This Business and Moment...

Soldato
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Excellent stuff. A mate works for Amazon in their marketing team based in London and loves it. The package seemed great and as you say i think once you're at the higher end of Amazon, you're treated and rewarded incredibly well.

Yeah I can't speak for any other part of Amazon, but AWS seems awesome so far..

They have to compete with the rest of the industry really, a lot of people I know work for Facebook and Google, who pay massive salaries and bonuses, Amazon do everything on RSUs. It's public knowledge that absolutely everybody is capped at $160k basic - but they make up the difference with 2 year sign on bonuses + RSUs which start to pay out on year 3, which make up the difference.
 
Associate
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So far, for me - it's been a very good move, my priority for now is to just focus on my first project (which is insane) get through the first year and get my L1 visa going, when Biden hopefully starts to open the US up. After that I'll reevaluate.

Quick tip open an Amex card now and build a credit history with them then transfer it to the US not having a credit history/score in the US is a pain.

Also try and get a written agreement to transfer you L1 to a green card after 2 or 3 years as it can take up to 2 years to get done. But not worth it if you only plan being in the US short term
 
Soldato
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Quick tip open an Amex card now and build a credit history with them then transfer it to the US not having a credit history/score in the US is a pain.

Also try and get a written agreement to transfer you L1 to a green card after 2 or 3 years as it can take up to 2 years to get done. But not worth it if you only plan being in the US short term

Not thought of the Amex thing, I'll look into that, thanks :)

Getting written agreements for stuff like the L1 > green card transfer right now, are almost impossible - as the situation with L1 visas is so up in the air with covid. I just have to bide my time for now. That said - I know at least 5 people who've L1'd over to the states with Amazon, and three of them already have their GC, so I'm not worried.
 
Soldato
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Yeah I can't speak for any other part of Amazon, but AWS seems awesome so far..

They have to compete with the rest of the industry really, a lot of people I know work for Facebook and Google, who pay massive salaries and bonuses, Amazon do everything on RSUs. It's public knowledge that absolutely everybody is capped at $160k basic - but they make up the difference with 2 year sign on bonuses + RSUs which start to pay out on year 3, which make up the difference.

Which part of AWS are you in?
 
Soldato
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Ah cool, was seeing if you had a role in S3, I've worked with a few guys from the S3 division recently.

Yeah our team basically designs and builds the connectivity for all of Amazon and AWS globally, so things like S3, EC2, etc, etc are downstream internal customers of ours. We connect all of that to the internet and/or global backbone, and all of our other DCs.
 
Soldato
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Quality news on the job man! Sounds like a really challenging place to be in a good way!



Not thought of the Amex thing, I'll look into that, thanks :)
Quick tip open an Amex card now and build a credit history with them then transfer it to the US not having a credit history/score in the US is a pain.
I'd agree with that. My mum lived in the US for a year setting up an office and she had a nightmare trying to sort things out without a credit history. Renting somewhere, mobile phone, home internet etc. was all a bind.
 
Soldato
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At least companies are sending rejection emails.

I think I need to undersell myself (basically worked as a PM and now career and industry changing) and yet at the same time re-write my CV from "i did X, Y and Z" to "i was in charge of corporate business fancy speak" which I have no idea how to do.
 
Soldato
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Just had a very suprising call from my Manager advising me that he believes I am hugely underpaid and will be requesting a substantial pay rise in the near future!

Completely out of the blue but extremelly welcome!
 

TS7

TS7

Soldato
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Just had a very suprising call from my Manager advising me that he believes I am hugely underpaid and will be requesting a substantial pay rise in the near future!

Completely out of the blue but extremelly welcome!

Congratulations - this is something that almost never happens!

I suspect, there is a competitor that is beginning to actively contact/poach your colleagues offering higher pay or they have intelligence that this is incoming and are being proactive. As it leaves them in a stronger position to do this first, than have to 'pander' and match competing offers to make you stay.
 
Soldato
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Congratulations - this is something that almost never happens!

I suspect, there is a competitor that is beginning to actively contact/poach your colleagues offering higher pay or they have intelligence that this is incoming and are being proactive. As it leaves them in a stronger position to do this first, than have to 'pander' and match competing offers to make you stay.

Indeed.

2 people have already left the team to join greener pastures so defintely a consequence of that. But I'm happy where I am for now so a nice pay bump is great.
 
