Comparing Theorem Vs Amazon
With Theorem, I dived right in - I just got my hands dirty. I got the chance to work on immediate, pressing problems that were critical to both the current success and future growth of the company. I was collaborating directly with full-time engineers. I was developing in-house tools and infrastructure that directly addressed the specific needs the company had at that time.
With Amazon, I got the chance to experience working with technologies at scale, and making both high-level design decisions and low level implementation choices that I definitely wouldn’t have had the opportunity to make at a smaller company. Or arguably, any other company, given Amazon’s unique combination of scale, frugality, and customer centricity.
At Amazon, one challenging aspect was that there was an absolute overload of information and resources, and sometimes it was difficult to parse out the information that was relevant to the task at hand. Like in the internal wiki for each common tool, there would usually be about 4-5 separate articles, written by different people, each detailing their own perspective on theirs and cons of the cool. Similarly, in the internal stack overflow, there would be several answers for any given question that you would search, and even worse sometimes there would be 3-4 different variations of the same question, which would make you question whether you actually understood your specific problem or not. So that was definitely a huge learning opportunity for me, and by the end of the internship, I felt much more confident about parsing through complex wikis and documentation and being able to apply that information to my specific task at hand.
uid: 202007222351 tags: #theorem #amazon #2020recruiting