Why I Turned Down an AWS Job Offer

I interviewed with AWS for an analyst&#x2F;business intelligence engineer role.<p>When asked to write a query to get the total GDP by month per country, I wrote a query along the lines of:<p>select date_trunc(&#x27;month&#x27;,datecolumn) as month, country, sum(GDP) over (partition by date_trunc(&#x27;month&#x27;, datecolumn), country) FROM the_table order by 1<p>The interviewer asked me if I was missing something. I said no. &quot;Don&#x27;t you need an additional clause if you&#x27;re doing a sum?&quot;<p>&quot;No,&quot; I responded, &quot;in AWS Redshift (and postgres and mysql 8.0+ and...) if you do a Sum Window Function a group by is not necessary&quot;<p>The interviewer made a noise and demeanor changed as if I knew not what I was talking about. While I can&#x27;t be 100% sure, I&#x27;m almost positive I was failed for &quot;missing&quot; the group by.<p>I went home later that day and wrote exactly the same query, which ran successfully. The AWS BI Intelligence Engineering manager didn&#x27;t even know how to use a sum window function. I was a bit frustrated at being failed because the interviewer didn&#x27;t know of a (well-known, well-used) feature, but perhaps I dodged a bullet.

I was leaning strongly towards AWS, after talking with people. I find the business model very appealing, and it sounded like I&#x27;d probably be valued well there.<p>Then I did a little due-diligence searching of news articles and such that I vaguely recalled, about both the blue collar and white collar cultures, and was very disappointed.<p>The various stories about non-developer treatment seemed much closer to home and real, when I imagined working there, and feeling I probably wouldn&#x27;t be able to do anything to help them, and might be afraid to even try, unlike at some places.<p>I also didn&#x27;t like the idea of (reportedly) being stack-ranked, and having everyone&#x27;s metrics thrown up in a meeting, for a bunch of managers who excel in Amazon&#x27;s metrics-driven corporate culture to debate amongst themselves. It sounded rougher than many other places.<p>Also, the noncompete. It wasn&#x27;t in itself a showstopper for me, but it seemed to send a message of what the overall tone would be.<p>I&#x27;m not doing myself any favors by saying this, but I was actually disappointed, and maybe our industry will improve if we speak candidly about some corporate cultural things and values.

I once met a guy who was a programmer for a hedge fund. The strategies and knowledge he had would be very useful to competitors. They didn&#x27;t have a non-compete agreement in the contract, as this is almost never enforceable here, instead he agreed to a six month notice period - after working two months&#x27; notice they then paid four months&#x27; salary for him to take a holiday while his knowledge became less and less useful to a competitor. I guess the strategies these guys use only have a limited shelf life but I don&#x27;t really know much about this sort of work.<p>Perhaps that sounds like overkill but it feels a bit more reasonable and more fair to the employee - if you want someone to agree to a non-compete then you should agree to pay them for their time where they can&#x27;t work.

&gt; <i>Come on, AWS. Do better than this.</i><p>The advantages are too significant. If a company of sufficient size isn&#x27;t doing this, they&#x27;re doing something else. Statistically, employees cannot win; there may be outliers where an employee prevails, but in the aggregate, the company will win — and that makes these draconian policies worthwhile.<p>Companies enjoy economies of scale when it comes to negotiating employment, because they hire over and over and over again. Meanwhile, individual employee candidates must reinvent the wheel with each negotiation.<p>If you ever end up in court or arbitration, the unfathomable resources that the company can bring to bear means you&#x27;re not fighting a fair fight. Our court system is by and large for the purchase of victories by those who can afford enough lawyering to exploit every advantage.<p>The only way to fix this is through government statute to change the labor market. The way the market has been constructed, employees will forever be on the losing end.

