This Business and Moment...

thewanted said:
Didn’t Amazon sponsor your US visa @Screeeech? Is it easy to move to another company or will you have to get sponsorship again?
Click to expand...

They did, then I basically changed my mind...

The main reason I wanted to go to the US was basically to get more money, but in the last 2 years I lived in isolation due to covid restrictions in Ireland and I lost my mind. I was earning more money than I ever thought I would, but I'd never felt as awful in my life, I got diagnosed with depression - it was miserable.

I also know a number of people who moved to the US and the visa / green card situation does put me off, I'm 40 - I'd need to be there for at least 3 years before I could get a green card, so that's 3 years of screwing around on visas. If the pandemic kicks off again, or there's another pandemic it complicates things further. I've spent the last few years screwing around renting/moving/messing about, and I just want to settle down and live my damn life, I don't want to spend a bunch of years being subservient to immigration laws, endless documentation and stress - I cba with it.

So right now I've decided to move back to the UK, Amazon are transferring me back (I'm already here). I like the UK more than the US (I've spent a lot of time in the US previously) and in reality - for me to be happy and life an enjoyable life, I don't need to be earning crazy money - I'd rather just get my dog, go fishing/hobbies, see friends and be happy, because I'd legit forgot what the feeling of happiness felt like.

As for Amazon, I'm not sure what to do - I'm in the middle of delivering part of a gigantic design and I kinda need to / want to finish it. At the same time - I can't see me staying if things continue like this, work life balance is a big thing these days, we're not a startup (although for some reason we like to say we are) we're not all walking out with a huge payout in 2 years or anything, it shouldn't need to be like this.
 
We have various software engineering / cloud engineering roles here in the UK now (MSFT) - feel free to give me a ping via trust if you want to have a chat... I think you'd find the culture a bit of a change.
 
Might be setting myself up to fail here, but last day at existing company and had the MD on begging me not to leave. I'm flavour of the month at the minute as I just found them 20m of additonal profit they didn't know they had because they don't understand reinsurance accounting.

Told them I'd stay and fix the reinsurance issue but it'd have to be at the weekends, no more than a month, outside IR35 and I threw out a massive day rate that nobody in their right mind would agree to. They agreed. Balls.

Didn't actually want to do it, but for the money it'll be worth giving up my weekends for a month and helps repair some of the bridges that were burned by me leaving after such a short time. Double checked with the new company and they're fine with it.

Looks like I need to go set up a Ltd pretty sharpish.
 
If it's outside IR35 just be wary of the "Friday-Monday" thing. I imagine it would be OK as you are just consulting at weekends, do it under a SOW with clear deliverables rather than a vague list of duties and day rate and it should be fine.
 
I'm so ******* close to handing my notice in right now, literally a hair's breadth away.

Been doing this absolute **** job all day, plagued to death by endless failures, program managers relentlessly pushing for **** that is never going to work properly, because it's all been rushed at 800mph and done back to front. And now they're giving me **** because I got dragged into what 2x people who'd been working on this for over a year were doing, when they both left - and I've had 3x weeks to get up to speed with the slow motion train wreck..

So ******* close.
 
Screeeech said:
I'm so ******* close to handing my notice in right now, literally a hair's breadth away.

Been doing this absolute **** job all day, plagued to death by endless failures, program managers relentlessly pushing for **** that is never going to work properly, because it's all been rushed at 800mph and done back to front. And now they're giving me **** because I got dragged into what 2x people who'd been working on this for over a year were doing, when they both left - and I've had 3x weeks to get up to speed with the slow motion train wreck..

So ******* close.
Click to expand...

I feel your pain. I’m applying for other jobs in a different field to take my mind off it. Anything relaxing you can do this weekend?
 
Stu999 said:
I feel your pain. I’m applying for other jobs in a different field to take my mind off it. Anything relaxing you can do this weekend?
Click to expand...

lol, well it's all a bit of a nightmare, I wanted to go fishing but because I was weekend oncall, I got dragged into an ongoing incident at 6am and it's still ongoing, just a call with a bunch of people in, all struggling with tooling and getting nothing done,

oncall finishes at 6pm, then starts again tomorrow at 6am :/

I just disconnected from the call, I don't give a **** anymore, if they want me again they can page me, already had 12 pages since 6am.

Zero ***** given,
 
So… thought I’d give an update after I’d applied for an external and internal role.

Got a really good interview externally… got on with the hiring manager really well and things just clicked. Or so I thought. The agency called and said that I’d been turned down because I “didn’t give enough detail”. What annoys me is that I answered his one and only question and he proceeded to talk AT me for 45 minutes :rolleyes:

Internally though… it turns out the manager that interviewed me is actually going to become the hiring manager after a restructure.

Also… from the team of 3… 1 left ages ago (the role I’m applying for) and 1 is working his notice.

I was told there were 3 candidates (one of them being me) which means there are actually two roles.

…but wait… there’s more! the 3rd chap has also handed in his notice. This leaves 3 roles and as many people.

I won’t count my chickens but it’s made me feel a bit better about my chances. Going to be a tense few weeks whilst they make a decision.
 
Stu999 said:
@EVH doesn’t it make you wonder why they’re all leaving?
Click to expand...
I knew someone would ask.

1 chap - left last year for internal promotion
2 chap - retiring
3 chap - has been on long term sick for a while

With the new director, I think they’re seeing this as a good way to restructure the team now that everyone is gone :)
 
Ev0 said:
@Screeeech sounds a horrible position to be in if thing have got that bad, would any of the other cloudy vendors (assuming it has to be one of those you’d move to) be a better balance?
Click to expand...

