I have an opportunity to interview with Amazon for a position as a contractor.
I've heard these type of tech companies can have NDA and brutal interviews. What should I expect? Do they do the same level of interviews for contractors as employees?
The position is a higher level position and the proposed rate is above market price by quite a bit.
I work with someone that is extremely good at figuring anything out. He has an extremely vast knowledge. He was involved in startup of a major tech company. (one of the top 5 for awhile)
However he is difficult and extremely particular about how he does stuff. Nobody can quite tell him exactly how to how to do something. He will fight based on ideal situations ( kind of similar to SAM) and resists heavily doing things he doesnt like even if it's something benign or neutral. Such as making a minor change that has no effect whatsoever, but follows standards like ISO 2700.
He's valuable to a a point that he gets to do things his way sometimes even if it's against manager.
Any advice for how to better work with him? He is cooperative most of the time, but sometimes it's hard to get a single point across.
Leaving work for the day and not looking back!
I am preparing for an out of state interview, and I'm wondering what are some things that I should bring with me?
The potential employer and have a relatively small descrepency on salary. The descrepency is small enough where we both decided we want to do the interview. I want make sure I can show that I am worth the extra money.
I never understood the whole asking salary is taboo thing. It's no secret that people consider that as a major factor when job searching.
I also never call people who sell cars or boats without a price. It generally ends up being a waste of time for both parties. I generally ask salary right up front even before the interview for the same reason.
If dealing with a recruiter, whether internal or external they always try to find your previous/current salary before revealing their range.
It's just really annoying.
Do you guys even apply for jobs without knowing the salary?
@scottalanmiller said in How should you handle a potential promotion?:
@Obsolesce said in How should you handle a potential promotion?:
Is the new role something you would enjoy more irrespective of a pay bump?
Or will you do it with the PLAN to move on once you are comfortable and mature in it? That's okay, too.
That's always a consideration especially if my pay is better than others are offering currently anyway.
@Obsolesce said in How should you handle a potential promotion?:
@RandyBlevins said in How should you handle a potential promotion?:
Should I consider taking the new position of my pay grade stays the same?
I think this is one of the big questions.
Is the new role something you would enjoy more irrespective of a pay bump?
I'm not sure. It will be no more writing code and doing troubleshooting like I'm used to doing now. I will miss getting to do the technical work, but at the same time I won't miss working through the corporate labyrinth for millions of different things. Every time I need a firewall rule opened, kms key created, dns entry, ssl cert created , etc I have to open a ticket to another team. Every team is different and it's an annoying process. Much more annoying than doing those things myself, because if I don't give exact details on how to create what I need it isn't done right.
Oh and Monday access to manage compute instances dissappeared as our IAM team is constantly stripping permissions in search for true zero trust. It's great to try to achieve it, but man stuff breaks randomly and then I have to open a ticket, they close it a day later because it wasnt the right type of ticket, then I reopen again and they fix the issue finally after 3 days.
Or would the only enjoyment or benefit of the new role come from the pay bump and not the role?
Would the new role be worth more should you take the role for a year or two with no pay bump, but result in like a 20% base pay increase at a new company later? Maybe that would be worth it. Maybe the new role would give a slight pay bump at your current company, and lead to more bonus/equity/etc, and/or more pay raises there too.
Maybe. I'm paid very well for my current position. I spent alot of time targeting a specific salary that is higher than most for my role. It's very hard for me to leave and match just my pay let alone all the other factors that are nice to have in a recession like FTE, yearly bonus, paid training, conferences up to $10k a year, etc. Also, some very intelligent people at my company so I feel I can still learn.
What do other companies pay for that new role now? What might they pay in two years? Maybe in 2 years of having this new role, you could at a different company get hired at a higher level like Principal or similar, resulting in a few hundred $K more total comp per year.
I do job searches sometimes, and get alot of messages daily about jobs (many of them revealing salary). I've got to be on top 5% for pay I think for my role. FAANG and maybe some big time banks could do a little better, but overall I'm very happy compared to what I've seen being offered
You could answer these best, but may help to point them out.
During a meeting with a manager, I mentioned that I would like to work towards a slightly different role, and take that role for our team. He has told me that a position has opened up and I can move towards that role and it would likely lead to a bump in pay level.
The role I wanted to work towards was cloud architecture design. I'm currently doing cloud engineering and building solutions. After the solutions are built I train an operations team on how to use them and provide documentation. Then move on to design the next build and implementation. The type of things I design are IaC to deploy immutable resources, scripts, service accounts, Docker repository management, helm charts, etc. Basically every single component of an application all designed with zero trust in mind.
Currently I'm able to make some nice changes within a handful of applications and continue to improve these applications without doing any of the day to day maintenance...
Sorry for long back story, but I wanted to understand my current role so you can understand the new architecture role.
