It's pretty bad and scaring me away. As I said the manager told me he thinks the team works 45-50 hours a week and to expect the 2am pager alerts. The main thing the manager/recruiter are trying to sell me on is total comp in the long run and a path to L6 engineer in ~2 year if I put in the work.
Did AWS offer you more than ten days PTO? I saw on levels.fyi that is the listed starting point at AWS, which is noticeably lower than other employers like Microsoft.
10 days PTO 1st year. 7 paid holidays, and 6 flex days (sick, floating holiday)
15 days 2nd year on.
Microsoft gives you 15 days from year 1, 7 holidays and 10 sick days which you can use just for "mental health".
So Microsoft is definitely better but it's not huge. Microsoft has WAY better 401k and free health benefits for family etc.
I'm taking that all into consideration and yes, I'd make 50k+ more at Amazon and that would help me retire a bit earlier. I'm also not a homeowner currently, and houses here are insanely priced.
Sorry for asking so directly but since I don’t have any idea how „work“ works in other places, does 10 days mean that you have 10 days of total vacation days per year? Or is it 10+7(+6)? If it’s 10 days/year, is it normal in the US?
The 10 "vacation days", would typically be for planned things, like taking a family vacation.
The 7 holidays are literally holidays, like Christmas, thanksgiving, etc, where most everyone is off work.
The 6 days are basically sick days, but you can also use them as one-off "dont feel like working" days .
I would say this is a decent policy by USA standards, but most tech companies have better policies. Amazon pays high salaries to engineers, but the other benefits are pretty poor.
The US really is crazy. In Ireland I get 25 days PTO (not particularly high) and 10 public holidays. Sick days don't exist here. If you're sick, you take whatever time off that your doctor signs for, and there are no pay deductions up to a pretty crazy number of days (I've never even come close to it, not even the year I had a bunch of recurring chest infections).
Edit: also, health insurance is optional but most people pay for it. It costs me and my wife about €240 per month, but options range from €45pm to €650pm with my provider. But that is used to cover stuff like queue jumping. I can go to a specialist, get a fast MRI etc, and my private hospital costs are paid. If I didn't have insurance I'd still get that for free, but I'd be waiting for weeks or months to see a specialist. Having said that, some specialists are rare. If you need to see someone who specialises in a particular type of condition you might be waiting a few weeks even if you have the best health insurance imaginable. And when it comes to the big urgent stuff, public health can really work. My sis died from cancer a few years back, and after a 9 month battle, I don't think they paid a cent. She had a lot of life threatening symptoms during the last 5 months and every one of them got immediate care. (That's something I didn't know about cancer - you can wake up one morning with a collapsed lung or a blood clots)
Thank you for taking your time to answer. Apparently you're talented and hard working to be able to work for a compensation like that and companies like Amazon and Microsoft - isn't there any leverage to get better conditions regarding free time? I have to take my time to dig a little deeper into how vacation works in the US since I did not know and thought it'd be comparable everywhere.
Personally I have never had a white-collar job in the US which started out at 10 days but it does seem to be the average in the US (when starting out) [1]. All of my employers have always started out with 15 days of vacation time with more after a certain amount of tenure. Given the age and experience of OP, I think they are getting shafted with 10 days.
On a side note, the US is truly awful when it comes to vacation and time off from work. The culture here is non-stop work and it's not sustainable.
Absolutely agree on 10 days being unacceptable. The recruiter said it's a blanket policy for new hires and there is no way for him to request an exception whatsoever. Crazy talk