I&#x27;ve also turned down countless Amazon interview offers. In fact, I don&#x27;t get how I&#x27;m still on their recruitment lists after asking several times to be removed.<p>Amazon has arguably the worst culture out of any large tech company, and generally treats its workers like dirt. Given all my friends that worked for them, almost all have quit within 5 years. Given their abysmal warehouse management, it&#x27;s no surprise they have the second highest employee turnover out of all Fortune 500 companies[1]. This scummy way of enforcing a &quot;never enforced&quot; NDA is just Amazon doing Amazon things. I mean, just think about the stress and money that must go into fighting a multi-billion dollar corporation in court. Keep away.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibtimes.com&#x2F;amazoncom-has-second-highest-employee-turnover-all-fortune-500-companies-1361257" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.ibtimes.com&#x2F;amazoncom-has-second-highest-employe...</a>

&gt; We need this to protect our business.<p>&gt; It’s never enforced.<p>If these are true, why would a company with 232.9 billion in revenue be afraid of paying an employee&#x27;s salary only when the non compete is enforced?<p>If the non compete is almost never enforced this agreement would cost the company under 0.01% of total company wide employee spend. Surely if the knowledge was that important to the business the company would easily make up the &quot;extra&quot; salary paid in revenue.<p>It&#x27;s strange that a company that large wouldn&#x27;t agree to pay salary if it&#x27;s chosing to enforce the non-compete. It seems like the choice is motivated by something else than reason. Tradition? Optimizing locally for cost reduction?

&gt; Non-Competition. During employment and for 18 months after the Separation Date, Employee will not, directly or indirectly, whether on Employee’s own behalf or on behalf of any other entity (for example, as an employee, agent, partner, or consultant), engage in or support the development, manufacture, marketing, or sale of any product or service that competes or is intended to compete with any product or service sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon (or intended to be sold, offered, or otherwise provided by Amazon in the future) that Employee worked on or supported, or about which Employee obtained or received Confidential Information.<p>Parse that clause: if a product is sold on Amazon.com and they&#x27;ve obtained Confidential Information (read: read a slide deck, attended a meeting, received emails with fine print at the bottom), they can&#x27;t work for the company that sells that product or its competitors. Which is, well, I struggle to imagine what that leaves out.<p>I couldn&#x27;t work for AWS, quit my career as a software engineer, and become a librarian without being hit by this clause.

Every time I&#x27;ve talked to AWS Recruiters they&#x27;ve belittled by past experience and just generally made me feel bad about my career. I will never ever work there, no matter how cool their tech stack must be.

Same happened to me. A few years back, I got an offer from Amazon after going through the interview pipeline and the non-compete and outside-of-work IP assignment were the only thing I asked to be changed since they were draconian given Amazon&#x27;s wide breadth of products. They declined to make the change so I declined to accept their offer.<p>In general, Amazon doesn&#x27;t make positive impressions on potential employees by saying &quot;work for us and we could easily prevent you from working anywhere else for a year and a half (and please trust us that we won&#x27;t)&quot;.

At what point does an organization get to be so large such that it is guaranteed to become a menace to society and individual human dignity?<p>I cannot come up with any publicly-held multi-billion dollar technology company today that isn&#x27;t seemingly run by psychopaths. Is there some new SEC regulation regarding corporate leadership I am unaware of? Is it an audit item that requires HR to fuck over all their employees with as much legal nonsense as possible? I seriously don&#x27;t understand why there can&#x27;t be at least one 100bn+ tech company that treats its employees like humans.<p>I will probably end up working in smaller shops and startups for the rest of my career judging by the way these megacorps have been conducting themselves. I used to dream of going to work on the bleeding edge with huge tech companies like Google and Amazon. Now, I treat their recruitment emails like any other spam items. I gladly accept my relatively paltry salary knowing that I can walk away and do whatever I want at any point in time without fear of legal or financial repercussions.

So this has mostly to do with a non-complete clause. The author is pretty explicit in their view:<p>&gt; This clause is, to be direct, abusive.<p>As far as I&#x27;m aware this is something that has been apparent for quite some time, and isn&#x27;t limited to just Amazon. I can&#x27;t personally conceive of why anyone subject to one of these would have any reason to believe that this isn&#x27;t just another tool that benefits the company alone, and could perhaps even be used against you.<p>A discussion about clauses such as this is well needed in general, not just the tech industry. Honestly, the real story that perhaps has more relevancy to tech is having (as the author correctly recognizes) the kind of privilege to turn down a job with Amazon. I&#x27;m no fan of Amazon but that would be something very difficult to turn down.

