Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by canttestthis 1082 days ago
> brave souls diving into a strange codebase

As someone who made a career out of being loaned out to other teams as an 'away resource' at Amazon, I've struggled to find a similar level of mental stimulation after leaving for other Big 4 companies. Being a loaner engineer meant something new to work on every few months, no maintenance or oncall burden, making lots of new connections, and just generally there being always something interesting/intense to do.
1 comments
NBJack 1082 days ago
I won't dispute your level of enjoyment from it, but I'd have to ask: did your fellow engineers feel the same way about it? What was your time commitment like to deliver?

Also, if you're looking for a thrill, I would highly recommend going after cloud-based infra providers. There's never a shortage of unique problems there.

link
canttestthis 1081 days ago
Time commitments were generally aggressive but reasonable with a 10-20% buffer to account for ramp up (realistically closer to 10 than 20). The reasonable-ness of most things eng-culture related at Amazon is probably a function of the competence of your management chain.

As for my fellow engineers- I don’t know anyone else who did this regularly so I’m not sure

link