Now time for a bit of a rant.

Part of this post I had published on my Mastodon, so I’ll give that background here.

Late last year, my workplace got a new technical director who immediately went about pushing the entire department onto AI. Like, full-in, full throttle AI. A “slop pusher” if you like. I’m already seeing the damage this is causing to intelligence.

He then also went and did 1-to-1 sessions with each member of the department and said that “there would be no place for someone who does not use AI”

Alarm bells and red flags were screaming. It was at this moment I knew I needed to look at getting out as soon as possible.

So I started job hunting in more ernest that I had previously. I updated my resume and put it out.

No bites, but then I found some Amazon Web Services listings and applied for some of those.

I managed to land an interview in March in their London office.

The process was quite interesting. There were 5 different people/groups of people and a mix of in-person and video-call interviews (one of the interviewers was American)

During the interviews, they asked about my on-call (I do on-call in my current job). I was fine with the concept of on-call

There was a simple tech test where they set a few prompted questions at me, with a shared text editor and asked me to write how I would solve some of those problems via code. It went pretty well, and they followed up with a few more questions to ask how I would solve future related problems to the one I just solved.

After all was said and done, I got the offer. At slightly less pay than I would have been getting at my current job, but potentially better financial benefits long term (shares, etc.)

Now I’ve been stung by bad contracts before, and Amazon being what they are I decided to check their contract. And I was glad I did.

In the contract, there was an on-call clause, which I did not mind, but what was required is what made me turn the offer down.

For the on-call, if you get paged out of hours, you NEED TO GET UP, AND GET TO THE OFFICE.

That’s right, you get paged at 2am, you then need to travel into the office (somehow, since at 2am, main public transport is closed down, and busses are probably the only thing running — although Night Tube might be if it’s weekend.)

I’ve been going through some heart-related concerns lately and doing this would be a danger to my health, so I literally told them “this job would literally kill me if I took it”.

I went back to job hunting and rechecked the AWS listing I originally applied for. There was no mention of on-call, at all, in that listing.

I continued job hunting and applying to jobs, including a few others at AWS and a few months later, the same recruiter who talk to me about the first (failed) job application called me back again as those second AWS job listings I had applied for were being managed by him.

Apparently, all their AWS job listings require the same on-call process (travel into the office when paged).

This is something I can’t agree with (on call on my current job only requires we respond to and manage the incident remotely as we can VPN into the office)

NONE of the AWS listings mention on-call and none of them mention needing to travel into the office after being paged. I’m wondering whether or not to report this to the job site for misrepresenting the job…

Anyway, rant over for now.