Career Advice About Amazon

I joined Amazon for my first tech job as an SDE I and was able to promote to SDE II after 1 year. Fast forward to 9 months after promotion, My onboarding buddy who has been here ever since the team was founded is leaving. I ended up being the SME for one of the team's projects that makes a lot of $$$, which means a lot of eyes are on it. Although we do have a couple SDE IIIs on the team, they've been more focused on other equally important projects and don't have too much knowledge on this one. I'm starting to feel the weight of the extra responsibility as I often get pinged for escalations, have a lot more say in meetings, and invited to meetings for the roadmap of this project. There was also a recent reshuffle in the Product side and I've become their go-to guy for anything related to this project. Having joined the industry less than 2 years ago, I kind of feel like things are really moving fast and I'm a bit overwhelmed to be honest. I was still thinking on how to increase my technical depth after promotion, and I'm not even sure if this is a good situation to be in or not. But at the same time, I do want to overcome this and perhaps turn this situation into a growth opportunity. In my forte review, there were many comments on the expectation of me evolving into a mature leader for the team and this feels like an opportunity to work on that. I'm kind of confused on what direction to take at the moment. What would be some things I can do to make the most of this opportunity and grow my leadership skills? I feel like before all this happened, I was focusing on growing my technical skills and didn't really pay atttention much to the leadership side. This might be a vague question, so I just wanted to see if anyone has been in this situation and have any advice on how to best navigate this or share similar experiences

Hi, I recently joined Amazon as a boomerang after a few years here. I am on a newly-forming team that has a few SDEs without a SDM. I've been wanting to get into a SDM role and haven't seen a ton of opportunities internally for switching. I am aware of the differences between SDE and SDM since I've gone through the expectations for each role. Here are some things I've done on helping grow teams: I have experience mentoring 3 junior engineers and helping them grow by taking on more initiative and becoming technically stronger. I have experience helping out a junior-heavy software engineering team that was also at it's early stages (I was the most experienced team member) I have experience cutting through ambiguity, tracking down the right people, setting up meetings and getting consensus I just joined a few weeks ago, so I'm aware this is sudden. I'm not sure if an opportunity like this is going to happen anytime soon. I'd like to get others' perspectives if I brought this up to the interim Sr. SDM. Would it look bad if I asked to be my new team's SDM and what sort of consequences could result from this?

I recently joined a Big Tech company. My assigned mentor is helpful when I have questions, and is also friendly. However, apart from asking questions when I get stuck, I'm not sure how to best use their time so I can onboard and grow effectively. Does anyone have some suggestions and insight on this? I've considered asking them to explain how some parts of the codebase work when I have issues, but it feels like unless I work on those parts of the codebase, I will forget what I learn. The domain and codebase is large so this feels low-ROI, especially since I am not working on some of these pieces.

One common complaint I get from my friends to who I pitch Taro is why they should trust a company that is "Selling shovels during a gold rush". I personally believe there is a ton of value in joining Taro but I can see their perspective since not every coaching/mentorship service has their clients' best interests in mind. This question is more for Alex and Rahul but others are free to chime in. What is your response to this?

Hi Taro. I got laid off in April from AWS. I interned at NASA JPL and I am considering going back fulltime and continuing to apply to tech companies. I don't have an offer but I am hopeful I would be able to connect with a team since I interned there one year and have 1.5 YOE at AWS. I have some concerns about joining JPL, because they are prototype and research focused. They don't have many production systems or serve customer traffic. They also operate mostly in small and independent groups so the engineering standards can differ a lot. The research group I interned at had poor engineering and code quality compared to AWS. The engineering environment is different than corporate. Some technologies and experiences missing at JPL that are common in tech are pipelines (CI/CD), TPS, tickets, oncall, debugging large and distributed systems, customer traffic, metrics, operational reviews. JPL pays poorly and has slow growth. You can be there 10 years and make less than an SDE-1 in FAANG. I don't have any visa issues. Finances are not a problem. Currently I have very low expenses and good savings because I didn't RTO and I am living with my parents. I have 1.5 YOE at AWS and 3 years of internships before that. I see the market picking up so I am tempted to keep trying for a tech company. Another thing to consider is that there is a lot of inertia when you join a job. I will have little time to look for other jobs in the first few months because I will be busy onboarding. I will also have less time to look for jobs and study for interviews. Please give advice :)

What are common limiting beliefs that you all believe software engineers have that aren't true that typically cause them to hold themselves back or causes them to not progress as quickly as they'd like? I would assume that at each stage there are some beliefs that we have that cause us to not progress, I am currently most interested in SDE2->Senior, but would also be interested in hearing other common limiting beliefs to progress past senior as well!

I was recently laid off but finding getting interviews to be quite difficult. If I cannot get a position in the next 6 months but spend that time focusing on interview prep, will employers view the gap as a red flag?

Hi all,
I entered the company as an L4 Frontend Engineer and it is my first tech job, so I started with 0 experience. Our team has a lot of frontend tasks, but also has a lot of backend work as well. As a result, I have been doing a lot of backend work when it is necessary and there isn't much difference betwee an SDE and FEE in our team in terms of the work we do. My manager knows that I had 0 experience prior to coming here and recognizes that that I'm able to do both backend and frontend work. He mentions that I could always transition into the SDE role if I wanted to.

My question is, would there be any huge benefits of changing my role to be an SDE for my career? At this point, I wouldn't say that my skillset is more geared towards Frontend since I'm doing both and this is my first job. My original intention was to stay a Frontend Engineer as I find frontend work more fun and it was what I studied the most for when preparing for interviews. But my friends were telling me that SDE would probably give me more opportunities in the future, so I've been thinking about this lately.

My latest position was SDE II at Amazon, backend. I was laid off. I have not worked for 2 years. I find myself struggling with which project I should talk about in my interviews. Here are the projects I had worked on. A project where I investigated how to create and analyze the right data to optimize something. This was at a previous company where we shipped highly technical software, and the software had nothing to do with the web. The project wasn't one where I built much of anything; the result was just an independent Python script. The technicals were in the weeds though. But I would say I spent more time on the project than the work needed me to. A React Native side project. I did not launch the app, but the app worked on testing. My favorite project, as I learned a lot about planning, learning a new stack, and structuring my code. However, it's a side project and the stack is not related to what I mainly worked on at Amazon. My 1st project at Amazon. A high level design of the project was done for me. The project was very simple technically: move a module from one service to another to support the deprecation of the former service. There were some choices of wiring where data goes in the new setup, but that was about it for the complexity. I worked with another team to discuss the data flow. I also broke down the project into small parts for a new grad SDE to do. I personally saw through the project to its successful launch. My 2nd project at Amazon. I was working under another SDE II and he was the one who had done all the design, assigned me the parts to work on, and drove the successful launch. I remember the end business product well, but what I do not remember is the key high level code logic behind the scenes that make it work. As a consequence, even though I remember some parts of what I personally had worked on, I cannot drive a coherent narrative about them. My 3rd project at Amazon. It was the first project at work I designed from scratch. I communicated with the technical project manager to get clear the requirements and thought about all the cases to cover to make a working design. I do not remember all the details of the cases I needed to cover but I can talk about them at a high level. The biggest downside of this project is that it was cancelled mid-implementation since another project it depended on was cancelled for reasons outside of my control. So this project never launched.

Hey folks, I recently got promoted to L5 (Mid Level). Looking for any advice in general on how should I approach my work, what to look for etc. Any words of wisdom that people would like to share? TIA PS: Apologies if this sounds too generic. My intention is just to learn from other people's experiences. Any advice is welcomed.

I am a back end engineer that works with Java. What steps could I take to make a switch to a job that works with hardware and software? I have some small side projects to learn more firmware related skills but I'm not sure how I could make something that could help me switch career fields.

I have a SDE 3 mentor who is very nice and helpful. I started working with them a while ago because I am trying to get promoted to SDE 3 but I don't always have great questions to ask. I also want to be respectful of their time. What are some questions that will be most beneficial to ask? How can I make the most of this mentorship?

Hey everyone, I'm a senior ML engineer (~4.5 years exp) working at a medium-sized company. My educational background is a BSc and MSc in computer engineering from a not super fancy university in Europe. I wrote a few papers during my university years and as a result of hobby projects, but these were published in mediocre conferences (so not Neurips/ACL-level). I tried applying to a few ML engineering jobs in the past couple of months (Spotify, Apple and Amazon) but did not hear back. I searched through Linkedin to see the backgrounds of ML engineers working at these companies in my area just to get an idea of the situation. My impression was that a vast majority of these people went to top-tier universities (significant number of people have a Phd), interned at FAANG during their university years, wrote (or contributed to) papers in top ML conferences etc. I know that ML engineering positions are very competitive at these companies & also the market is very tough now in general, but it got me wondering: What should someone like me work on to increase my chances of joining one of these companies as a ML engineer? The patterns I see from people working there is hard to achieve at this stage in my life as: I already have a MSc degree and doing another one at a better university does not really make sense Since I'm working as a senior engineer, I don't know if applying for internships positions (even if it's FAANG) is a sensible choice Writing top-tier papers is incredibly time consuming and hardly possible with maintaining a full time job. To be honest, I tried to do this in the past (since I know publications at top-tier conferences matter a lot in these situations), but it really affected my personal life. This is almost like trying to do two full-time jobs, which messed up my WLB. Some things I was thinking about focusing on that could help me stand out: Writing technical blogposts to our company's engineering blog. Apply to meetups or conferences as a speaker. Certifications (I was thinking of something like or ) Focus on promotion to staff/principal MLE. It may be easier to step into a higher tier company by down-leveling. Keep trying to do research/writing papers as a side project, but need to figure out how to do this without burning out. I honestly don't know if the above sound sensible, so I'd love to hear your opinion on this or if you have any additional ideas.

I'm about to be officially promoted to Senior Engineer in a couple of days. At the same time, I've also been been presented with an opportunity to move to a different organization in Amazon that's doing some rather exciting work. This is an opportunity I'm likely to accept. I deeply value my current manager's support, because he was critical in helping me secure my promotion despite some very tricky circumstances. I'm aware that promotions are just meant to recognize past work, but leaving virtually immediately after a promotion still feels rather unpleasant. Leaving now will also have a bigger impact on my team since we've shrunk quite a bit recently. What are some tips for structuring and framing the inevitable conversations I will be having with my manager(s)?

I have a new grad offer from Amazon, which was forcefully deferred earlier this year. I currently work as an SRE (which I don't want long-term), and my offer is for an SDE role in the same team I interned at when I was there pre-layoffs. Plus despite me working for >6 months elsewhere, they're not increasing my comp in any way. I'm attracted to the Amazon job since it's a SWE role and that's something I want career-wise, but given that the company and current economic situation have been kind of unstable, I'm hesitant to join. Does anyone have any advice for me on how to navigate this? I'm on a student Visa so I guess that's why the threat of layoffs is a bit higher in my eyes.

Background: Being pressured to deliver at high speed all the time, my team doesn't seem to value wiki type documentation a lot. When starting a project/feature, we often have a high level design doc & design meeting to talk about high level infrastructure, and we make key trade-off decisions together as a team. If we are lucky, we get another low level design doc & meeting focused on sequencing of actions & interaction between class level objects. We rarely seem to go back to our initial design doc after initial design phase of a project to update them and explain the actual final product we built and maybe some additional design decisions we made during implementation. As a result, documentations are kind of dead after facilitating the initial design review. For legacy projects, high quality docs are extremely hard to come by and most just rely on reading large amount of code to understand how things work (nothing wrong with this but I think high quality documentation can save lots of time here). I understand we don't want to boil the ocean and write everything in painstaking details, but we should at least have enough to help people understand responsibility of services and contract between them. Questions: Could you share your view on this topic and how you find your balance? Do you believe it's always worth it to go back to documenting after finishing a project/feature and update it as if you are explaining it to someone new to the team/project? Could you share any resources we might already have on this topic as well?

My manager made it clear that my org is not offering return FT offers, but that he would put "incline return" for an internship position if I stayed another year in school (or somehow delayed graduation until 2025). I could just take random classes or another major to extend my time in school. I also could do a 1-year Masters program which I have already been admitted into. But I am an older student and would rather not stay another year in school. I also feel like I am learning very little in school (I go to a small state school). Compared to the ridiculous amount I learned this summer in the industry, I feel like staying in school for another year would be a huge waste of money and time. I could potentially work Fall/Spring internships for the next year (so basically a gap year) to artifically delay graduation by a year as well. Becuase I go to a small state school, getting interviews from Big Tech is extremely hard. We send about 1-3 kids to each FAANG+ company each year and I was only able to get 2 FAANG+ interviews even with refferals to every top company, a 4.0 GPA and relevent experience. Even getting actual SWE engineering jobs is really hard with most CS grads getting jobs labeled "SWE" but that involve very little coding. Because of that, my worry is this might be my only chance to break into Big Tech for a long time (if ever).

So is it worth delaying my graduation for a shot at big tech? Or should I just graduate and start my career, even if its at a non-tech company (with potentially very little actual engineering work)?

I have worked as a software consultant for 4 years at companies like Amazon, Hitachi, etc.

I've looked at the leadership principles. But it's a bit overwhelming the number of questions that can be asked. I dont want to be caught like a deer in headlights when I'm asked a question. But it also doesnt seem practical to prepare every question. I'd love to know people's preparation strategy. Are you preparing 5-10 stories and then tagging them to different principles? if so what kinds of stories should I be preparing? i.e. what are the broad topics of each story? Or Maybe are you preparing 1 different story for each leadership value? Also If I'm asked "Who was your most difficult customer?" how would I answer this if I'm just a junior and have never dealt with customers first hand? or similar where I'm just like i've never been in this situation