For a decade at Amazon, nearly everyone I worked with was following the linear, expected path. High school, university, degree, FAANG job. Amazon basically didn't interview SDE1s unless they were new grads. For a number of years that policy was explicit from our Director because "we find that works out best".
Now I'm at Shopify, where it feels like a complete 180. More than half my team took non-traditional paths- former dietician, government clerk, logger (like with a chainsaw). My team doesn't even seem like an outlier.
One thing I've noticed: the women I work with now are far more likely to have taken a non-linear path to get here. They weren't encouraged to go into that career when they were in high school, but later in life realized it was a good choice. One really great staff dev I've worked with told me how she was encouraged to be a tech recruiter (and did), then slowly realized she could be the one making the huge salaries she was offering people.
Amazon would never have given them a chance. And funny enough, Amazon struggles to hire women in dev roles.
Often, businesses don't realize how much they are missing until they bite the bullet and hire SV caliber engineers.
Seems every time I'm pitched something about "finding unconventional IT talent" it's about hiring cheaper programmers. There's a whole industry built around paying less for programmers. With questionable results. Hell, Canadian politicians pitched Vancouver as an ideal HQ2 location to Amazon since tech workers are worth ~50K less than in America[0]
Shopify's salaries are pretty competitive. They aren't "Bay Area" levels, but you can also live wherever you want, so your after-housing take home pay works out better.
Amazon Toronto doesn't pay much better than Shopify- I can say first hand.
> but you can also live wherever you want, so your after-housing take home pay works out better.
"After-housing" doesn't really mean anything: buying a house means you build equity into the house which you can later sell (and pocket the appreciation).
this doesn't apply to most junior/mid level engineers who are just a couple years out of college and are still on their student loans / don't have a mortgage / prefer to rent in downtown to be close to local Tinder scene :p
It also keeps the base those that have the privilege to turn down other jobs and focus solely on getting hired at Amazon (or other FAANG) right out of college.
A good chunk of folks (among whom exist great developers) are those that are focused on working a job while graduating, and getting to a point where they have stable finances. Then they focus on things like "what kind of job" do I want, and "where do I want to work". That could be years and years down the line though.
So it enforces an aristocracy / pedigree of sorts, but folks are hesitant to admit as such.
Amazon is universally known as the shit tier of tech. They can't hire top grads and people with experience because everyone has heard the horror stories. Sounds like they are optimizing their hiring strategy to mitigate this.
Amazon also pays much less than the other top tier tech companies. Maybe that's changed in the last 6 months but that was yet another reason why top talent didn't go there.
Ex-AWS here and echo what you said. Although there are some outliers (like myself, in terms of non-linear path) at AWS, most SDEs more or less traveled a similar paths:
That's interesting, most women I know were heavily encouraged and incentivized to go into computer science and engineering from university. Do you not live in a western country? I would expect similar incentives and pushes all over.
I don't really know about the background of the (few) women I know in my industry now though, except for the Indian ones who do seem to have a higher represenation and do I think seem to have engineering/cs degrees.
It sounds like the incentivization in the west is not working then, it is not getting to the right people or not going about things the right way. It actually doesn't surprise me if it does become a disincentivization for many women. It does seem pretty patronizing, shallow, and tone-deaf IMO, more likely designed by and for the political and grievance industries rather than actually being honest about women in technology and working to remove real barriers they face.
You can make big money as a tech recruiter. Why work for one big salary if you can take a percentage commission off of many big salaries over the course of a year?
There are some very talented recruiters that are very well-connected, very good at what they do, and very hard working, and they can make quite a bit of money.
But most recruiters are working for one company or one agency on a salary or hourly basis and it's not much money.
Modern software engineering / data analytics jobs require 3 month prep (from 0 background) in total to be hire-ready. Of course people from other fields are jumping ship.
Now I'm at Shopify, where it feels like a complete 180. More than half my team took non-traditional paths- former dietician, government clerk, logger (like with a chainsaw). My team doesn't even seem like an outlier.
One thing I've noticed: the women I work with now are far more likely to have taken a non-linear path to get here. They weren't encouraged to go into that career when they were in high school, but later in life realized it was a good choice. One really great staff dev I've worked with told me how she was encouraged to be a tech recruiter (and did), then slowly realized she could be the one making the huge salaries she was offering people.
Amazon would never have given them a chance. And funny enough, Amazon struggles to hire women in dev roles.