<story><title>Amazon Pip Horror Story</title><url>https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hire-jiawei-wang_hi-linkedin-connections-i-am-ready-for-my-activity-6894943241523875840-tZ7C</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BossingAround</author><text>Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot?&lt;p&gt;In the past, I  thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that&amp;#x27;s just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven&amp;#x27;t really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it&amp;#x27;s off the table and all I can do is wonder :).</text></item><item><author>greatpostman</author><text>I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”.&lt;p&gt;I ended up switching teams and had a decent time at the company, but the nightmare situations are very real. You are replaceable and there’s no mercy</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>greatpostman</author><text>I’ll be honest, I learned an absurd amount. Like more in those six months than in four years if previous work. It was real software development, with actual distributed systems problems. But was also scarring, I have huge trust issues with management now</text></comment>
<story><title>Amazon Pip Horror Story</title><url>https://www.linkedin.com/posts/hire-jiawei-wang_hi-linkedin-connections-i-am-ready-for-my-activity-6894943241523875840-tZ7C</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>BossingAround</author><text>Maybe a silly question on my part; did you manage to learn a lot?&lt;p&gt;In the past, I  thought of putting myself in positions like these to increase my understanding in short time, at the short term expense of personal life. I wonder if that&amp;#x27;s just a stupid thought that leads to nothing but burnout, or actually a viable short-term strategy to get up to speed with some of the tech stack you know but haven&amp;#x27;t really used in prod at the scale of Amazon.&lt;p&gt;Nowadays, I have health issues (go figure) so it&amp;#x27;s off the table and all I can do is wonder :).</text></item><item><author>greatpostman</author><text>I’ve worked at Amazon. I made it a few years, but was almost pipped in the first few months. Management dropped a huge project on me, a brand new tier 1 service, with full dns resolution, api, database, distributed system, along with micro services. The deadline was three months. Brand new tech stack. When I was struggling to meet the deadline, we started having “performance conversations”.&lt;p&gt;I ended up switching teams and had a decent time at the company, but the nightmare situations are very real. You are replaceable and there’s no mercy</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>klodolph</author><text>My go-to aphorism in for questions like these is &amp;quot;you learn more from success than from failure&amp;quot;.&lt;p&gt;People like to talk about how great a teacher failure is, and how it teaches you valuable lessons... and it&amp;#x27;s true! Failure does teach you lots of valuable things, including things that you don&amp;#x27;t learn by succeeding. However, succeeding at something challenging generally teaches you more.&lt;p&gt;Or to cast it in ML terms... you need examples of both success and failure in your data set, but the &amp;quot;success&amp;quot; data points are more valuable.</text></comment>