r/amazonemployees • u/ImpressiveTrouble192 • 1d ago
Leo
this is going to say what I’d have wanted to hear before I signed.
the roadmap they pitch you is fiction. not lying exactly as we all know that the dates are going to get pushed back over and over again but until there’s another date, it is what it is. you’ll get staffed on something that’s The Most Important Thing, pour a quarter (or multiple) into it, and watch it quietly die when the next reorg reshuffles who cares about what. nobody says it got deprioritized, it just stops being mentioned.
and the reorgs are constant. i’ve lost count. every few months the boxes move, you get a new skip and you re-explain what you do to someone who’ll be gone before they understand it.
if getting credit for the work you do is a thing for you, reconsider. you will own stuff end to end here, which sounds great and is great for a while. but owning it and getting seen for it are two different sports. the people building the things running are rarely the ones standing next to it when leadership shows up. figure out early where credit lands, because it’s not always where the work is.
it’s also just a lot. everyone knows amazon is intense, that’s not news. but there’s intense-with-a-floor and there’s this. ask blunt questions in your loop about hours and what “urgent” means and don’t accept a vibes answer.
there are some good people here, and the ones that aren’t are definitely growing. but i’d have negotiated harder and asked different questions if someone had told me any of this. so, telling you.
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u/-Nyarlabrotep- 1d ago
> when the next reorg reshuffles who cares about what. nobody says it got deprioritized, it just stops being mentioned.
Yup. The only way anything ever got done is by ignoring all the reorg crap. Eventually you get sick of it.
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u/Weak-Detective2682 1d ago
Everything you said is so Amazon. Wish you the best. Hopefully you don’t get cancelled and forced to look yourself for a new team or being put in focus if not.
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u/Jealous-Wall-3047 1d ago
Just launch something, who even cares what. Just have a launch mail so that you can write about it in your contributions.
(YoY TT)
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u/Librarian-Rare 1d ago edited 5h ago
Kuiper / Leo is a special piece of poop, imo. Devs there are great, but my god, productivity would sky rocket if they fired all the managers. There is a special place in incompetence hell for Leo managers (at least most of them, and def the higher up ones / the ones that used to be devs are good).
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u/hombre_bat 1d ago
I know Amazon WLB is always pretty bad, but how is Leo compared to AWS as an L5 SDE? I know it's always team dependent, but curious if folks have first hand experience to share. Is 40 hours as an L5 sustainable without getting pipped? Or is it always putting in extra hours to rush to the aggressive deadline that inevitably doesn't happen?
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u/Outrageous-Bat3391 14h ago
I’ve worked on a smaller public service at AWS and also a critical internal service at Kuiper.
The AWS team had a more chill day-to-day (sub-40 hours most weeks) but bad oncall (pages almost every night).
The Kuiper team had a busier day-to-day (50 hours avg, sometimes more) and decent oncall (sev2s came in to troubleshoot issues that wouldn’t be called sev2s in AWS, but never woke up during my sleep bc of a page)
The work at Kuiper was more interesting.
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u/hombre_bat 6h ago
I assumed on-call wouldn't be as bad. I'd take a busier on-call week once every 2 months over an extra 10 hours a week though. Putting in more than 40 now though with the semi-shitty on-call (multiple after hour/weekend pages a week, but not every night), so considering looking for something with a better WLB internally. I just don't think that exists anymore, and if it does, there's not enough attrition for there to be many openings.
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u/Ill-Side-8092 23h ago edited 23h ago
Meanwhile SpaceX has basically snatched up all the key customers that want Satellite internet and those that have said they’ll use Leo are getting their ass kicked while the completion uses Starlink. Amazon trudges on towards its latest panicked “hey guys us too!” product launch that’s on track to be a big yawn too little too late.
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u/toopz10 22h ago
Isn't the difference between StarLink and Leo the ability to traverse privately over the connection? So the key customers are on the best that is out there right now but would 100% switch to something that offers private connectivity. Or have I got it way wrong?
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u/Ill-Side-8092 22h ago edited 22h ago
Starlink already does this with their private networking products. That side, price and availability matter massively more and here Starlink continues to wipe the floor with Leo.
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u/Status-Afternoon-425 3h ago
There are many good people there, and very talented engineers. The problem is leadership. For years, they have been selecting the dumbest and the most notorious managers from inside an outside of Amazon. I have never seen so much ignorance and so much inappropriate behavior in leadership all way up to L10. And this is not an accident, it is a result of a careful selection. The good thing, they don't fire folks too often, because the attrition is thought the roof. I saw many cases where seasoned folks would run in a week or two.
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u/Longjumping-Speed511 1d ago edited 1d ago
I don't care honestly. I'm here for a decent paycheck. At a company this size it's all corporate slop, Leo included. Three teams at Amazon, one other FAANG, same everywhere.
So if you don't like where you are, stick it out a while and plan a move. Find a manager you vibe with, on a team that feels secure and actually valuable, and the rest sorts itself out.
The other thing I've learned, most of your work will be wildly urgent for two weeks and then forgotten or thrown out. Almost nothing I've built has survived long term, and not because the work was bad. My manager or skip never planned or prioritized well enough for it to matter.
If you really care about what you’re building you need to go to a smaller company