Career Advice About Amazon

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?

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.

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.

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?

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

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)?

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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.

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.

English is not my first language. I don't know what to write or talk in all kinds of situations. I don't know if I lack critical thinking to think about points or is it because of lack of English proficiency. I have joined Toastmasters but its not helping that much. I am looking for 1-1 coaching in English speaking, writing, public speaking. Group discussions, driving meetings especially getting alignment, breaking down points, story telling are my biggest problems. Any recommendations to fix these issues?

Manager and I have a disagreement on creating a promo doc as per the approach suggested by Rahul and Alex .

So to avoid losing the time I went ahead with working on a XFN project, say Project XFNA , as it has high visibility and chance of impact. Due to the complexity I had to spend lot more time on it than I initially estimated.

It meant putting 1 week time learning/testing a frontend framework , Angular and I am a backend developer and never done Frontend coding earlier.

What happened was.. my main project's progress ( say Projects B , which doesn't have impact opportunities in the short term) got delayed by a week , due to my focused attention on Project XFNA. I am Mid-Level Software Engineer [SDE 2] at Amazon.

I will need to defend my time on this project XFNA as I focused on it purely for delivering quick impacts. So can I say to my Mgr that I "I took this initiative to work on Project XFNA for showing impact in the short term". If not, how should I rephrase it?

Context Of Company

This is a really well funded company (Bank) that underwent a large scale leadership change. The company's primary source of revenue was never it's tech capabilities, however with the new leadership change they're looking for a large scale revamp on how the existing systems work and are working on setting upto a FAANG equivalent engineering environment. This is vision is consistent across the leadership upto the CEO. This org currently consists of multiple Staff engineers from Twitter, Meta, Amzn and Google leading big initiatives.

Personal Context

I'll be soon taking up an offer in this company and will be joining this freshly created Org, where I've opportunity to be among the first 10-15 engineers to join with potential of the org to grow over 100+ engineers. There are lot of existing tech that have been already deemed unscalable due to previous decisions and have been a known business blockers, these tech require either re-write or a large refactor or a completely different viewpoint on tackling this problem. This will involve me working with Engineers who've built this system (Not part of this new Tech Org, rather the old existing infra), I've been already given a heads up from my potential manager that there can be potential hesitancy that the existing engineers may feel and wouldn't be too open to provide all information necessary as our systems will be replacing their soon (Have been reported that this has happened). There isn't a concept of internal wiki similar to Amazon or other Big Tech, hence lot of this is just domain knowledge etc. Fortunately the leadership is aware of this and is taking steps to answer this, and takes into consideration when scoping for projects and setting up right expectations.

The following are certain concerns that I've, and wanted to understand what is the best course of action I can take up to make my onboarding successful.

This is my Current plan, given i'll be among first engineers to join this team.

1. Understand domain, reach out to multiple PMs and document all pain points, problems we are solving in long term & Short term.

2. Go through code base of relevant packages and start adding their UMLs, HLD etc to best of my abilities to a document to move towards creating a Knowledge base.

3. Socialize with engineers from the related org and try to gain their confidence, and potentially get few KT sessions (Not sure how i'll go about this as the team is situated in different city).

4. Work with manager to setup boy-scout rule, such that everyone onboarding will incrementally add more to the existing knowledge base.

Follow Up Questions :

• I still haven't taken up the offer yet and still have a week before I can respond. The increase in pay and the growth opportunity in the new company is significantly big, I can see myself reaching Sr.SDE in < 2 years and Staff in < 4 years there due to the problem space being so fresh and getting a really early head start. However, I'm slightly concerned if the lack of co-operation from other org and lack of documentation, and the fact that the entire org is being setup fully freshly could be a concern. What's the best course of action i could take to minimize this risk?
• Second, one would view moving out from FAANG to a not well known company as a downgrade, would this still hold true if the problem space and opportunities in the new company is more complex?

As I'm starting to join a team soon(and knowing this answer varies by team, level, and company), I'm wondering how long does onboarding take and what does it mean to be fully onboarded within your team

I'm going to be joining Amazon soon and the team I'm on is going from 4/5 people a month ago to I believe 9/10 people (counting me). Our team is going to be comprised of SDE 2's and 1's (I'm an SDE 1).

I'm wondering what's the best way to have the best onboarding experience during this time.

While it will be nice that I will have a decent amount of people who will be in the same boat as me in terms of onboarding, I'm also worried that my manager and more senior teammates won't have as much time for things like 1 on 1s, answering questions, helping me onboard, etc. if they're also helping other people on our team in addition to their own work.

First of all, thank you guys for making these wonderful courses on Taro. The courses on Onboarding, Internships, Code Quality, and Promotions really helped me shine in my internship.

After my internship, my manager gave me "Strong Hire"; however, I was scared that headcount will be an issue so I applied to some other internships from different companies as "backup" (I planned to graduate an year later if I didn't get the return offer).