My manager has said that this will likely lead to a promotion, but what I'm finding at job postings show this role at my current pay grade
Should I consider taking the new position of my pay grade stays the same?
If I do not increase my pay grade now, how difficult will it be later? I'm guessing very difficult
What are gotchas to consider when moving into a new team or new role?
COVID-19 has push large tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and Amazon to be WFH (at least at the moment). These companies decided against it, even though they deliver technologies that make it possible.
Microsoft has really been push Teams though all this and pushed companies in every industry to use at as remote collaboration solution. Amazon just made a deal with slack and will be delivering slack video calls through Chime. Amazon will also license slack for every employee in their company. Not to mention the advantages that AWS and Azure already provide to 100% remote workforce.
In addition to these companies pushing their customers to adopt WFH, they have hired tens of thousands of IT employees during the pandemic. These companies will have to provide relocation services for these employees. Sure they have the money to provide relocation, but the challenge of providing the service means they have to provide housing which may be very difficult to do in headquarter areas in a short period of time. 10k people looking for a house in Redmond, WA would be challenging to say the least.
With a rapid hire rate, push for customers to adapt WFH, and challenges related to relocation; will these companies go remote?
@black3dynamite said in Job postings with no salary listed:
@RandyBlevins said in Job postings with no salary listed:
I never understood the whole asking salary is taboo thing. It's no secret that people consider that as a major factor when job searching.
I also never call people who sell cars or boats without a price. It generally ends up being a waste of time for both parties. I generally ask salary right up front even before the interview for the same reason.
If dealing with a recruiter, whether internal or external they always try to find your previous/current salary before revealing their range.
It's just really annoying.
Do you guys even apply for jobs without knowing the salary?
When recruiters contact me via LinkedIn my first response is to asked about compensation.
I still end up applying for certain jobs without knowing the salary.
Yeah. I have done the same thing. I actually prefer to deal with recruiters for that reason.
The majority of positions do not openly list salary. You can sometimes find information on Glassdoor, but who knows how accurate it is.
I never understood the whole asking salary is taboo thing. It's no secret that people consider that as a major factor when job searching.
I also never call people who sell cars or boats without a price. It generally ends up being a waste of time for both parties. I generally ask salary right up front even before the interview for the same reason.
If dealing with a recruiter, whether internal or external they always try to find your previous/current salary before revealing their range.
It's just really annoying.
Do you guys even apply for jobs without knowing the salary?
Leaving work for the day and not looking back!
@flaxking said in Difficult co-worker:
@Kelly said in Difficult co-worker:
Without more experience or information it is difficult to draw an exact conclusion, but have you considered that he is on the autism spectrum? Some of the things that you're listing could be indicators of that. There are significant differences to how you will work with someone on the spectrum vs someone who just has control issues.
This sounds a lot like my co-worker, who I am pretty sure is on the spectrum. He is amazing technically, reading comprehension of technical documentation that is out of this world. But he can't think in terms of business needs and what is practical. He will also assume he knows what you're saying without listen so you really have to watch for cues that the didn't actually understand what you said. Also can be a lot of work to convince him he is wrong, you need to have definitive proof ready.
Yes this sounds quite similar to what I have seen. Although, I will add that he always 100% believes he is doing the right thing. Its not because he wants to cut corners or anything. Sometimes we cannot get him to cut corners where they need to be cut.
@DustinB3403 said in Difficult co-worker:
@RandyBlevins said in Difficult co-worker:
I am not asking about going to management. I'm asking about how I can personally deal in a more constructive way
If anyone has any experience in dealing with this.Alot of times they reaction is dependent on the delivery more than content. Everyone is careful how they say things and try to give real specific instructions
I have a coworker like this myself now, and to tell you the truth the only way to get the issue resolved was to have my boss step in and force a reset. My coworker thought I was here to back stab them, make them look bad etc. They were and or are disgruntled with things in their work life and I have no control to fix it.
So literally anything I was asked to do that they weren't informed of would cause friction - it's not my place to inform a coworker if a manager exists (and they do). Just do your job, if things get really bad, take it up with your manager (again).
Some times you just need to consider that maybe your coworker is just pissed off in general about where they are in their life/career and have someone else force a cease fire as it were.
I don't necessarily share your opinion. As I mentioned that alot of it is how it's done on delivery. I want to better understand how I can do a proper delivery.
In my experience, you deal with certain types of people differently. I don't believe in running to manager or HR when I can solve issue by better understanding a personally. I don't take anything personal because it's not just an issue I have.
@Kelly said in Difficult co-worker:
Without more experience or information it is difficult to draw an exact conclusion, but have you considered that he is on the autism spectrum? Some of the things that you're listing could be indicators of that. There are significant differences to how you will work with someone on the spectrum vs someone who just has control issues.
Thats possible. It doesn't seem like a control issue to me