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.

 

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.

 

Which part of AWS are you in?

 

Network core, I'm an NDEIII - so basically design and architecture.

 

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.

 

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.

 

Nice one. AWS is one of the few companies I would consider leaving VMware for if I had to.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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..."

 

That's not unusual in start ups. It's part of the risk you take.

 

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.

 

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.....