Luckily, I received a full-time return offer from Amazon. Now, I am in the interview loop for Google Internship. I am wondering what I should do:

1. Tell my Google Recruiter that I got an Amazon offer and don't waste their time.
2. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, go to Google for an internship before joining Amazon full time
3. Do the Google interview, and if I get the offer, reject the offer.

Additional context:

• My team at Amazon is amazing. I love working with software architecture, and the hours are really good. However, promotions are on the slower end. It seems like people from my team are getting promoted in 2.5-3 years.
• The location of Amazon will be in Vancouver (where I grew up - I don't need to pay rent), the location of Google is either Toronto or Montreal (where I will need to pay rent)

I am going to join as an SDE2 at amazon in couple of weeks. This is my first FAANG. I work on an oracle ECom platform.I don’t use design patterns often. Please recommend how important design patterns are in FAANG. What are the main ones ?

Not a manager here but I strongly feel like understanding my manager's perspective is essential for me to successfully navigate my tech career.

I understand that if a software engineer wants to become promoted, they need to complete projects with increasing scope involving increased technical depth, ambiguity, impact, etc in addition to many other things.

How is this scope defined for engineering managers? Does it work the same way where engineering managers are rewarded for leading a team that develops highly ambitious products in terms of users, features, etc? Does the number of engineers on the team matter? If so, how does an organization prevent empire building from happening?

During my first 1 on 1 with a manager, I asked him if he could help me find a mentor and he said he would find one within our overall organization. He also said he could find me a manager within overall Amazon if I want. This would for overall mentorship in Amazon vs being limited to the scope of just my organization.

What are some advantages/disadvantages of having 2+ mentors? Also are there any qualities I should be(or probably more likely asking him to be) on the lookout for those 2 mentors?

My starter project was to migrate a web service to a new API which offers similar functionality. This was intended to be a pretty straightforward migration, mostly renaming + replacing some strings. However, this project took much longer than my manager or I anticipated. How could I have predicted and prevented this?

These are Google levels for discussions/comparison sake and that I came in under-leveled.

I can do work in below capacities:

1. L3 - individual contributor and doing my tasks well.
2. L5 - Delegating work to others as well. means developing and maintaining relationships XFN teams which are costly in terms of time/meetings it requires in order to do that. Also doing system designs /architecture/ planning /preparing content for consumption.

If I work in the L5 scope ..will the calibration meetings/equivalent give me sufficient credit for that or will I still be viewed as a L3 ( my actual level. If so then my raw code output will be primary metric)? Code output is something I won't be able to do if I focus on delegating work ( scope of L5). So will my L5 work lead to penalties if I am viewed as L3?

Lines are bit blurred in terms of R&R as I have to do product management work as well in order to get the project to succeed. I have regular meetings with many L5/L6s in order to drive the ideas and occasional ones with Directors and Senior Directors to get their buy-ins.

Hi all, I need an advice on quite a random thing. I recently changed teams at Amazon. Since I shared a close bond with my previous team members, I continue to hang out with them sometimes and my ex-manager is quite aware of it. (He was new, and has worked with the team for less than an year)

Is it fine if I continue engaging with old friends, or does it make me look bad from professional aspect?

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.

Since Dec 2021 to Aug 2022, My managers changed 4 times after and I got promoted from sde1 to 2. Due to multiple projects and managers, I could not take ownership as I was still in ramp up phase but manager was expecting more at the SDE2 level, pointing issues, demotivating. So I took internal transfer to a different team. I am in this new team for 3 months. 1 month - I took to even understand the basics. Manager left and new manager joined. I had to go on vacation for 15 days. I don't have metrics to show that I am performing at the SDE2 level because

1. I didn't get design projects (design phase has already been completed by the time I joined this team).
2. No OPS, this is a new product. There are no operational tasks. Working on beta launch.
3. I am the last person who joined this team. I don't have anyone to become mentor since I have limited knowledge on this new team and work
4. Have not taken interviews due to hiring freeze

Worried about Q1 performance cycle in 2023. 2022 was difficult for me to show any impact. Is there anything I can do now to not get low rating in Q1?

At this point, I am no more interested in work and just want to leave due to lack of mentorship. I have a buddy who answers questions if I ask in this team but I don't have anyone to mentor me to guide me to see what kind of projects I can work, coming up with the initiatives. I feel stuck. There are no hirings happening outside and inside the company. What can I do to proceed further?

My team is quite small but we own a handful of critical services. Because of the small size, our on-call rotation is around 6 weeks or less but the actual load is somewhat manageable. We do not get an intolerable amount of high severity pages but get a lot of low severity tickets. We constantly work on projects that support goals for other teams that always seem to be higher priority while our tech debt grows. We have identified longer term fixes for some of recurring issues but never have the time to implement them. Most of our planned work for the upcoming year involve modernizing infrastructure or migrating existing services. I'm concerned about whether staying on this team would be conducive to my career growth.