Maithily Pande

** Unfortunate Experience with Amazon: Seeking Guidance ** On March 30, 2024, I placed an order with Amazon for a Boat neckband and Boat earbuds. While the neckband arrived in good condition, the earbuds turned out to be defective upon receipt. Naturally, I initiated a return order, and the defective earbuds were collected on April 19, 2024. However, over a month later, I'm still awaiting my refund. Each time I reach out to customer support, I'm told an investigation is ongoing, and worse, I've been accused of potentially returning a different item. Despite their agent verifying and collecting the item, I continue to face delays and blame for an issue that's beyond my control. I filed a complaint on the consumer portal, only to receive a response stating that the product wasn't returned, despite confirmation from their own agent. Here's an excerpt from their communication: "Dear Sir, On review of your complaint and on the information received from the third-party seller we find that you have not returned the product delivered to you vide Order Id 403-8363294-1083540. Accordingly, neither refund nor replacement order can be initiated. Please note that the seller initiates refund only after receipt of the original product as per return policy. Further, it is submitted that our role is limited to that of an intermediary and we are not the seller/manufacturer of the products listed on our e-commerce marketplace. The products listed on our e-commerce marketplace are sold by independent third-party sellers. In view of the above, the issue stands closed. Thank You." I find myself at an impasse and seek your guidance. What steps would you recommend I take next in this scenario? Your insights and advice would be greatly appreciated. Thank you. #CustomerService #AdviceNeeded #AmazonExperience #boat

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Do Data Engineer profiles hold less value compared to Software Engineer profiles?? Looking at the compensation for the Data Engineer 1 position at Amazon, it seems quite good in terms of numbers 🤑 but appears lower when compared to an SDE role. Some argue that the two roles are almost the same in value, but in reality 📌 , other companies often show a significant difference in compensation between data and developer roles. I believe 😎Data Engineers are no less important than leading roles such as Data Scientist, Software Engineer, or Full Stack Developer. Moreover, it’s not easy role for someone starting their career in DE or transitioning from another domain. What do you think about this parity, and what makes Data Engineers stand out? 👇 Follow Gunashekar Chenna for more 😊 #dataengineer #softwareengineer #seniorsoftwareengineer #amazon #intuit #kotakmahindra #qualcomm #tcs #interviews #compensation #datascientist #dataanalyst

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10x engineer, rock star, brogrammers....these are all unhelpful myths. Were they a great dev? Probably, but a great dev should not have to suffer through ego death to consider themselves successful. I agree with others, this attitude is not how a team succeeds and it is toxic. When I look at Facebook now I see an application stack that constantly breaks, is unintuitive and doesn't have the infrastructure to support itself, worse in quality than it was a decade ago. Exactly the type of thing I would expect from a bunch of individual contributors without cohesion. I'm sure this analysis on my part is unfair and there are dedicated, hard working team members there ready to make a difference, but this type of culture needs to stop. Invest in your internal teams, promote from within, train, encourage, build great things together instead of waiting for an imaginary deus ex programmator to save you.

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You get 60 days to find a job if laid off This is when you are on H1B visa. If you are laid off, you don’t even get enough time to absorb, recover and reflect as an immigrant. Out of these 60 days, 2 weeks generally go towards visa transfer. Ideally, you have 45 days after layoff to - Absorb the layoff stress - Prepare Resume - Apply for jobs - Prepare for interviews - Appear for interviews - Clear interviews and sign offer Tbh, this is a stressful situation to be in. You need to be extremely tough if you are an immigrant working on H1B visa #immigration #usa

