The question is why is AWS a shining star for you even if all of those issues are addressed? Having AWS on your resume as a developer doesn’t set you apart from hundreds of thousands of other developers who were able to grind enough leetcode to make it in BigTech.
True, it opened a lot of doors for me - some I chose not to go through. But I went into ProServe working in the consulting division, became a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche and made industry contacts by working with outside companies.
You don’t have to memorize LPs. You just have to know how to answer standard behavioral questions like I’ve done a million times before and since - 30 years across 10 jobs.
Every tech company that pays top of market requires coding screens and all of the BigTech companies are forcing RTO and they all have a toxic work culture.
It’s par for the course if you want to make the money they offer.
Google is no better if you look at the leveling guidelines. It’s still based on politics and working on the new and shiny - the reason they have so many products that go nowhere and at one point had 5 or 6 messaging apps simultaneously.
I think you are looking at BigTech - any of them - through rose colored glasses
You have good points. I wanted to highlight a couple bits:
> Google is no better if [...]
Google has significant differences from Amazon, from everything I've heard. And in some ways a better cultural fit for me.
Two Google problems are the forward-facing frat pledging and egos during hiring, and then misaligned careerism by many on the job, with both problems supported from the top. (Well, and the adtech ethics, with a veneer of "California nice" and rationalizing "we're the good guys, so it's OK to do this"; partly mitigated by the veneer being self-fulfilling to some degree.)
I know less about Amazon, but my impression is that the problems are more like (let's call it) "corporate roughness", and the gradual effects of who survives or thrives in that vs. who leaves. But complicated, because not all teams seem to feel that rough side of corporate culture as much as others. On the good side, the company often does great work, and they have some good earlier ideas about engineering and product culture (but maybe coasting or backsliding in parts).
I haven't seriously considered most of the other big tech companies, and I think many of them have much worse problems.
> Having AWS on your resume as a developer doesn’t set you apart from [...]
That's not much of a goal for me. Resume prestige (and also resume-driven-development keywords) are goals for most developers today, though. Too much so. Which I think is a sign of a serious culture problem across our field, and I think it shows in our field's output.
My opinion of Google is great technology, but no product focus with the attention span of a crack addled flea.
My personal “blind man feeling on the elephant” perspective in my corner of the world - cloud consulting - is that when I was an employee of the consulting division at AWS, was that we never saw GCP as a serious competitor. It wasn’t because of the technology. But they had no clue organizational how to talk to the “enterprise” and meet them where they are.
I had a more than even odds in 2023 to work for GCP doing the same thing I did at AWS - making more money - but I was kind of over the big company thing and from talking to people at Google, the same political pro mo culture was there too. Besides they had a return to office mandate for their former “field by design” roles before AWS and working in an office was a non starter for me.
But to your other point, at now 51 years old and on my 10th job, I always have my eye on my next job and keep my resume updated. I love my current job. But facts on the ground can always change.
True, it opened a lot of doors for me - some I chose not to go through. But I went into ProServe working in the consulting division, became a major contributor to a popular open source “AWS Solution” in its niche and made industry contacts by working with outside companies.
You don’t have to memorize LPs. You just have to know how to answer standard behavioral questions like I’ve done a million times before and since - 30 years across 10 jobs.
Every tech company that pays top of market requires coding screens and all of the BigTech companies are forcing RTO and they all have a toxic work culture.
It’s par for the course if you want to make the money they offer.
Google is no better if you look at the leveling guidelines. It’s still based on politics and working on the new and shiny - the reason they have so many products that go nowhere and at one point had 5 or 6 messaging apps simultaneously.
I think you are looking at BigTech - any of them - through rose colored glasses