u/golemwhoa wrote (the comment Michael replied to):
I plan on staying until I \*potentially refuse to move and fail to comply to RTO 5 policy. But I'm new to Software engineering, with 3 years of experience now, with the last 2.5 at AWS. I also have a CS degree from a big state school. I really enjoy my job generally, but it can f
u/michaelnovati replied · ★ FEATURED
Hi, thanks for sharing details. The L4 -> 5 promotion in 2 years is good trajectory that should be helping you in job hunting.
1. Yeah, I feel like the life of the engineer for your entire career is just not knowing stuff and figuring it out haha. I theorize that engineers sometimes are so opinionated about odd things because it's what they know - and they shy away from things they don't know, but acknowledging you don't know a lot of stuff is better for you than trying to pretend you do or putting pressure on yourself to.
2. I'm surprised and first tip is to show your career progression on your resume instead of bundling all of Amazon into one item. That progression is the checkbox for FAANG "mid level"/Meta E4 bar. Amazon does have some negative signal some places right now and I haven't dug into why, but it might just be a flood of people looking for jobs from RTO - but I'm not sure why that would be negative. But showing your career progression will help a lot. i.e. break up L4 and L5 into two sub buckets under Amazon.
3. Based on what you said, you pattern match to people that are getting jobs just fine yeah - everywhere from startups to FAANGs. Companies are holding a high bar so having just one borderline interview can no-hire, BUT the bar itself isn't technically higher for raw skills per se... i.e. the bar is the same but the variance of signal they get needs to be tighter than in the past.
We're also seeing the post onsite "team matching" process being a bit pickier than in the past. Most people are getting matched but a couple people here and there aren't matching at Meta/Google.