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Hot take: Google might be losing out on many amazing engineers because of their interview process. For the last few years, we have seen many inconsistent launches at Google. Once a pioneer in software engineering (still is), something feels broken. First, it started with the poorly handled layoffs where many veteran googlers were laid off without any proper notice or smooth transition. Then, there were some high profile voluntary exits from the company across various core teams (Eg. Core flutter devs). Some of them went on to publicly criticize the culture changes over the years. After that came the AI catch up and mishaps. Google looked like it's falling behind OpenAI and Microsoft. Google Bard launch was rushed and didn't go well with users and investors. Most recently, the AI image generation issues happened. Amidst all this, there have been a series of redundancy/branding issues (remember Google Meets, Google Duo and Google Hangouts, all doing similar things?) and big product shutdowns (Stadia, Domains, etc.) These are a few things I could recollect at the top of my mind. The question to ask: Do Google's hiring practices have an impact on these culture shifts? I often come across some really good engineers who never apply to Google (because of their hiring process) or give the Google interview and fail to crack it but are able to crack other FAANG like companies. I have also seen many Googlers who actually crack the interview after 2-3 attempts or more. Why is this the case? 1. The interview process is long. You'd normally be given 2 weeks to upto 2 months of "prep time", because let's face it, almost no one can solve a Leetcode hard question in 30 mins without proper practice. 2. Then, you have multiple rounds, solely focusing on DSA style questions. You might be asked to write clean code in a Google doc based editor. So, you have to memorize syntax and code refactoring patterns too. 3. There is a team matching phase after you clear the interviews, which takes extra time. So, often, you will be giving a general interview and not team specific. Who are the people who stand the best chance to clear this process and actually join? [Continued in comments]

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After 7 years, last week I said good bye to Amazon Web Services (AWS) 👋 7 years ago, I was working as a project manager but I was secretly dreaming about going to a coding career. Somehow I managed to get in Amazon. I barely knew anything about coding production systems. But being surrounded with some of the smartest engineers I have ever met, I was able to learn, grow and eventually achieve my dream of being called a software engineer. Here are a few fun moments that will stay in my mind forever: - Before my first day, I asked my skip level manager what's the dress code for my first day. He was shocked at first and then told me "do what you want, but never wear a shirt and a tie, that'll be super weird" 👔 - I bought ice cream at 11:59pm just one minute before the store closed while working on a project with a friend. it was the fastest run of my life and eating this ice cream is a moment that I remember as pure joy 🍦🏃 - One day when I was on call, all the on call engineers on the entire floor got paged. Thinking it's a global issue, I am relaxed... Until I see all the on-calls on the floor looking right at me and walking in my direction... The outage was caused by our service and it was my job to fix it 😱 - One night, I wasn't on-call but my pager rang for missing connection... While sleeping, I woke up my wife (who doesn't work at Amazon and has never been on-call) and I told her to go to work. I got screamed at a lot that night... 🫣 But the part that I love the most is that most of the people I worked with, I can now call them friends. So I wanted to to thank all of you, directors, managers, PMs, fellow engineers... And all the others I'm forgetting now. See you soon friends, now it's time for another dream! 👋 PS: Also big thank you for all the devs sharing free content on blog or YouTube and also those writing great books. Your contents were and will continue to be a big part of my growth too!

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I've been at Amazon a long time. When I talk about my career with Amazon, the most frequent questions people ask me are: What kept me with Amazon for so many years? When I left after nearly 14 years, what drew me away? What brought me back 2 years later? The genuine answer to each, as trite as it sounds, is the same: it's the people The people who took a chance on me. The people that, when I struggled, helped me lean on my strengths and shore up my weaknesses. The people who saw potential and invested in me. The people who modeled the value of building relationships, not just building code. The people who challenged me, made me think differently, and helped me grow. As I've grown in my career it's also those people in whom I can see potential and invest, where I might take a chance to give them an opportunity, for whom my experience could be of some value as they grow, and with whom I can continue building lasting relationships. I've been with Amazon's Global Talent Management and Compensation for about a year and a half, where our mission is to help Amazonians build rewarding careers. In that time, I've met with hundreds of people in our org and every single one of them has been driven by our mission and passionate about how we can meaningfully improve the lives of every Amazon employee. I've learned so much about how challenging, rewarding, and important taking a culture-first approach can be. This post isn't a claim that Amazon is objectively unique, I know there are amazing people in every company, though it has been my personal experience that Amazon's intentionally peculiar culture is one that encourages these kinds of behavior in people. Rather, my point is this: To deliver sustained business and customer value, your organization cannot be a feature factory. It needs to be an organizational engine that continuously inspects and adjusts its culture to grow people and relationships, according to your values, and through which you deliver for your customers. #people #relationships #culture #amazon

