$150,000 Amazon Engineer vs. $300,000 Google Engineer
The difference is in the company culture.
I started my software engineering career at Amazon in 2020 and later joined Google in 2022. Amazon and Google are both profitable tech giants with several successful products:
Amazon: Amazon.com, Kindle, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime
Google: Google Adsense, Google Cloud Products, Youtube
It goes without saying how amazing engineering work exists at both companies. But from someone who has worked at Amazon and Google, let’s talk about the differences.
Amazon
Performance Improvement Culture
Amazon.com is notorious for performance improvement plan (PIP) culture. At Amazon, roughly the bottom performing 10% lose their jobs every year. I’ve never seen or experienced this myself so I never confirmed it was true.
But whether or not it’s true, it’s a fear that floats among the workforce. That itself is holding engineers back. You can’t do a good job if you’re too worried about keeping your job.
Leadership principles
Amazon has a list of working commandments that employees are expected to honor and practice. There’s 16 of them now but I really only heard my manager mention the same 3:
- Ownership
- Dive Deep
- Customer obsession
If anyone told you to have ownership and dive deep on your issues, you’ll slowly learn it’s just another way of saying “figure it out yourself”.
- Don’t know why your API isn’t working? Dive deeper.
- Want help implementing integration tests? Own your work.
Look through the principles and notice teamwork isn’t really part of them. While you might not see teamwork, you will see customer obsession.
Customer obsession
“The customer is always right”
When you always put the customer first, you’ll sacrifice engineering quality for rushed results and output. You’ll drop everything you’re doing because a customer made a small complaint. You’re optimizing for the customer, not the builder.
If you’re considering a career at Amazon, remember, it’s customer obsession, not engineering obsession.
Build for Everyone
Google doesn’t have leadership principles (thank god) but it does have the popular slogan “Build for Everyone”. When you build for everyone, you’re optimizing for the builder and focused on engineering productivity.
Here’s how it does that:
- Documentation has single team owners that can only be updated with peer reviews. This led to higher quality documentation throughout the company with single sources of truth.
- Testing on the Toilet: You’ll see coding tips and tools on your downtime in the bathroom. Learning never stops at Google.
- Automated environment setup: You can make your first code change in hours with completely automated environment setup. Less ramp up leads to more productivity
- Readability Reviewers: A programming language certified professional reviewer must sign off on all code reviews. The standard for engineering is higher because bugs are prevented easiest a the code review.
Just google search how many Google careers are listed for engineering productivity to recognize how seriously Google takes its engineering culture.
Employee Well Being
The perks and benefits at Google are extreme by offering free lunch+dinner and on-campus gym membership.
- If you spend less time cooking and cleaning, you’ll invest more time working effectively.
- If you exercise more often, you’ll feel less stressed and maintain a better work life balance.
Optimize your time for yourself and notice how quickly you’ll improve at work.
Concluding Thoughts
When you spend more time Building for Everyone and less on customer obsession, you’ll be better setup for success as an engineer. The simplest difference between working at these two companies is whether you prioritize the customers or the engineers.
Did you see what happens when you click and hold the clap button?
The resume template that helped me get into Amazon and Google
If you enjoyed this experience consider being a member for more content like this!
1000 are following on Twitter!
And follow me on my quest to 100,000 followers on LinkedIn
Alex Nguyen | LinkedIn
Here’s another reason why Amazon is a stressful place to work:
