Career Advice About Amazon

Heard a lot about Bar Raiser round during Amazon interviews but I also see some people posting it as an award. Would like to know more about this and the kind of mindset needed for it.

My team is responsible for an ambitious product that we're looking to have a multi-year time horizon for. I know that it's important for senior engineers and especially staff engineers to be able to think proactively, so I was wondering what can concretely be done to get better at creating that long-term vision spanning across many years?

I recently received an offer to join an Ads team at Meta at E4 level. The comp was pretty much equal. Here are some pros of my current team: Work life balance is great I've learned a lot and am still learning a decent amount Manager is nice Here are the two big problems I have with my team: I see no path to L6. My org is very L6 heavy, and even more L5 heavy (i.e. no L4's to mentor). There are strong L5 engineers that should have been promoted long ago but are still here. They are always given the promotion level projects (despite still never being promoted). The projects I'm working on feel extremely useless, and there is minimal real impact that product or engineers have on the business. (Few massive enterprise customers with deal terms driving business growth over product)

• A lot of features we build are used by tens (yes tens) of users.
• Some of our systems are interesting and high scale (we serve content), but are heavily guarded by a group of OG engineers that don't like to involve others. The Ads team at Meta seems bland but impactful, they have concrete incremental revenue goals and are serving a large amount of ads customers. Don't know much else. The manager seems nice and mentioned that "oncall wasn't bad". Here's a few additional twists to my situation: I actually declined the Meta offer already in fear of losing my WLB, but every time I push a commit for a feature I know that at most 10-20 people will care about, I start to wonder if I should try to claw my way back towards another offer (I declined a few days ago) I'm possibly going to need to leave the Bay Area in August 2025 (so my tenure if I switch may be ~1.5 years, probably not long enough for promotion) I'm trying to think of what would put me in the best situation in 1.5 years when I move and begin another job search. Hopefully I'll land in a more senior role by then.

I was inspired by the gamification on Duolingo, which is a language learning app with a "daily streak" mechanic. The incentive to do something in the app every day has been very powerful for me - I have a streak of 200+ days! I want to bring this idea over to an engineering context, creating an app called "Leetfriends". The purpose of the app is to have friends share with one another their Leetcode streaks, using social pressure to encourage consistency for everyone. I’m hoping that the app does well, so I could include it in my portfolio and boost my job prospects. How do I best go about this app?

Background: I interned on my current team last summer and returned full-time at the beginning of this year. I've been performing well and have a great relationship with my co-workers, manager, and skip manager. However, I'm not satisfied with the level of engineering in the org as a whole. Specifically, our service does not operate at a high scale and thus the engineering constraints are very relaxed. It feels like we can get away with making poor decisions and I often think that I am not learning good engineering principles by being here. It also feels like my peers are not that ambitious or passionate about engineering which makes me feel like I don't fit in at times. As a result, I'm looking to change teams even though I am only ~6.5 months into my career. I recently did an internal loop with another team that does very interesting work with high-scale and low-latency services. The interviews went well and I was given the transfer offer. I think my mind is mostly made up on joining the new team, but just wanted to ping-pong my situation with the Taro community as a sanity check on whether I am making the right choice. I'm aware that switching teams is essentially a "soft reset" on my promo timeline. I have a lot of substantial work artifacts from my current team such as: code reviews for important feature work and docs that contributed heavily to the service we just launched. I'm okay with taking a hit to my promo timeline because in my mind, if I zoom out and view my career as a 30-40 year span, it won't really matter whether I got promoted from new grad engineer in 1.5 years or 2.5 years. What does the Taro community think of my situation? Am I thinking about this in the right way? I tried to keep some details vague as to not speak too negatively on my current team in a public forum. But I'm happy to provide more details to the best of my ability!

I'm a pretty new SDE 2, and I know that the SDE 2 -> SDE 3 promotion is really difficult at Amazon. Given that, I would like to start working on this promotion as soon as possible. However, I'm new, so I don't want to make things weird for my manager and I. When does it make sense for me to bring up this topic of promotion and start working on a growth plan with my manager?

I'm an sde 1 at Amazon and been working there for 2 years. I have changed multiple teams during that time unfortunately. In every team, I have struggled with getting noticed by the team. I have observed that the best performers talk about active tickets even when they are not on call. How do I balance between my task and working on extra tickets to get noticed? What else can I do to get noticed apart from my own task and high sev tickets?

Through a series of unpredictable events, my team has boiled down to just my manager, myself, and many entry-level engineers (SDE 1s). Some of the SDE 1s have some experience (e.g. a somewhat tenured internal transfer) but many are new grads. My manager is being more hands-on with this gap (and I like my manager overall), working through technical reviews and whatnot, and has other plans to shore up the seniority of the team. However, it looks like a lot of responsibility will fall on me to upscale this team and help deliver. This is nice as there's a pretty clear path to SDE 3 for me, but I'm also a relatively new SDE 2, so I'm unsure if I have what it takes. All that being said, is this overall situation good or bad? The growth potential is there, but I'm also afraid of being overwhelmed.

I’m choosing between three different options for organizations to join as an undergrad in CS. I’m an incoming Amazon SDE Intern and looking to focus on maximizing prepping for the internship and future opportunities. First, a group working (paid part time, associated officially with college) on a student facing grading tool used actively by 8000+ students. Java/Spring Boot tech stack. Large code base with full-on github style pull and merge contribution style. Ex TikTok SWE told me it’s the closest they’ve experienced to industry style SWE at my college. Second, various student-led groups with focuses in quant finance, data science, etc. Some doing projects with companies like quant companies like Millennium, Sig, etc. Some doing app projects used by thousands of students on campus (dining hall, game tracking, etc) Third, focusing on my own growth and development. Setting more time aside for interview prep/side projects. I believe this discussion would be very valuable to any undergrads because this dichotomy of choice is common. Personally, since Alex emphasizes the importance of contributing to large codebases like in open source then I see the first option as the leading candidate. But I’ve been running with the third option of solely focusing on my interview prep and it seems to have yielded well.

I'm trying to understand how the math works. Amazon offers a 5/15/40/40 split So im confused when I see on theres 30k stock options at amazon where is that coming from? does that mean year 2 theres 90k? and 250k years 3/4?

One thing I have noticed about competent engineers is that they have a very strong understanding of upstream and downstream dependencies in terms of what are the typical parameters being passed into our API's and what we return and what are the things we pass into our dependencies API's and what they return,

How can I learn the context behind what data is typically being passed quickly? I understand that one of the best ways to learn is to start tinkering, and call the API's myself and see what they return. I was wondering if there is any faster way because surely a staff/principal/TL doesn't have the time to tinker with all of the different dependency services and understand what they take in and return. Is it just a matter of reading documentation and asking around?

Hi Taro. When choosing a team, we also have to choose their specialization and tools. If the specialization is niche and the team uses exclusively internal tools I won't gain any transferable skills. I got laid off from AWS and I am realizing that I have little transferable skills. I used mostly internal tools. Believe it or not, many AWS teams do not use AWS extensively. How can I choose a team or focus area for transferable skills? I was considering pivoting into Android and IOS development because I see many job openings for these.

As a team switcher, I'm worried that I could join a team that is rapidly expanding in headcount but isn’t having a clear business impact so the execs don’t care: As an engineer, would you get punished for this with worse performance reviews and slower career growth? How can you evaluate the business impact of a team? Is it just an educated guess or are there concrete things I can look at to judge this?

Hi everyone, I am a software engineer since 5 years now. Over time, I have realized that I am ambitious but not competitive. I do my work as I enjoy doing the same and when my heart is in it. This has two facets: I am not bothered when someone is doing better than me. I am loved by all. Nobody sees me as a threat. I love helping everyone. Without feeling competitive, there are times when I lack the motivation at work. This also means I don't have the heart to snatch or ask for the better projects of my colleagues when I know they really want to do it. I am fairly excluded from the power hunger games. I want to seek advise on what are the ways you have sustained your motivation at work and your ambition to climb the career ladder if not for competition? How much has a competitive spirit fuelled your career growth?

With a recent, completely unexpected reorg, the product my team owns has effectively been cancelled and will be sunsetted. The company is trying to figure out new scope for my team, but in the meantime, I don't really have stuff to work on. Here are my questions: Is having 1-2 months of downtime like this okay for my job and career? What can I do in the meantime to be productive? I've mainly just been doing auxiliary things like reading documentation.

Joining a FAANG (Amazon) as a senior eng after being mid level at another FAANG. The team uses Go programming language which I've never used before. Should I work hard on learning this language (in the week I have before starting) or just relax and wait till I actually start?

I know about the Pomodoro Technique but I feel that 25 minutes is too short of a time block to get and stay in the zone. How would you organize your day into time blocks for deep work while maintaining focus and not burning out? Four-hour blocks with a break in between? One eight-hour block (if there are no meetings)? One six-hour block?

How do you respond to an email or over a phone conversation from recruiter asking: Recruiter: What leveling would you prefer? L5, L6, etc (This is for Amazon)
My thoughts: I personally think I'm somewhere in between L5 and L6 (much closer to L6). But I'm not sure what the right response should be. Recruiter: What are your compensation expectations? We have a limited amount of positions open at the moment (but more coming soon.) And we like to know a little more about this from each candidate so we don't waste anyone's time involved, specifically yours :)
My thoughts: I don't want to give insanely high number to Tier 2/3 since I want to increase my chances of getting interviews. But for FAANG I don't want to give a smaller number either. Could you please tell how to handle such questions?

I like my team and management. I would like to stay here and yet address the comp concerns. Promos are too difficult. So I would like to learn from Alex, Rahul and community members here on how I should go about the retention offer. What are the things I should do in order to increase my chances. I want to plan it thoroughly and execute it without getting burnt out.