I worked at Amazon Robotics low level software team, as a contractor, for a few months. This article sounds about right. Crazy pace of work with no room for reflection or — especially — groundbreaking invention, is given. And that was a year ago, when AI was totally optional.
The engineers are smart and fast folks, which helps a great deal. But don’t seek true creativity and deep expertise at Amazon, unless we’re talking about legacy L6+ (or likely even L7+) level engineers who get to have the leeway needed. The picker robots I had been working with were created, originally, by a Netherlands company, not Amazon. Amazon’s job was scaling it all up for their massive warehouse operation. It was a bunch of hacks on top of hacks. Heck, not even Harel state machines (which is kind of what one would expect to have on a properly designed event-driven robot that’s not overly tied to its PLC implementation, where things can be modularized, in and out, as needed). Just a bunch of switch statements and a menagerie of globals, with only two key people intimately familiar with most of its key code structure, one of whom decided to leave the group in frustration.
In fairness, the mess didn’t originate just at Amazon, but there never was a technical push at Amazon to have the initial work done in the right way. Not the software part anyway.
I can see that the craziness not only didn’t abate but has gotten worse. The money was good but it’s not worth the stress and other frustrations IMO, unless you’re a noncontractor and at least a technical program manager or above, where you won’t be coding as much as reviewing others’ code anyway.
Otherwise, I can totally understand why people just work there for a couple years, to get their resume looking good and then leave
The engineers are smart and fast folks, which helps a great deal. But don’t seek true creativity and deep expertise at Amazon, unless we’re talking about legacy L6+ (or likely even L7+) level engineers who get to have the leeway needed. The picker robots I had been working with were created, originally, by a Netherlands company, not Amazon. Amazon’s job was scaling it all up for their massive warehouse operation. It was a bunch of hacks on top of hacks. Heck, not even Harel state machines (which is kind of what one would expect to have on a properly designed event-driven robot that’s not overly tied to its PLC implementation, where things can be modularized, in and out, as needed). Just a bunch of switch statements and a menagerie of globals, with only two key people intimately familiar with most of its key code structure, one of whom decided to leave the group in frustration.
In fairness, the mess didn’t originate just at Amazon, but there never was a technical push at Amazon to have the initial work done in the right way. Not the software part anyway.
I can see that the craziness not only didn’t abate but has gotten worse. The money was good but it’s not worth the stress and other frustrations IMO, unless you’re a noncontractor and at least a technical program manager or above, where you won’t be coding as much as reviewing others’ code anyway.
Otherwise, I can totally understand why people just work there for a couple years, to get their resume looking good and then leave