Career Advice About Amazon

I just joined a team in AWS and the team has approximately 8 L3s (SDE 1s) out of 12 people some of whom have been Amazon for approximately 3-4 years. I want to make sure I am set up for promotion and that this does not become an obstacle for me. How should I navigate this situation?

I have communication issues. Especially in a new team, it takes lot of time to grasp what others are saying. During design discussions and post scrums - When there are varying opinions and I still don't understand how to proceed next, what to say? When there is an alignment and I am not confident if I have understand correctly, what to say?

1. Received verbal offers from Snorkel AI (non-public startup) and Meta, but not sure how do I perform apple to apple comparison once I receive the offers.
2. Recruiter from Snorkel mentioned a per share preferred price of ($15) for offer evaluation. How do I identify if this number is inflated or not ?

I watched Alan Stein's and I wonder if my answer was too long or too short at 3 minutes. I also was given a system design question (all of this was upon phone screen with a in-house/internal recruiter from Meta who was pretty junior) and I was not given a whiteboard or ability to use Excalidraw. The interview lasted about 45 minutes and I had like 3 questions from the interview. Did I go too long winded in my interview? Also is it typical you get a random system design question (as the last one) upon a recruiter screen? This was last year and I wonder how standard it is and I am told it is not. There were other red flags in the interview, they also told me what total compensation and benefits would be in the beginning of the interview, which I also found confusing since I was always told you can negotiate upon offer, and that would be in the later stages of the interview process.

How can I enhance my soft skills, particularly in navigating leadership challenges? As someone from India for whom English is not the first language, I aim to transition into a senior or staff-level role. Building rapport with peers and juniors is essential for me, but I'm unsure how to foster personal relationships in the workplace. Are there any recommended books on this topic?

I'm currently working at Amazon as a contractor. There's 2 questions on my mind: I approached my manager for the possibility of converting to full-time and they said that headcount wasn't available. However, several full-time engineers joined the team recently in a similar role to mine. Should I approach my manager about this? If so, how do I frame the conversation? Is it a good time switching to full-time in general? What are the pros/cons of contract vs. FTE?

Inspired by this , Alex mentions that it's risky for the Meta calibration committee to keep someone under-leveled for too long, even if they want it. I am just curious why this is the case. It seems better for the employee to be under-leveled for the reduced expectations/stress and better for the company financially. Thanks!

For context, I joined last month and am an entry level software engineer. I was working on a feature for an entire continent and we realised during validation on the release call that there was a bug in my code which was not spotted earlier in the code review process. I feel really disappointed; even though my manager and teammates have assured me it’s not a big deal, I still think it paints a bad impression of me. How do I come back from this?

The last time I was interviewed was pre-covid and all interviews were in person. Companies these days (at least Amazon) seem to prefer virtual interviews these days and that makes it hard for both parties to do system designs. What are some of the tools others are using for system design? I personally use an iPad with Apple pencil so I could draw on it to show others. However I find it very one way, it helps to explain concepts to others but not so much of a collaborative tool.

After mandatory RTO I need to be in the office 5 days a week. In the past, I would go to the office for meetings, socialize with coworkers and come home to do development work in quiet where I could focus. It was great. Now with RTO, I am surrounded by talking coworkers, people taking calls, the business side / project managers (their job involves lots of calls and alignment so very noisey). And then I have constant context switches with in person meetings every few hours. Not to mention the bathroom being 30 yards away and having to travel to another floor for lunch. AND traveling 40 minutes - 1 hour for commute everyday! At home I have the bathroom 10 feet away, water dispenser 2 feet away, kitchen 5 feet away. And can easily get into the zone to code. I noticed stories that used to take 2 days are taking a week. To fix things I am trying to start to follow this schedule: 7 AM - 11 AM : Stay at home and do deep dev work 12 PM - 2 PM : go to office get little done (meetings, lunch, distractions) 2 PM - 4 PM : find a private office and do deep dev work 4 PM - 5 PM : return to desk get little done (talking to team members ) 5 PM - 7 PM : go home try and do deep dev work I have also bought noise cancelling headphones and noise cancelling earmuffs to use at work (but honestly I feel rude wearing them at my desk). Not sure how others are dealing with this or if I'm just super sensitive to noise. I don't think my plan is sunstainable because it requires me to be so isolated and so much of SWE is team work and learning from others. But it doesn't feel like I can focus at all in the office.

