Career Advice About Amazon

When working on a new task, I often find myself asked to estimate how long a task may take. Luckily, my team is pretty forgiving, but a critical step will be to start more accurately estimating tasks.

How do you get better at breaking down tasks to understand what needs to get done, and then giving proper estimations for how long those tasks will take?

Hi everyone,

I received an offer from AWS for a SDE 2 role. I was planning on asking for an additional 50k sign on bonus for year 1. I would justify this ask with evidence of past work (saving on infrastructure costs, mentoring multiple engineers) and being willing to cancel other interviews (mix of onsites and first rounds).

I'm a boomerang and the offer is the same as my TC before I got laid off. I also read some Taro Q&A and negotiation videos but couldn't find a situation similar to mine. The email states:

This will be the highest offer we are able to put forward at this time.

Is this a trick to try to get me not to negotiate?

I’ve been a senior FEE at Amazon for almost a year now, and I’m still figuring out time management.

Sometimes I get overly involved in others’ tasks, or have too many meetings, or get overwhelmed by all the new campaigns and estimation requests constantly coming through the door while we’re in the middle of meeting deadlines.

How do senior FAANG engineers balance their priorities without overworking or burning out?

P.S. it’d be amazing if Taro can get Steve Huynh (PE at Amazon) to talk about this topic in detail.

Here's the experience I have so far with leadership:

• I schedule meetings between teammates to clarify things for everyone when people seem to be lost or start asking a lot of questions in a trend. This usually helps unblock them.
• Most of my success comes from cross-team communications in terms of knowing and finding the right people for local tasks. I also jump on opportunities myself which usually end with good results. But I haven't yet been able to make a significant impact within my own team.

And here's more details about my current team:

• My team is myself, a PM, one full-time developer, and two other developers/Solution Architects that juggle other responsibilities part-time.
• I've had issues with a particular person who leans too aggressively sometimes questioning the impact of the work items I'm proposing. I'm able to work it out with them, but this relationship could probably be improved further.

I'm looking to leave my current team, as I don't find the work to be interesting: I spend ~50% of my time on ops work.

I want to choose the right team that’s interesting to me, but it's tricky as I don’t exactly know what I want to work on. I just know that I want to work on the back-end and on a team where learning opportunities are flexible. During team matching, what kind of things would you look for in a team?

My priorities are as follows:

1. Interesting work
2. Growth opportunities
3. Compensation
4. WLB

Hi all. I joined AWS after university and recently got laid off. I have 2YOE at AWS and a 1 year internship at NASA.

During undergrad the only thing I stood out for was having multiple publications. I suspect really talented undergrads in CS programs where targetting FAANG so there wasn't much competition. Maybe I was good at research though.

I am a US Citizen and I went to a medium tier university for undergrad. The name is recognizable but it's not impressive. What kinds of doors does attending a top university for MS CS open for me? I might be able to get into a top school like PHYMS.

Most people tell me that top schools are not useful after getting a couple YOE. I remember I was talking with someone that went to MIT for undergrad and they told me that there is a company that will basically give students $100,000 to do a startup and all they needed was an idea. They told me that it was pretty easy to get and many people got that at MIT. That's not something that would ever happen at my university.

I have some concerns:

1. I am not interested in doing research. I want to stay a backend SWE. MS CS is getting away from that.
2. I don't need a visa. Graduate programs in my experience are usually for international students that need a visa.
3. The opportunity cost and tuition cost of doing a masters is huge.

Hi all. Got laid off from Amazon in April and still looking for a job (I know :/). I don't get any interviews with lower tier companies but I get interviews at top companies. Do you think that lower tier companies avoid me because I worked at Amazon and they know that I would leave when I get an offer from a top company?

The leadership principle is as follows:

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

I have a hard time with this, e.g. my team is debating between two JavaScript frameworks. How do I stay firm in the decision while keeping others positive?

I am a software engineer with 3 years experience at a fintech company and I am on H1B visa with 33 months left. I recently got offers from Amazon L5 and Meta E4.

I am debating between two positions because I know Meta has an up or out policy. If I can’t get promoted after 33 months I will run out of my H1B time to switch job. With Amazon I can stay at L5 and potentially relocate to another company (supposed I dont get PIP). I see myself as a hard worker but I am not as fast at coding as others.

I like the work at Meta better but I am worried I can't survive there reading many comments that Meta moves much faster than Amazon.

I have the following questions and would greatly appreciate any guidance:

With Meta

1. How are the ratings Meet most, Meet all, Exceed Expectations decided at Meta ? Are they evaluated based on the 4 axes (Impact, Direction, Engineering Excellence and People)?

2. If I complete all projects within the timeframe I agree to , do I get MM, MA or EE ?

3. How does one get Meet Most ?

4. Does the obsession with “impact” and “metrics” at Meta lead to people competing for sexy projects only and avoid things that are harder to measure like Engineering Excellence (refactoring codebase) ?

5. For work that falls under the Engineering Excellence category, what are some tips to justify or measure their impact ?

6. Is it better to give conservative estimate for the projects I work on to meet the deadline so I can get Meet All ? Or doing this will put me at risk of not delivering enough work in each half ?

With Amazon,

1. How does one get PIPed ? Not completing as many tickets as others ? Not finishing the project they promise to deliver ?