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How much time is wasted while on-call debugging bugs that have already been debugged (or partially debugged)? As a new grad at Meta, I try to take note of every gem of engineering wisdom I hear from the senior engineers around me. On this issue, I recently heard a senior engineer on a sister team encourage creating an “investigation doc” for every debugging task you touch. He explained that this: 1) Enables the next on-call that may need to take over the task after you to quickly pick up from where you left off. (This happens when you debug the task to the point where you realize a different team owns the root problem and is better suited to drive the fix.) 2) Makes it easier for you (or other engineers) to quickly debug similar issues that may come up 3-6 months from now. The investigation doc should include: - A summary of the issue - Detailed steps + screenshots for how to repro - Debugging steps taken and all learnings so far Genius. So for my next on-call, I diligently followed this practice and created an investigation doc for every task I debugged. I noticed 2 things: 1) When I had to triage the task to another team, I almost always got a sincere thanks for having a thorough investigation doc attached to the task. 2) Even when I didn’t need to triage the task and drove the fix all the way myself, the doc still helped me organize my process, build upon my discoveries, and move quicker. I wouldn’t be opposed if this eventually becomes a standard best practice / expectation for all engineers.

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I'll fully accept that sometimes CEOs need to make very difficult decisions, but this explanation from Intuit's CEO below is truly atrocious. It is frankly impossible that they've suddenly noticed 1500 of their staff are not meeting expectations and, if it was possible, that would very much be a failure of the CEO for allowing the situation to get that bad. No matter how you look at it, the magnitude of the layoffs forces one to conclude only thing thing - it's a larger problem, the buck therefore stops with the CEO and, as such, one would expect a level of compassion and contrition as the CEO dishes out consequences to much-less-powerful people who aren't them. Gergely summarises the rest far better than what I can, but I really think those who have influence in a company should pay attention to what he writes with regards to what the CEO gains from making such a statement. When you're writing an explanation for lay-offs, ask yourself why you're writing it. Then read the statement from the perspective of your laid-off staff, from your surviving staff, and from the average member of the public. If you come across worse than you would do if you said nothing, then why release those words as they are? In doing so you destroy all possible benefits from writing a statement in the first place and it results, as we say in Germany, in a Verschlimmbesserung (google it, it's a great word). And for heaven's sake, don't introduce a fantastical projection of blame on 1500 people by suggesting you're giving them "the respect and compassion they deserve". That just makes it ripe for a @bestoflinkedin Instagram post.

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An application to offer conversion rate of < 0.3% sounds terribly daunting. That's exactly what Dhruv Loya had to power through to get his full-time offer as a Technical Support Specialist at Tesla after 300+ applications. Each rejection feels like failure and the discouragement never gets easier to swallow. I get it, but I've also learned to accept that one door closing doesn't mean all of them have been shut. You're doing just fine -- keep hitting submit. ⭐️ You also don't have to do it alone. I write a blog where I send internship and scholarship opportunities to your inbox every single day. You can view the exhaustive list here: https://lnkd.in/e6FWb6Uh I have also found Jobright.ai, Handshake, and Hunter.io for cold emailing to be extremely helpful. :)

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In the end, the issue here is abuse of low cost labor (not skilled + low cost — just low cost). I’ve worked with plenty of companies who have made this mistake and suffer for it (Nissan is a BIG one). This isn’t something anyone should be encouraging. It’s not about “competition”. This is a conversation on extortion.

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The Layoff That Led to a Breakthrough (True Story) Aman was an experienced software engineer, deeply invested in his job at a well-established tech firm. But one day, during a company-wide restructuring, he was laid off. Shocked and uncertain, Aman initially felt defeated. But rather than giving up, he embraced this challenge. He took a step back, re-evaluated his career, and spent the next six months learning in-demand skills like cloud architecture, AI/ML, and data engineering. During this period, Aman also built an impressive portfolio with open-source projects, collaborated with online communities, and took on freelance gigs to stay active. Slowly but steadily, his confidence returned. With his updated skill set and refreshed mindset, he began networking intensely—attending conferences, joining webinars, and connecting with industry leaders on LinkedIn. Despite the rejections, Aman remained persistent. Eventually, he landed multiple interviews, and after nine months, he was offered a senior position at a leading startup with better pay and a more dynamic role. Looking back, Aman realized the layoff was not an end but a turning point, sparking a new chapter in his career. His story is a reminder: sometimes setbacks are setups for the greatest comebacks. It’s all about how you respond to the storm. (This is a true story—only the name has been changed for privacy) #Resilience #EngineeringJourney #TechComeback #NeverGiveUp #CareerTransformation