Not that simple unfortunately, when you sign up to work for AWS you get put under a very strict 2 year non-compete, which is kinda normal for this sort of stuff. I think you’d need to be a “special case” or pull some legal Kung fu, to get around it.

I have plenty of options right now, however I know that when I’m upset I can make poor, rash decisions. With that in mind I’m going to just weather the storm, whilst reaching out to contacts in the background, there are a lot of decent opportunities out there.

To cut a long story short, I’m in this brutal position because a; so many people have left, leaving major projects unresourced. B; nobody higher up the chain seems to realise that key people are walking away and so won’t readjust expectations and want everything doing at 100mph. And C; because of the above 2x factors, we’re creating a huge mess of tech debt, landlines and hell - which further bogs down anything you do.

Eg: We attempted to do task X, but we’re now on the tenth attempt, because other people from different teams are trying to get their **** done at any cost. The end result is that each time we try to complete project X, we run into another horrid piece of tech debt, that either causes an outage or blocks the project.
 
Sadly that sort of thing is quite common nowadays with a big mesh of interconnected systems and overlapping programmes, although I imagine it could be heightend/accelerated at AWS. Tech debt used to be [relatively] isolated insofar as with monolithic systems with little cross-integration you could have a mess left behind in system X, but at least the impact on system Y was minimal. Although it sounds like here it's also an issue relating to the fact different teams are picking up the same systems so have to inherit the tech debt created by others, which is different from the old model of having teams develop and then continue to maintain and support a platform (i.e. they made their bed and have to lie in it).
 
HangTime said:
I imagine it could be heightend/accelerated at AWS
Click to expand...

Amazon scale is just something else, I’ve worked on infrastructure of every size and scale since 2001, but Amazon - it’s literally by a sizeable margin the biggest piece of infrastructure there is now, it literally doubled in the last 2 years alone.

One thing which makes it worse is the startup mentality Amazon prides itself on. If we were a traditional ISP we’d spend ages testing everything we do, problem is that takes months / years and we’d never be able to expand fast enough if we did that.

The end result is that we test very little, when a program manager says “we need to get this additional 6Pbs to S3 by [date]” we just have to do it, and if the project trashed the network in the process of deploying it - so be it, we’ll pick up the pieces later. Problem is - those pieces are becoming 12 month projects to fix lol.

Essentially it mostly circles back to the same problem - we can’t hire/retain the staff. The learning curve to the stuff I’m working on (high performance IP fabrics) is vertical, each time we hire - it’s about 9 months before anyone can even do anything.

We also have a lot of very young very clever engineers, who quite frankly frighten me sometimes, they’re happy to work 20 hours a day, have no life and say yes to everything.

When I come along with my common sense and ability to say “no I can’t do that by tomorrow because I need more time” and the fact I might want to spend the weekend or evening doing hobbies, we end up with a bit of a clash..
 
Last edited:
EVH said:
I knew someone would ask.

1 chap - left last year for internal promotion
2 chap - retiring
3 chap - has been on long term sick for a while

With the new director, I think they’re seeing this as a good way to restructure the team now that everyone is gone :)
Click to expand...

That’s cool, as long as you know the reasons you can make the decision that’s right for you.
 
Screeeech said:
Amazon scale is just something else, I’ve worked on infrastructure of every size and scale since 2001, but Amazon - it’s literally by a sizeable margin the biggest piece of infrastructure there is now, it literally doubled in the last 2 years alone.

One thing which makes it worse is the startup mentality Amazon prides itself on. If we were a traditional ISP we’d spend ages testing everything we do, problem is that takes months / years and we’d never be able to expand fast enough if we did that.

The end result is that we test very little, when a program manager says “we need to get this additional 6Pbs to S3 by [date]” we just have to do it, and if the project trashed the network in the process of deploying it - so be it, we’ll pick up the pieces later. Problem is - those pieces are becoming 12 month projects to fix lol.

Essentially it mostly circles back to the same problem - we can’t hire/retain the staff. The learning curve to the stuff I’m working on (high performance IP fabrics) is vertical, each time we hire - it’s about 9 months before anyone can even do anything.

We also have a lot of very young very clever engineers, who quite frankly frighten me sometimes, they’re happy to work 20 hours a day, have no life and say yes to everything.

When I come along with my common sense and ability to say “no I can’t do that by tomorrow because I need more time” and the fact I might want to spend the weekend or evening doing hobbies, we end up with a bit of a clash..
Click to expand...

We call that "Live Testing"

I think most programmers like to see what they can do, without really thinking should they do it. probably more extreme where you are, but its common trait.
 
I love reading job adverts that say they are offering a “competitive” or “excellent” salary when they are offering minimum wage or £500 to £1,000 a year over minimum. Good times :D
 
Enough is enough.

Went on a call earlier, and just got nailed by my own manager and delivery manager, where they basically teamed up on me to try and get me to accept some alternate reality, where we can do 50x things a day, every day, have zero problems and hit some ludicrous end date, where some of the guys in Syd and Seattle are already up and sending slack messages at 3am their time and I have ******* bags under my eyes.

Thankfully, i'm experienced and wise enough to bite back which I did (professionally and politely).... But having spent the day reflecting on it and having a quick glance over my contract to check a few things - I just handed my notice in, don't want to do it any more.

Loads of decent opportunities out there too, and I have a 3 month notice so plenty of time to get something good on the go!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom