161–170 of 268 posts
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You are. The software engineer profession is becoming like traditional factory workers, only this time they have ping pong tables and free snacks. Also the salary is very high. But the downside is that you are still at the bottom of the pyramid.
That would be the warehouse workers not tech
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The alternative seems to be something like “people operations”. I don’t find that any more encouraging, really...
Back in the Dark Ages when people still had pensions and unions, this department was called "Personnel," which was perfectly descriptive and non-humiliating. This is obviously the reason it had to change to something orwellian that lumps in a company's employees with its inventory of pig iron and staple removers.
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Fulfillment was like that 5 years ago. Just widely reputed to be the worst place. New upper management came in and started rating the L6/L7 management on their highsev counts. Things got a lot better very quickly.
What's highsev?
I have worked in Amazon for many years now in India. Jeff himself doesn't seem interested in taking work culture seriously. I have never seen any interviews of him after NYC article where he accepted that something was going wrong and needs to be fixed. Instead he turned the whole debate into work-life harmony rhetoric.
In India, the situation is far worse than US. There is less transparency and more opportunities by senior leadership to rule with an iron fist without any accountability. Concerns are suppressed instantly. One might have been an excellent employee for couple of years but for some reason if you are not on top of your game for even a quarter, you will start hearing complains from everyone and the situation can go upto PIP (Performance Improvement). The culture completely lacks the emotion of "Let me help you". It is heavily influenced by politics and survival of the fittest which might be fine for a small period but takes a toll on you in long term. Probably this explains why attrition is so high in Amazon.
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TBH Amazon Indian org is known (from the Seattle folks I spoke to) for being sub-par filled with employees from service companies, so no surprises there.
^this. Part of my team at AMZN is in Bangalore, and they really are way below average compared to US. Usually its taken as low cost centre to send less lucrative work there, like operational stuff...
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Performance improvement plan. Basically a chance to get your act together before they fire you.
It's mainly a way to avoid having to pay out unemployment insurance: it provides documentation that you were fired "for cause". Most US companies do it, so you can't ever really count on getting unemployment benefits.
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Some would argue it's more of a "start looking for a new job, we're about to fire you" warning.
I don't know whether you're making this statement about Amazon, in which case I have no insight and you can stop reading now, or whether that's intended as a more general statement. If it's the latter, I'd like to challenge the assertion that a PIP is necessarily the company trying to get rid of someone. In my experience as a manager, I've always made sure that PIPs are as honestly designed to get people back on trac…
In my workplaces I would consider 2 PIPs over 5 years among 200 (highly filtered) engineers to be a normal rate, yet you are implying this is a small fraction of the total PIPs.
I'm not a manager so it is definitely possible that I'm unaware of many instances, but to have a pip for more than low single digit percentages of your workforce seems like a big red flag. Whether the motivation is cya or honest encouragement, a pip still means their current performance is unacceptable, so you seem to be describing a harsh environment (or a large collection of unmotivated employees, but the former seems more likely in this industry).
Can you clarify?
Overall, I've been happy with my choice to work at Amazon. Compared to most other tech companies I've worked for, the hours are predictable and not that intense. Of course, a lot is asked of engineers during crunch time, but that's the same way everywhere in the industry. I like what I do. I like the projects I work on. I like my coworkers. I'm happy with my compensation.
In terms of perks, there aren't free lunches every day, but most orgs that I know of have some budget for a snack shelf. There are also other perks though - there are are opportunities to learn from other software engineers in the form of tech talks, internal conferences and the like. There are also opportunities to learn about the business side as an engineer.
I've generally found other people at Amazon very willing to help. I've had people outside of my team review designs and give feedback (and I've done likewise for other teams). I'm currently working on a project that's required me to reach out to a bunch of different teams to get input on how to approach a problem, and all of them have either accepted a meeting invite or responded to my email with the info I was looking for in a reasonable amount of time (a couple days).
Amazon has 14 Leadership Principles, and I've found that people mostly take them to heart. For example, it doesn't mean that you can use "Insisting on the Highest Standards" as a blank check to refactor your code to the point that it's immaculate, but it does mean that most of the product people I work with get that tech debt is a real thing and slows down product development at some point, and they will budget time to address tech debt when given suggestions by engineers.
Most of the people who have left our team in the past 12 months have left to go work on other teams. Some of them left to work for a different org, some because they wanted to work in a different office.
Amazon's not perfect, but it's pretty good, and most of the things that are frequently raised as issues on HackerNews are, in my experience and the experience of everyone I've talked to at Amazon, generally not issues.
Moved to Google and TBH have cried once or twice because I didn't realize an employer could be so humane. Amazon was terrifying, but the academic culture I came from normalized self brutalization to succeed,so I didn't realize how much they were relying on my lack of a sense of boundaries and personal priorities to extract excess labor.
What school did you go to? Went somewhere similar.