Are there any SWEs on this website? What kind of work are you doing, and how do you feel about it?
I am currently a SWE graduate at Amazon. I mostly accepted the position because I want to get a good start to my career and get a good resume, despite despising large tech corporations for obvious reasons.
There is a cult-like culture at Amazon. They treat Bezos like a God. On our first day, they showed us videos about him. These videos were exactly like what I expect they show you on your first day walking into the Scientology HQ. Very religious idol-worshiping.
Mostly, it’s a great place to work. Relatively relaxed (as long as you do a good amount of work), good kitchen, they let you have toilet breaks (unlike Amazon warehouses). It just sucks that I’m working for a company as unethical as Amazon, making a bunch of rich people even richer and not much else.
What about you guys?
Me and /u/fidel_castro are doing the coding for this site, and we’re both programmers. I worked for many years in lots of different industries, hated them all for different reasons, but white-collar office culture, and the insidious tactics the last company used to exploit free labor and get us to fight each other for “ownership” of different projects makes me have nightmares about going back to that world. I just do remote work from home for now.
I’ve never actually never really worked at an office, except for a part-time job when I was a student. Since then I always worked remote, and its much better, in fact i never met a single one of my bosses or coworkers since then. But i’m still not entirely happy with that, ecause I dont like to work 5 days a week at home working. So now I’m trying to find a part-time job in programming, but there arent many of them, and maybe i will do freelancing instead.
Yeah, I definitely want to transition, some day, into a non-full time situation. I’m incredibly lucky that I have that luxury.
Being able to live off part-time work is definitely a privilege. But I still think its good to do that, because it normalizes the idea that full-time work is not necessary. Also it allows more people to get into these kind of high-paying jobs.