there is still a chance if I can talk to the Silk team manager.

[justoneshot]

If your ok wearing a pager Amazon is the best place to get the scaling experience on your resume. They put college hires on giant SDE mission critical systems with no training, because they dont have senior engineers. Except the highest engineers that do not get swapped out and need not comply with schedules. My friend works there. He is always either love it or hate it. He likes most of other programmers but a lot are really bad coders. The technology is cool but the management is clueless and stupid, they cant tell good code and they make up schedules all the time. My friend laughs at production code and code reviews. The managers like the worst programmers the best because they are biased for action and don't care if they push out stuff that breaks as long as they dont get the ticket or get credit for fixing it later. The manager is a huge fat guy who always talks about the meeting with Jeff Bezos and makes them go to socialize with recruits. Their softwares were copied from some other Amazon project and most of the engineers spend their time trying to put out fires for "Jabba" because it is so bad. I interviewed there and got an offer from the fat guy who told me it was more exciting than my other offer because the other guys just doing reporting and data. But I want to do that and data-driven analysis. Amazon says that its data-driven but the boss says it's boring?

[potatolicious]

Like others have said, decide on the merits of your internship.

I left recently (a few months ago) and much of Yegge's rant rings true - but like all big companies, it is not universal. My main caveat when others ask me about working for Amazon is - know exactly which team you'll be on. That will be the difference between a hell on earth scenario vs. a pretty sweet job.

From your internship, you have much more information than most people coming into the company. Use that.

And even if it does turn out to be the wrong decision, the golden handcuffs are only on for 12-24 months. Amazon on your resume is incredibly powerful and opens a lot of doors, so you won't really have suffered in the long run for it. Towards the end of my tenure I had recruiters banging down my door, so your options even if Amazon turns out to be a bad fit are, well, pretty limitless.

[eljorgito]

any advice for people considering a move to Amazon but haven't had the benefit of internship or view from the inside. it's clear that group to group variance is enormous - hell on earth vs pretty sweet - but getting clarity on the particular group is key to decision. it's possible to get some of that through the recruiting process but not the same as spending time there.

also curious as to whether the hellishness everyone talks about applies cross-org (eg for PMs, TPMs, etc.) as well as engineers.

[TruthPrevails]

This is quite comforting :)

[simplekoala]

Be-prepared for the worst. They are some specific groups which do good work, and have good management. If you luck out, you can have fun working at Amazon but if you end up getting into painful groups with extreme operational load or bad management - just keep your head down, slog it out, suck up to your boss. You will end-up learning a ton by being at Amazon, if you are just out of school. It will help you immensely in your next job search.

[henrikschroder]

But remember to get out if you end up in a crap group. Learn what you can, but remember to get out before you develop Stockholm syndrome.

[TruthPrevails]

Yes. It has happened to me once already.

[tybris]

Amazon changes faster than any other company I know. In Amazon years, Yegge left centuries ago. In addition, your Amazon experience depends mostly on what team you're in. You should base your decision on your internship.

[TruthPrevails]

Yes, this is something even I observed as an intern. Amazon environment is very dynamic and chaotic (at least the group I interned in was).

[revertts]

If you did an internship, you're in a better position than anyone else to decide if the company's a good fit...

[aphexairlines]

Well, what did you think of your internship?

Personally I find Amazon a great place to write software.

[TruthPrevails]

Thanks for the suggestions guys. Internship experience was quite good. But then it was just for 12 weeks. I enjoyed writing code. Since I have less time to decide now, I might just accept the offer and test the waters. I am inclined to choose one of the good AWS teams or the Kindle silk browser team (hoping they have plans to turn it into a browser OS in future)

[revertts]

There are also a lot of _really_ interesting but less public-facing teams (AWS and Kindle tend to get a lot of press). I had been pretty set on AWS when I accepted, but ended up in a different org and love the work I'm doing. You might talk to your recruiter or anyone you know at Amazon about your interests and see if they can suggest additional orgs/teams to consider.

[TruthPrevails]

Sure, I will try to find out about such teams.

[TheTarquin]

I agree with skyo and aphexairlines. I've found Amazon a fantastic place to work and am, frankly, baffled by the flak it's taking here in the comments. My experience at Amazon has been fun and rewarding, and I'm thrilled to be a coder at such an awesome company.

I guess your mileage may vary, but I've found AMZN to be an awesome place to be a programmer.