I recently got a full-time new grad SWE offer from Amazon. I'm obviously really happy about getting this offer because of the all the things that are going on with the tech job market. The only issue is that the range of start dates they gave me is April-June, and this conflicts with my schedule because I actually signed a offer to intern at another company this summer. I've reached out to Amazon and they've said that I would "need to select a start date in Quarter 2 if possible." Does anyone have any advice on how I can push my start date back?

This is actually a continuation of previous question. Time flies :) I was laid off from Amazon as an SDE 1 and it took me ~1 year to find my current role. I'm very grateful to have a stable job in this economy and learn an in demand tech stack (AWS), but truthfully I don't see this place as a long term fit because The Good Coworkers are all nice, WLB is pretty good, and company is somewhat stable (no layoffs at all in the past 4 years) I only need to come in 1 day a week (Many weeks they say not to come in so it feels like my position is semi remote) Mentorship is great and tooling is all AWS infra which is a pretty relevant stack. For example, I completed a networking project which I thoroughly enjoyed and felt was a really unique opportunity compared to traditional web dev work The Questionable There is no real career matrix or promotion system. There's a tech lead for the team but he/she is the lead most likely because they have been here the longest Infra and software teams here work in silos and sometimes I find 50% of my day is manual work such as the following

• Uploading files to S3
• Modifying DynamoDB entries
• Creating feature flags in Parameter Store
• Running ECS containers
• Logging into and running commands on EC2 instances
• Note: I actually tried seeing if we could automate this work but the thing is that we don't want to give the application team permission to do these things themselves (especially in PROD). We are essentially the gate keeper No code review culture here. Everyone pushes straight to master and for deploying to production, we need to raise a change and deploy on release day Company only hires experienced engineers so there's very little opportunity to mentor anyone new Manager doesn't have 1:1s with subordinates, not out of maliciosness but most likely because everyone is experienced and feel it's not necessary, especially with no leveling. Upon my request, feedback comes ad-hoc My question is Is it worth it to just to try and fight the slow culture here or just do what's necessary since I'm going to leave anyway

1. For example, work to implement code reviews here even though people feel it's not necessary, etc How long to stay before applying (for context it's already been ~1 year) Thank you!

I’ve seen this a lot with smaller companies like startups. It’s just not likely that I’ve worked with the particular tech stack of whatever the question is about, so I can’t really answer them a lot of the time. How can I respond gracefully to these types of questions?

With RTO and everything else that's going on, I've realized that Amazon is not a suitable place to stay. I've been applying and interviewing for new positions but truthfully, I'm a little bit burned out and want to take some time after I receive an offer before I start. If I have an offer in hand, how much time off can I reasonably delay the start date before it becomes too much? I know this sort of depends on if I'm signing with a startup or another big tech company, etc. Also wanted to ask if I should just use all my PTO days now. I'm currently using them if I have an interview but not sure if I should just use them all at once if I sign an offer or start to use them for days even when I don't have an interview. Thanks!

I am joining a team a backend team at Amazon that I have interned for twice before. Both times I delivered my project but did not deeply understand the codebase. I know Rahul and Alex have talked about not going deep into the code at a monolithic application like Facebook / Instagram but each of my team's services are less than 5 years old and are large but can definitely be understood indepth. And as the scope of my projects increases I feel like I need a deeper understanding. We are also having some initatives in the next year where large parts of the codebase will need to be redesigned / rewritten so having more context will be very useful soon.

The issue is that each service has: Language specifics (ex. Intermediate/Advanced Java)

• I know basics of language but not familar with the industry level code I see in codebase Language specific library / frameworks (ex. Lombok / Guice)
• not familar with at all Dependency Injection framework (ex. Dagger)
• not familar with (understand basics) Build tools (ex. Ant)
• not familar with at all Unit Testing / mocking frameworks (ex. Mockito / Junit)
• not familar with (understand basics) Cloud Technologies (ex. CDK / Terraform)
• not familar with (understand basics and can use console) Numerous internal specific tools with their own documentation
• not familar with at all I have made code changes in the past by referencing other code examples in the code and trying my best to understand them. But to be honest this has lead to very limited understanding myself: I'm just copy and pasting. Lately, I have been using AI to understand the code and concepts while working which is a lot better - but even AI chat will only give you answers to what you ask and will only provide limited depth.
  
  When I've ask team members, they tell me to keep completing tickets / finishing my stories and I will slowly gain an understanding of how everything works. But I feel like I can never go deep and I'm just rushing to finish stories. The best advice I've gotten so far is to finish your stories as fast as possible so you have the time and mental energy to go deep and learn. I have gained deep understanding from writing code from scratch after going through documentation or a course or a textbook. Not by copy pasting.
  
  Would love any feedback on how to tackle this!