[eru]

I did work at Google between 2014 to 2016. It was ok. I enjoyed my time there (about as much as I enjoyed other jobs I had).

> I have friends in all the big tech companies and I don't think any of them is fundamentally better.

Amazon had a reputation for working their software people pretty hard. Not sure if that's still the case.

[programmertote]

I know a little about that. Programmers in Amazon have to work harder mainly due to the poorly-designed/thought-out (despite sometimes unnecessary process like writing design docs and "discussing" over your solution with various 'stakeholders' until it gets approved) systems and tools supporting their internal development work. Pipelines is their CI/CD platform and boy, looking at the interface wants me to puke.

Every single step you need to implement requires you to look up several internal wiki pages, some of which are outdated and/or poorly written or linking out to another wiki page, and so on. My ex-manager always talk about 'scalability' (because they want to sell it to other teams for visibility) although that tool we are designing is going to be used by like 2-3 people and is processing at most like 500GB-1TB a day (which is not big data in my experience). In the name of scalability and rapid deployment, the manager wants us to use CDK, and we spend probably half of our team's effort maintaining/patching/upgrading that CDK dependencies (like Node.js and others). This is not to mention that when you want to tear down the resources created by CDK, it doesn't do things cleanly, so you are left with lots of CDK-created S3 buckets over time. Oh man, I can recount a few more problems surrounding the tools used within Amazon and how obtuse they are for usability and ease-of-development.

[yolovoe]

Depends on the team. I work in arguably one of the most core teams at AWS, and I’ll say that most oncalls, I am doing 60 hour weeks at least and getting woken up at night and/or paged in on weekends.

Outside of oncall, I’m constantly pushing back people who try to give me more work. Team is great, manager is great. We’re a team and I can definitely rely on them for support and my welfare. Work life balance can be really bad at times, but we get a good amount of PTO, promotions seem achievable, and my pay at least is really good cause of my manager and perf rating.