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Thoughts on the H-1B debate. 1. Most individuals on H-1B visas while smart aren't uniquely brilliant or doing anything only they can do. They are your standard senior level engineer in terms of skills working jobs many other senior level engineers, including U.S. citizens, could do just as well. 2. One of the reasons why American companies sponsor H-1Bs is they have more control over the recipients than hiring a U.S. citizen for the same job. Skilled senior level engineers are in demand and individuals on H-1Bs have less ability to change jobs giving the employer more leverage in the relationship. 3. Another reason American companies sponsor H-1Bs is because there is a self created shortage of senior engineers, because only junior engineers can become senior engineers, but there is higher risk around hiring junior engineers for companies, so there is a lack of willingness to hire and invest in junior resources that leads to a shortage in senior resources, a shortage that is filled by H-1B visa recipients. 4. Bringing in the best and the brightest from around the world is good for a country, but the current volume of H-1B visa recipients creates a financial disincentive for American companies to invest in American citizens in engineering roles in favor of H-1Bs and it's reached the point where I'm aware of multiple instances where American companies have told American engineers who lack a college degree that while they know the engineer could do the open job they have available they won't hire them, because doing so would negatively impact their ability to sponsor H-1B visas for similar roles.

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When I left Apple, I got a 50% pay raise, and unknowingly left millions of upside on the table… After getting laid off from my first full time job in tech, I was very excited and relieved to land at Apple, a company I had long admired. It was my first job in BigTech and I learned a lot about company culture during my time there. My salary there was a bit smaller than my prior role. But, on the perks/benefits side of things, the company was very generous. Google was just emerging from the garage phase of life, so the whole BigTech compensation arms race hadn’t really started yet. My former director from my first job recruited me to the company she had joined, which was a younger public tech company that seemed to be doing pretty well, and had survived the dotcom bust. She was looking for a tech lead for the web team, which was working on the corporate web site, the marketing lead-gen system and the customer support portal - lots of stitching internal systems together in the database layer. After going through technical interviews with the team members, she made me an offer - one I seemingly couldn’t refuse. It was 33% more salary, 50% more bonus and more stock options annually. Topping that off, she wanted to support my growth as a team lead and eventually provide an opportunity to try out management. So, I decided to go. There were many reasons for me to make the leap - fantastic manager, growth opportunity, and compensation. But, the main point of this post is that compensation can be tricky to gauge head-to-head. If I had only gone for the compensation, it would have been the wrong decision. It turns out that the Apple stock options I left behind would have been worth multi-millions by the end of the vesting schedule. After I left, the stock split and then split again after a short time and continued to go up quickly in value. Stock compensation in a public company with a solid track record is almost as sure as cash. No, it is not certain, and you have to make your vesting cliffs. But, it is vastly different from pre-IPO shares. And, if you get RSUs that are vesting quarterly or monthly, that is basically cash compensation. The good news is that I took that 50% pay raise and used it to start building wealth. I did not change my standard of living, but instead increased and diversified my stock market investments, maxed out my retirement accounts (401K and IRA) and started on an accelerated pay-down of my home mortgage. Had I finished 5 years at Apple, I likely would have been financially independent early in my career. Instead, I had a very fun job for a few years, got the career development I was looking for, and learned financial discipline.

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One of the best System Design Mock Interview Videos I ever came across. 1. Effective Communication Skills: • Mark demonstrates exceptional communication skills, a crucial trait for Engineering Managers (EMs), especially when interacting with non-technical stakeholders. His approach—breaking down complex problems, using placeholders, and clearly outlining his thought process—makes technical discussions more accessible and inclusive. 2. Structured Problem-Solving Approach: • Mark doesn’t rush through the problem; instead, he takes deliberate steps, ensuring that each component of the system design is thoroughly explored. His methodical approach highlights the importance of understanding the problem space before jumping into solutions, a valuable lesson for anyone involved in system design. 3. Emphasizing Clarity Over Speed: • Unlike the common pressure to think quickly in interviews, Mark’s strength lies in his clarity and structured thinking. His style—marked by pauses and thoughtful detours—shows that taking time to articulate ideas clearly can be more effective than rapid, but less thoughtful, responses. 4. Importance for Engineering Managers: • As EMs frequently bridge the gap between technical teams and non-technical stakeholders, Mark’s ability to communicate complex concepts in an understandable way is a model for other managers. His style can inspire current and aspiring EMs to focus on clarity, patience, and adaptability in their communication. Key Takeaway: • This mock interview isn’t just a lesson in system design but also in leadership communication. It exemplifies how to navigate complex technical discussions gracefully and effectively—a critical skill for any senior engineering role.

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