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?
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.