myalphabet

>After 2 day delivery became 5 day delivery

Where do you live? I hear this repeated on HN a lot, but every person I know IRL doesn't have this problem (ie family spread across multiple states). Hell, in the last ~2 years, other than high-demand stuff in the pandemic like Clorox wipes, most of my orders have been _next_ day delivery, nevermind 5 days.

Amazon Basics are cheap and low quality, but they're at least curated. Amazon doesn't just slap their brand on any random shit, so you at least know that your phone charger will meet safety standards, for example.

I don't often intentionally look for cheap, low quality stuff to buy, but when I do, I'd buy an Amazon Basics item over a UEVYUF (or another <insert fake dropshipping brand here>) item every time.

>back-weighting the vesting schedule is perfectly constructed to make people endure abuse in the workplace.

Amazon's work culture is toxic in a lot of ways and this RTO is idiotic, but saying this about the vesting schedule just shows that you don't actually have any idea how the Amazon compensation structure actually works. There's a lot of reasons to not want to work at Amazon, but the vesting backweighting isn't one of them.

Despite the impression that Amazon is a hellplace, it remains one of the most desired places in the world for software engineers to work, so being "worse than Amazon" isn't saying much.

Walmart's tech side of things is very highly regarded both for the work, as well for the pay. They pay $200-300k for people from 5-10/yrs experience, which despite being below FAANG level, still puts it squarely among the top paying companies for software development.

>A good agile process will not have an ironclad upfront definition of what is to be delivered in a large project.

"what is to be delivered" does not have to be a rigid definition of "5,000 lines of code program with features 1, 2, and 3". A good agile contract will allow the possibility for changing project requirements but also still define how those changing requirements affect expectations and responsibilities of the consulting company.

The agile process itself can actually be a deliverable that you define in a contract, and it should spell out, for example, how new requirements are prioritized and the criteria you use for determining if it's something that the consulting company is responsible for. In my experience if you can't write out your agile requirements in a contract, then you don't have a good enough internal understanding of your own agile processes and should probably work on that, too.

Far too many people use "we're Agile" as an excuse for "we don't plan or document anything" and extend that to contracts, but that's absolutely not what good Agile actually is.

Nobody said anything about waterfall. A good agile process can and should have all of the things the parent commenter listed. If you eschew those things by using the "well we're agile, that means we don't plan ahead!" excuse, that's a sign of incompetence.

Some numbers to put this into perspective:

A $500 bonus for one month of full time 40/hr/week work comes out to ~$3.20/hr "raise" for the month of June. Amazon minimum pay is $15/hr, so this bonus is effectively a ~20% raise for one month.

Amazon Q1 profits were $2.5 billion, or ~$620 million averaged per month. Spending $500 million on this bonus is ~80% of "monthly" profits.

This is a situation where I suppose I do have to give props to Amazon for giving a bonus that's well above the status quo (a 20% raise and spending 80% of profits on pay raises is nothing to sneeze at), but at the same time, $500 still seems paltry.

An NDA is practically unenforceable in this situation, which is the entire point a noncompete is a thing. Who is going to snitch on them for revealing AWS secrets to Google and violating the NDA? Another Google exec?

Agreed. I'm generally uncomfortable with noncompetes and especially with Amazon's practice of making every employee sign one. Unless it's a really special case where a team is working on something truly groundbreaking and secret, I don't see what Amazon is really afraid of if some random developer leaves and goes to a competitor.

However, I do have to say that their argument as stated in this article does seem like a valid case for a noncompete. From the article:

>“Virtually every day, Hall worked with Amazon’s most senior cloud executives to create and execute those plans. As a result, he was entrusted with an unusually broad view into Amazon’s cloud product plans; its priorities; and its competitive strategy.”

Yea, that's something else I forgot to mention. I chalk it up to OP possibly being inexperienced/naive (I think this was his first job out of college), but I have worked with a lot of companies and all of them require you to pay back at least part of your signing bonus if you quit within a year.

When I graduated college, all of my friend group discussed it and we all took out a small chunk of the bonus to go on a small group vacation, but the rest of the bonus got put into an investment account and not touched for at least a year. That way if we did decide to leave, the money was easily accessible to be paid back. I know not everyone has that flexibility, but it's probably the best way to approach signing bonuses if you're not 100% sure you will be at the company long term.

I fear OP may have misunderstood how the signing bonus works and it seems to have caused him undue stress.

I've interviewed at Amazon and had a lot of conversations about compensation. I don't know about the terms of the relocation bonus, but for the signing bonus, you don't pay it back if you are fired and even if you leave voluntarily, you only pay back a pro-rated amount. For example if your signing bonus is $20k, and you leave at the 6 months mark, you owe $10k back but you get to keep the other $10k.

I can't really comment on your interview experiences except to say: that sucks. I know firsthand (unemployed for a long time and had a really long personal struggle similar to yours) how shitty it can be. The unfortunate reality is that, no matter how much these companies say otherwise, a huge part of hiring comes down to luck. Luck of who you interview with, luck of what mood they are in before beginning the interview, luck of having technical problems, luck of a lot of things. To a certain point, you are in control of how you respond to unlucky, non-ideal situations, but you may still not come out ahead versus someone who didn't get so unlucky. Luck sucks. But one day, you might get lucky too, so keep your head up.

The main thing I want to say to you as this: I work for a FAANG, I know many people that work for FAANGs, and I know many people that have left FAANGs. It is not all it is cracked up to be. I would even venture to say that, in most cases, it isn't worth the hassle. You should not in any way feel like you are setting your sights "lower" by targeting non-FAANG companies, because you absolutely are not.

The FAANG hiring process measures whether or not you pass the FAANG hiring process. That sounds tautological, I know, but it's a not-very-well-kept-secret within my FAANG that the hiring process does not at all measure proficiency for the job, but it's something we keep doing because at this point the process itself is ingrained in the culture. It is not a measurement of how smart you are, how good at programming you are, or even how likable you are. The "hiring bar" is entirely built around whether or not you will be a good worker for that specific team's needs, which are not necessarily the characteristics of "smart, good at programming, likable". Sometimes it could be a specific niche skillset, or how well you will adapt to a weird or chaotic internal culture, or how well you will kiss ass. Sometimes people dumber than you will be hired because it just so happens that they applied at the right time when the company was in dire need of bodies.

I too know how much it sucks when your personal confidence starts to take a hit. It makes it so hard to apply to jobs when you already feel like you will fail before you even hit submit on the applications. But keep in mind all of the things that make you smart and all of the things that got you those FAANG interviews in the first place. If you failed out of FAANG hiring, it just means you aren't good at FAANG hiring. That's it. Period. It does not mean you are not good at your job, or that you are not smart, or that you can't pass hiring at another company. It doesn't even mean that you wouldn't succeed working at FAANG! It only means you didn't succeed at FAANG hiring.

If you really want a FAANG job, then keep at it. You are smart enough to get it, you just have to use those smarts to mold yourself to the very specific way that the FAANG hiring process looks for. If molding yourself in that way isn't something you want to do, that isn't a bad thing, and there are definitely other, just-as-good-if-not-better, companies that will value you.

It isn't all grim! His granddaughter is successful porn star Brandi Love.

When did you join the Austin office? I'm guessing things changed over time. When I visited there definitely was not a security person (not for the building nor for the Cloudflare suite in the building) and there were no badges. I was able to walk into the Cloudflare office through the unlocked door and walk around inside the office for at least a couple minutes before anyone paid any attention to me (and even that was only because I was trying to get someone's attention to tell me where to go).

Regarding the reception desk, it shouldn't matter if it's a shared building. Unless it's a small company (CF is not), even in shared buildings it's common to have at least one person sitting at a desk in the office suite to act as a gatekeeper and assist visitors, etc.