Meet Michael, who worked at Netflix for $450k a year and decided to quit. In addition to his story, we zoom in on Amazon’s old/new recruiting strategy and recommend some great YouTube channels.
1. Amazon needs students
We start with some interesting news from the US. According to a recent leak of Amazon’s internal memos, the company is now expected to focus more strongly on hiring students or recent technical graduates. In this way, management wants to fill the lowest positions in software engineering teams. What’s more, “juniors” will not be allowed to become programmers who previously worked at higher levels, or people who finished their education more than 12 months earlier.
This decision has two facets. On the one hand, so-called Campus Hiring has always been a source of young, ambitious, and relatively accessible talent pool. It is hardly surprising that this is where Amazon is looking for people who will form the backbone of the company in the future. It’s also positive that Amazon is hiring anyone at all in the current, rather complicated economy situation.
On the other hand, some experienced Amazon developers claim that in this way management is “lowering the bar” for new hires. A spokesman has already commented on these revelations and assessed that they have nothing to do with reality… but before that, the big media managed to write about them.
Just wait for the well-known discussion to begin anew: is Amazon still a “Day 1” company as envisioned by Jeff Bezos? Or is the giant facing a slowdown in growth that will not be prevented by fresh blood? If you are curious about the answer to this question, I recommend a slightly more business-oriented text by John Rossman, a former director at Amazon, who does an excellent job of analyzing the last years of his former company’s growth, but also recent management decisions.
Source:
- https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-hiring-careers-recent-graduates-students-only-after-layoffs?IR=T
- https://aws.amazon.com/executive-insights/content/how-amazon-defines-and-operationalizes-a-day-1-culture/
- https://www.geekwire.com/2022/is-it-day-2-at-amazon-a-former-executives-turnaround-plan-for-the-tech-giant/
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2. He gave up $450k a year and… he’s happy
It would seem that working as an engineer at Netflix with an annual salary of up to $450,000 is the height of dreams. Not for everyone. Michael Lin published an excellent, provocative post a few days ago about a programmer’s priorities and the sense of security that can equal… a sense of addiction.
Why did Michael decide to leave? Several factors were decisive. First and foremost, a long, unsuccessful attempt at the role of Product Manager, increasingly repetitive and low-developmental tasks, a different direction for the entire team, as well as the consequences of COVID-19 – especially those that involve working alone, and make a person begin to reflect on the true meaning of life.
Towards the end of my failed PM job search, I felt the high salary was an increasingly bad deal. Before I was earning and learning. Now I was only earning – Michael explains. I also liked the part where he argues that time spent in the wrong company should be counted a little differently…
It started to feel like I was making a previous career mistake again — staying in a job that wasn’t a great fit longer than I should have. This mistake is more costly than people think. If you stay an extra two years at a job that you wanted to leave, and did that over 5 jobs in your lifetime, you just wasted 10 years of your life working jobs you didn’t want to do. I felt like I was wasting time.
At some point, Michael’s motivation and commitment levels were so low that he decided to leave – despite the skyrocketing salary and prestigious company. For now, he doesn’t have such a good source of income, but he is regaining his inner peace and looking for new opportunities for himself.
Michael’s story seems to confirm that money does not bring happiness. On the other hand, this is most often said by those who have quite a bit of money.
Source:
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3. And if you’d rather watch than read….
…then at the end of today’s edition of Career Weekly I have a real goldmine for you, namely a compilation of the 8 most interesting YouTube channels for developers according to Hackernoon. They cover both backend and frontend topics – not only for novice devs, but also for experienced sweeps.
The list included channels such as:
- Hussein Nasser
- Programming with Mosh
- Fireship
- Hitesh Choudhary
- freeCodeCamp.org
- The Coding Train
- DesignCourse
- The Net Ninja
I think you can subscribe to them blind, but if you need an additional reason, you can find a brief description of each channel in the original text. Highly recommended!
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