throwaway981211

Can’t see the article (paywall), but this isn’t a surprise. You have Democrat candidates open to or advocating for the notion of increasing taxes on the elite classes. For the rich, it’s a tiny investment to support the opposing candidate... not to mention the poor and uneducated classes who are convinced democrats only want to take their freedom and turn America into Venezuela.

On a personal note - with money supposedly being free speech, it’s absolutely critical we increase estate taxes, especially for billionaires. Personally I don’t want to live in a world where our opinions and politics are shaped by dynasties, whether that’s the Trumps, the Clintons, or anyone else.

I’m highly paid ($300K+), so before anyone says - I’m not trying to steal from anyone. But having a billionaire class that laws don’t apply to or that can essentially do whatever it wants makes no sense to me. It’s a bigger threat to democracy and freedom than any terrorist or religious extremists.

Is this the right way to hire? Not saying it’s wrong but I’ve taken a different approach which has generally worked out.

Even if I was hiring for a specific role (front end), I care less about familiarity with specific bundlers or frameworks and something more like - “Can this person problem solve and deal with varying levels of ambiguity? Do they seem capable of figuring something out without a ton of direction?”

I’m not sure what’s the point of your comment. As an American I’m also lucky that my country isn’t facing the issues innocent people in Syria, Iraq, etc face being caught in a civil war. I’m lucky we have vaccines, clean water, contracts, courts, cops, etc etc.

None of that excuses Boeing’s gross negligence and lack of accountability.

I’ve dumped them from my portfolio although I still - unfortunately - have exposure since they’re in the SP500.

At some point, I’m hoping heads roll at Boeing.

Using personal time to work for my employer instead of investing it in myself.

Recommendation systems.

At Google or FB you’d earn upwards of 300-400K in a senior role. I don’t think being on the shiny stuff t your previous company will help unless you’re known in the industry, as in you’re brought out as a Distinguished engineer or similar VP/ equivalent IC role - source: I interview at a FANG.

Somewhere between $150-160K.

My salary is $160K (that’s the max your salary can be at Amazon). The rest of my compensation (remaining ~$160k) is in restricted stock unit vests. I save 100% of that $160K after taxes. I max out my 401K from my salary. I also save 30-40% of each paycheck.

My husband and I don’t eat out 11 months of the year. The 12 month is a vacation where we travel within the US for a week vacation. Even then, we don’t go to expensive restaurants and will look for good deals... I mean my husband will open the McDonalds app on his phone to get a buy 1 get 1 Big Mac coupon. We don’t spend eating out... it is unhealthy and a bad habit.

We don’t have a car - so living in downtown Seattle, no expensive car tabs or parking. Also no fuel costs or car insurance payments. We paid off student loans and so there’s no debt. We pay for that with high rent ($2400/month excluding utilities).

Our only splurge is we have Netflix, Amazon Prime, Spotify, and we might get Disney’s new service. Our apartment is upscale (by our standard). Our furniture is nicer.

You called yourself a poor person - I’m sure you know this, but income is not a measure of wealth. We’ve built up some investments and liquid savings over the years, but I know coworkers from previous teams and other friends who earn just as much or more than us but also have $15K/month mortgages and are house broke or have expensive drinking or general spending habits where they end up saving practically nothing.

These numbers are self reported so I wouldn’t index on them that much - most numbers I see there for Amazon are on the higher end and give the appearance the higher end of the scale is the median... which is inaccurate given that some of the pay bands are pretty wide.

$320K at Amazon this year. I’m 32 and have been here 7 years.

You just wrote that I’m abusing customers and then say it’s not an attack.

S3 is blob storage. Dynamo is a key value store with support for additional indexes. Neither technologies are particularly novel today or provide specific features that would lock you in. You could use comparable technologies on Azure or Google Cloud. Like I said before, you can’t blame Amazon or any cloud provider for poor design/architecting on your end.

Your questions are written as sarcastic personal attacks, which you write instead of posting something of more substance. It seems like you’re just trying to incite a response from me aka trolling. I won’t engage with you anymore. Good luck.

Salaries are capped at $160 but salaries are a part of your total comp. Most of my compensation comes from stock not salary, and my salary is maxed.

You didn’t answer my question and deflected, only responding with personal attacks. Nice.

I still think that your notion of intentional vendor lock in is misinformed at best and poor design and architecting from your side (at worst). I do happen to work at Amazon but my post history will show you how critical I am of the company.

But nothing you’re saying is valid, and I don’t see any parallel here with the migration from Oracle. If you’ve used Oracle DB or have familiarity with its one off special “features”, there’s no parallel between that and using something like RDS or Dynamo. RDS is replaceable. Dynamo is a key value store first and foremost.

There are also enough third party abstractions that let provide you their own configuration and syntax for spinning up resources on AWS, Azure, GCP, etc or mix and match.

Amazons internal organizations all have slightly different culture, although there’s a core set of company values (Leadership Principles) that keep us bounded together.

Within Amazon, some places will absolutely grind engineers with nightmare on call rotations, untenable deadlines or deliverable dates, etc. but these things are part of any job depending on your company. What really sets Amazon apart is the brutal honesty - if you’re not performing or meeting someone’s expectation, regardless of how reasonable or unreasonable it is - you will get called out, sometimes in front of colleagues.

Over time, you learn there’s ways of influencing people or motivating them to be at their best. One such way is running a cut throat organization where people end up blaming others to save themselves - sometimes because it is the other person who dropped the ball - other times because that’s how you preserve yourself.

As a business model, this actually works. Running a cut throat organization where people are terrified to go out of line out of fear of losing their jobs - it has worked at Amazon at scale.

But to be clear - not all of Amazon is like this. I’ve been lucky to bounce between really great teams during my 7 years at this company. I’ve had one bad manager who didn’t know how to manage and honestly wasn’t qualified for his role. I’ve met people who legitimately helped me grow and become a better engineer and mentor to others. I’ve gone through two promotions. I’m paid really well.