Amazon is not the only company to sue over this, Microsoft successfully sued as well[0].<p>In fact, several large companies have pushed to keep these non-competes in place in Washington State[1].<p>I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to focus only on Amazon. The reality is that in Washington State, this benefits many large corporations ( while being harmful to employees ) so it is the company&#x27;s incentive to try and keep the non-compete as broad and ambiguous as possible.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2671108&#x2F;microsoft-sues-google--former-employee-over-hiring.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.infoworld.com&#x2F;article&#x2F;2671108&#x2F;microsoft-sues-goo...</a><p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;tech-leaders-sound-off-washington-states-new-non-compete-restrictions&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.geekwire.com&#x2F;2019&#x2F;tech-leaders-sound-off-washing...</a>

IIRC salaried workers at Amazon get 10 PTO days. This stops me from even applying. I wouldn&#x27;t ever again consider less than 20, and really need a minumum of 25.

Even their warehouse workers sign abusive noncompetes. (Edit: they apparently stopped the practice for hourly workers once it hit the headlines <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;amazon-removes-non-compete-clause-for-hourly-workers-2015-3" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.businessinsider.com&#x2F;amazon-removes-non-compete-c...</a>)<p>Don&#x27;t work for Amazon. Don&#x27;t give them money if you can help it.

I&#x27;m wary of Amazon since they have a terrible reputation for tech work in addition to warehouse and delivery work. People who I&#x27;ve talked to who work there have not entirely refuted this for me.<p>Non-compete agreements are garbage and are unfortunately very common - I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised to find them at Google, Apple, etc.. Employment contracts are usually &quot;take it or leave it&quot; in that regard, though personally I try to cross out everything I disagree with before signing one.<p>I&#x27;m surprised it&#x27;s even legal to require employees to sign an agreement preventing them from quitting to work for a competitor. It seems like just the sort of violation of freedom to work, and a harmful restriction of the labor market, that should be illegal under labor law.<p>Like all employment agreements, it&#x27;s also absurdly asymmetrical. Imagine this &quot;if the company ends your employment for any reason, company agrees not to compete with you or your next employer in any way - including but not limited to products, services, and labor - for a period of 18 months subsequent to the end of your employment.&quot; No sane company would agree to this, since they would effectively have to shut down for 18 months (and lose 18 months of income.) But they are perfectly OK enforcing such an agreement on their employees.

This is worrying on so many levels. How is a person supposed to provide for their family if a non-compete clause prevens them from taking another job that can match the salary ?<p>Doesnt the employer enforcing non compete have to provide a portion of the salary if the former employee has to work for a reduced salary in different industry?<p>Also -- shouldn&#x27;t the suing company have to show what secret sauce the former employee could be taking with them ? And if that secret sauce is that valuable, shouldn&#x27;t the former employer get a patent on that sauce instead of suing employees.

Based on what I&#x27;m seeing in this comment section, I&#x27;ll be doing as much of my online shopping with Costco as possible. They have just as much, if not more of an emphasis on customer service, and they actually treat their employees very well.

I&#x27;ve turned down 2 different amazon offers, in both cases they lowballed and then dragged negotiations trying to get what they wanted. I thought they acted in bad faith and thought it wouldn&#x27;t be a good fit, later confirmed by many many friends who work there

I interviewed for a software role in Amazon Business, had spent several years with a quite high engineering rank in Apple, and was warned by the hiring manager that the roles to be filled considered the people as, and i quote, &quot;fungible&quot; assets.<p>Pretty much the most damning confession the hiring committee could have admitted to, and I imagined a good-hearted warning. I semi balked at that, and feedback from the recruiter was that I&#x27;d been brilliant, but might not like the culture. The recruiter sounded truly annoyed. I found that experience &quot;interesting&quot;.

I&#x27;ve been approached a few times by Amazon recruiters, I reply back with my salary and profit share demands and that usually shuts them up.<p>I guess that they must have some luck picking up junior developers from Europe, or maybe people who like the idea of living in the US or Canada for a few years so are willing to take the cut.

I would bet money that Amazon has an internal LLC&#x2F;P&amp;L for this type of non-competes and litigation.<p>I can see it now: _We implemented automatic non-compete lawsuits and income and increased 3x&#x2F;month-over-month._

Very eye opening, thank you. I had no idea Amazon treated their employees this way.<p>I turned down two amazon interviews because I asked them if they still did the whole whiteboard-leetcode-type interviews, and they did so I passed.

Working for amazon is like joining a fascist cult - you made the right decision.<p>Source - worked for a startup that was acquired by Amazon. My team was slowly managed out of the company and replaced by teams in Seattle. Most of my team was let go by PIP, essentially claiming we weren&#x27;t &quot;performing at a high enough standard&quot; since they weren&#x27;t willing to reprehend my boss for being incompetent.<p>However, I&#x27;m proud of the fact that in my exit interview my incompetent boss tried to have me give a &quot;reason for my willful exit&quot; to which I responded &quot;oranges&quot;. I mostly did this because there was an Amazon HR person on Chime (internal Amazon Skype) during the meeting recording a transcript of the meeting. So at some point, my boss had to explain to her boss why she fired someone and explain why my reason was &quot;oranges&quot;.<p>TLDR: Amazon is cheap, doesn&#x27;t care about workers and is kind of horrible.

This is a good post about something that doesn&#x27;t get talked about a lot. NDAs and confidentiality agreements should be able to cover the concerns of loss of intellectual property.

The only thing that scares me is the IP factor if I work on stuff after work.<p>From what I am hearing, if I am not in Cali, I am at risk even if I don&#x27;t use company time&#x2F;equipment?<p>Amazon pretty much doubles salaries in areas outside of California, so it&#x27;s extremely appealing money-wise if you stick around for the vest.

I know about 10 colleagues that are working at Amazon right now.<p>Yes nobody was excited about what they&#x27;re doing, but I rarely heard about others who are truly exciting on daily jobs, so nothing unusual.<p>They all seem a little more busy indeed, but their salary plus bonus is at least 2x comparing to previous job so I think they&#x27;re fine with a little added workload.<p>Money talks for many, it is just yet another high-tech big company, and it paid really well comparing to other mid-small-companies especially, that&#x27;s enough for most people, what else are you asking for then?<p>If I can get hired with double salary and a little more work, I will lower my sensitivity to the soft-skills and culture bullshit and just go to work and get paid, then I enjoy my life elsewhere.

They are going after an executive for non-compete. They&#x27;ll lose the case because they probably didn&#x27;t go after hundreds of other employees that went into competing roles. A selective lawsuit like that will definitely fail - it will look vindictive.

How does refusing to sign a non-compete clause typically play out? I imagine it goes back and forth, and I&#x27;m trying to imagine a tactful way to do it that doesn&#x27;t burn the relationship.

Last year I was contacted on Linkedin by a headhunter at AWS for an opportunity in Ireland as a senior lead dev. At this time I was working hard toward a different destination, so it didn&#x27;t exactly match my plans, but the &quot;wow&quot; effect of an opportunity in Amazon made me accept to &quot;have a chat&quot; with him, because I thought it was worth seeing if on the long term they could help me to reach my destination.<p>After I accepted, the recruiter asked me a CV. I gave it to him even thought my LinkedIn profile is far more detailed and qualitative than any CV. Then I received an email for a technical automated test, which was ridiculously easy. Two weeks later, when I received an automatic email saying that I reached the first &quot;candidate interview&quot; step, I politely declined and explained why.<p>Copy&#x2F;pasting my CV in a standard recruitment process and being handled like I had applied for the job by myself is not my definition of &quot;having a chat&quot; not of headhunting...<p>I already wasted the 4 first years of my career in a political and corporate &quot;big company&quot;, thank you very much. I thought the ones like AWS may be different, but in the end it is seems to be the same corporate bullshit than in any big-sized company. I feel better working in human and really innovative startups with real entrepreneurs.

There are many reasons to reject Amazon and other companies and prefer to use your labour towards more ethical efforts. The DSA tech action working group and the Tech Workers Coalition are compiling &quot;rejection letter&quot; templates for companies that have committed particularly egregious misdeeds here:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nycdsa&#x2F;tech-rejection-letters" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;nycdsa&#x2F;tech-rejection-letters</a>

<i>some random sales schmoo</i><p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shmoo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Shmoo</a>

This is one of the benefits of not having a linkedin profile. Recruiters&#x2F;former managers cannot see where you&#x27;re heading next. Obviously this is different for high profile execs but my gut feeling is that most individual recruiters could be shielded from non compete enforcement if they don&#x27;t publicize their employment on the internet.

I don’t see anything in this article about Amazon offering the author a job, so I’m a bit confused by the headline. Were they offered a position at Amazon the same week as this non-compete dispute became public and forgot to mention it?

Wait. Amazon&#x27;s anti-union rhetoric said they want rapid innovation and want to focus on customers!<p>Are you to tell me that Amazon &#x27;associates&#x27; might actually benefit from unionizing?

<p><pre><code> If someone signs an agreement to this effect, what possible job could they take after leaving Amazon that wouldn’t potentially run afoul of this clause? I’d have said “writing a newsletter making fun of AWS,” but—lo and behold—they’re already in the business of making fun of themselves by launching services with names like Systems Manager Session Manager. </code></pre> I wouldn&#x27;t be surprised if they&#x27;ve automated out an RNN system to generate names

I should like to turn down an offer from AWS but first they&#x27;ll need to extend one.<p>But I agree that Amazon&#x27;s recruiting is hot garbage, they even spam your inbox with surveys requesting feedback while they already ghosted you in the interview process because they have decided to not continue!

Blows my mind that non-compete clauses in these trivial instances are legal and actually enforced. Let&#x27;s not forget that humans created these laws, and humans can change them.

AWS is really not the same as Amazon Retail. The culture, leadership and practices are really really different!

AMZN even <i>recruits</i> evilly.<p>I once got an email from them that was an email blast to 100s of people.<p>&quot;Congratulations &lt;RECIPIENT&gt;! You have qualified to go to &lt;INSERT CITY FAR AWAR&gt; for a recruiting mixer where you may then apply for a chance to then be interviewed.&quot;<p>I want to work for a company where people care about me, at least enough to email me in person and treat me like a human being.<p>I think people think that working for a powerful evil company is fine because at least they are powerful. As if, if you go in with your eyes open and try and get as much money as fast as possible and get out you&#x27;ll manage to leave emotionally and spiritually unscathed.<p>Who wants to deal with that though? Life is too short to have to live in a kind of horror show.

Amazon pay is shit. I was laughed out of the room for asking for a salary that some analysts make in finance.<p>People get paid so much more in finance than any other industry that I wonder why tech people aren’t more interested in those jobs.<p>Also the work is more exciting and challenging. And it’s better for the world, though I suspect I’ll get a lot of downvotes for that one.

Could someone from AMZN confirm that 18 months is the common duration of their non-compete? This is upping the ante considerably even compared to the already abusive terms by Google&#x2F;FB&#x2F;MSFT in WA (1 year, never seen it enforced). Unless offered truly staggering compensation, I wouldn&#x27;t even consider a job which upon termination requires me to not work anywhere for a year and a half.

OP Seems to be confusing trade secrets and noncompete

&gt; Note that it’s scoped to Amazon—not just AWS.<p>Well, it’s also scoped to products that the employee worked on or received Confidential Information about. Not just all of Amazon, full stop. IMO, that’s far more reasonable.<p>Work only on AWS and get no Confidential Info about other aspects of Amazon and it’s scoped to just AWS for you.

This is the ultimate humble brag. To work at the leading cloud operation would be an honor.