My other concerns are

1. Green card: Meta labor market test failed 99%. Amazon paused PERM for the last 2 years so no data to compare but they said they will start PERM process (maybe batch PWD) for me 4/2025

I know it is not an offer evaluation platform but I would greatly appreciate any suggestions to guide my decision making process. Thank you

I recently interviewed with two 100-person startups and both of them have one round of "pair programming" interview. In that round, we do live coding with a very simple coding question. An example question is to design a Robot class that has integer 2D coordinates and listens to keyboard input to move up/left/right/down - Intro to Programming level questions. They emphasis on class methods design and how the solution code is structured.

During the interview, I feel like the interviewer has a clear answer in mind of how it should be structured, but I can't read their mind. I asked what's the use case of my class (how it's called, call patterns, future features, etc...) and the interviewers say something like use your best judgement or ask the question back. The interviewers don't seem to be interested in input parsing and edge cases (like how many edge cases could there be for such a simple question?). They also asked what would you do if you want to deploy it to prod, which feels more confusing (I answered a few metrics, logging, tracing and monitoring stuff but not sure if that's what the interviewer is asking for).

I failed both, but I want to get some learnings out of it. What are interviewers looking for in this round and how should people prepare for it?

In one of Rahul's videos [1], he mentions his interview journey when he had ~3 YOE and how he interviewed for a Meta E5 SWE position.

I interviewed for Meta this year w/ 3 YOE similarly and they would not consider me for E5. This is also similar to most other people I know with 3 YOE.

Was it because he had a previous internship at Meta as well as his many other internships? I know Alex also interviewed at Meta with 3 YOE and was down-leveled.

Rahul also mentioned he received an L3 offer at Google (which makes no sense btw!). I'm curious to know how there was such a large variability in the offer levels. Thanks!

[1]

I'm on a team with many new SDE 1s, and I'm trying to get them up to speed. However talking with all of them takes a lot of time, and it's affecting my velocity with project execution. My manager suggested that I set up office hours. Does that idea make sense and are there any other ways to make this all more efficient?

Asking because I have some experience with it, which you can find below:

• I wasn't truly enjoying the work I was doing in my role from the very beginning. I think the fact that it is customer facing drains me the most and I keep feeling bad that I wasn't doing deep technical work.
• I completely burned myself out last year after joining a high-stakes team with too much ambiguity to deal with being early in my career. Also, my senior colleague left the team so most of the work landed on my shoulders. It was also a lot of the non-technical work I disliked.
• That burnout was the breakpoint of my decision to switch careers to SWE where I can be more hands-on. LeetCode is a grind on its own so this non-stop chase somewhat makes me question the whole field in general, but I'm probably just spoiled with the current opportunities I have.

Hey everyone,

I've been abit lost in my job recently and feel disappointed by own performance. I'm part of an infrastructure team, and while the primary force pushing me forward is my personal engineering growth, I can't shake the feeling that the domain itself doesn't resonate with me. That said, being an average l4 I'm not in a position to switch teams.

What's keeping me going is the goal of self-improvement, which is helped from being surrounded by my incredibly talented colleagues, each bringing their unique strengths to the table. For instance, our senior engineer is an incredible communicator, teacher of concepts and general problem solver, another engineer is a coding machine and works extremely hard, and an L4 who joined at the same time as me is very customer-centric. In particular, it was through observing the L4 leveraging his strengths, while almost neglecting his weaknesses (he doesn't care as much about code quality and is quite argumentative) that I felt uncomfortable with my own trajectory. I've been so busy with trying to improve all my weaknesses that I'm now reflecting on whether I should focus on my strengths.

All of that said, I've been here for a year, and I'm struggling to pinpoint where my strengths lie. I'm willing to put more hours than others but for obvious reasons that should in no way be considered a strength (my manager described me as a hardworker, which i don't want to be known as haha). I'm also a very enthusiastic person and very open to feedback, but it leads me to being pulled in different directions. I don't think I can be an engineer that does it all and I think Amazon wants you to focus on your strengths through their conflicting leadership principles (e.g. bias for action versus insist on the highest standards, deep dive versus thinks big). I've been reading this book called Atomic Habits recently and it really focuses on the idea of identity and how that shapes your habits. It seems like everyone in my team has built an identity based on what they're good at, how can I find mine? And are there certain skills that provide higher ROI over others that I can perhaps focus on, given that I don't really have any strengths right now?

I'm currently working pretty long hours on the weekdays to boost my learning speed, but I know that this isn't sustainable. I feel like my micro-routines can be improved: How can I get the most out of each day? I'm also fairly new to the company, and I want to set myself up for a senior level promotion ASAP - These are 2 big reasons why this is very important to me right now.

I had an internship with Amazon last summer and was lucky enough to have the return internship offer for this summer. I am quite nervous because my tech stack skills are so weak. I am just good at technical interview because I do competitive programming and leetcode a lot, thats why I land my internship offer with Amz.

I forgot almost everything from my last internship. I have to admit that I was a very bad intern, not to say the worst intern. My mentor and the senior engineer of my team did the most of my last project so I got the return offer.

Please suggest me any sources to improve my tech stack skills, projects, open sources, ... so I can perform well at this summer. My team last year used Kotlin for backend codebase.