Soldato
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Man work has been an interesting/ strange place at the moment. This whole re-org has been a joke to be honest, and me as the only person who is looking after product from an advisory point is madness. Everything I am spinning up is way bigger than just myself. I'm currently spending 50% of my time in meetings, 50% of my time doing proposals for things and then they also expect me to deliver on creating a shedload of product resources, a whole training for non product managers, the whole product playbook and a product operations function. I just don't have the resource under me, so need to work out how best to position that going forwards. It's rewarding stuff and has great impact and value, but so much falling on my shoulders just makes it hard to plan for achieving it all without it crashing down or missing things.
One team, which isn't under our team's space is demand management. The guy who is running this team at the moment is a pain in the arse. We're running a lean product org and he wants to spend months locked up on his own trying to come up with a really convoluted solution for simple processes. Completely against what we're looking to do. Anyway, just found out he's quit this week! This is good in one sense, he's a dinosaur and we can do better. A lot of the stuff he was "doing" were things that myself and a colleague actually did for them anyway, so not bothered he's gone. I'm more concerned now that my current boss (ad interim, covering my boss whos' off getting chemo!), who is a project manager and knows nothing about this space, is "working with the leadership team to come up with solutions" which I dread. She's nice enough but literally has no idea what she's doing in our space. I heard rumors that my sick boss is interested in the demand role, but she's not due back until May. That would be great as she is actually quality. Risk with that though is my ad interim boss will become my full time boss... ugh.
I am working to try and leap frog this though; I am certified in service management, agile project management and product management, which this space is responsible for. I would like to put myself into that position, or considered for it without ******** on people on the way. So I'm planning my moves at present... Just means a lot of work and I'm doing 12hr days at the moment, with not enough time in those days. Then getting out and hitting all my Cheezus work too. Only plus point is that now my day job reflects a lot of similar things I do in the evening too and I'm enjoying it. Just need to take out some more clueless people and take that Director role.
 
Soldato
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Bad news on the grapevine this week...

A company in LA that I knew of, setup shop around a year and a bit ago, they wanted to build a global low-latency network just for online/esports games studios to use, to reduce lag/etc, setup by some former employees and investors from other parts of the games industry. Fast forward 12 months, through the middle to the end of last year, they went on a hiring spree - hiring/poaching people from all manner of expensive, high-end tech positions. They poached 4x people directly from the team I used to work in, and around 20 people in total. Crazy amounts of money being offered. Some people who'd been hired had been in jobs for 10+ years with established tech companies. It never felt right though, it seemed "too good to be true" and I didn't really understand how they were going to make any money, as I know the networking/internet industry intimately.

I then heard that a whole bunch of people had been fired, however former colleague who works there there told me what happened; Earlier this week - the CEO announced an all-hands meeting with 5 minutes notice, zoom call - everybody logged on. They were told that the company hadn't made any money, they'd built all this stuff - but nobody was buying it and it was sat there derelict. Essentially - they hadn't got through the 'gate' in terms of generating enough revenue to secure the next phase of funding. Basically they were going to "do something else" and the current idea was finished, and it was all being torn down.

The whole company was told, within an hour - you may, or may not be called by HR if you are, you'll be leaving the company.. Within 2 hours around 90 people had been axed, basically 2/3rds of the company gone.

There were people who'd been fired, who'd been hired two days prior to this happening, only last week - my Linkedin feed had someone announcing their new job there, with a picture of their new laptop/goodies on their first day. The CEO/Management must have known things were going south, and they'd made no money.

So yeah... The old sayings really do ring true "if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is..."
 
Soldato
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.....The guy who is running this team at the moment is a pain in the arse. We're running a lean product org and he wants to spend months locked up on his own trying to come up with a really convoluted solution for simple processes. ....

Our place is full of people like that. They dig themselves a hole so deep that it overloads them then want to drag people into their disaster. I've spent the last two weeks trying not to get sucked into one of these nightmare projects. It's not the work itself, but working with these people is a nightmare.
 
Soldato
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Urgh... funny story;

Was talking to a friend who's a software engineer who works on a production line overseas. His firm recently bought some assembly robot machines from China (because they're cheaper...). Machines that are programmed to assemble things on a factory line. Anyways - they came with literally no support, when they got in contact with the company, they were told to get support - they'd have to download Wechat, then add a bunch of random chinese engineers, to get help.....

They finally got things working, but noticed that some of the control servers/systems had random people logging in and out all the time, and stuff still wasn't working properly. The whole thing was just a pile of crap, things were crashing and just generally not working well at all, so they hired a security consultant to come in and look at everything...

Turns out all the machines had bitcoin mining software running on them..... :D
 
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