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My Amazon Burnout Experience

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Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#61

Post by waterlesscloud »

x0x0 wrote: post #44
adekok wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or to put a positive spin on it, this person was hired to do a job, was good at it, but was prevented from doing so by internal corporate politics. I've worked at companies where meeting major customer deliverables fell through the cracks. The managers simply didn't notice, and didn't care that the software was late and/or non-functional. What is an engineer to do? a) say he knows better, and get called "difficult to…

yeah, difficult people always scream politics after reading that post, my prob that the author is a very difficult person is 0.995. Or maybe higher. And the managers at amazon appear not to be running the company into the ground by, say, measures like company success.

In my experience large, successful companies can be harboring a very large number of incompetent or irrelevant managers. The parts of the company that work often do so spectacularly and sometimes carry the bulk of the company that's broken.

Eventually the tide goes out and reveals who's been swimming naked, but that can take decades.

The point is- you definitely cannot look at a successful company and infer that all (or even most) of management knows what its doing.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#62

Post by calbear81 »

tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

It's surprising that someone who is so smart would be so complacent with accepting slotted into a low rank and accepting of it after two years of that situation not changing.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#63

Post by bduerst »

tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

That's a pretty bold psychological assessment based on an anonymous post.

They seem to be writing about the gap between the reality for promotion Amazon and how they thought they thought they had fit the expectations - the latter of which involves talking about themselves and establishing why they think they qualified for promotion.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#64

Post by angersock »

buckbova wrote: post #29
dmourati wrote: post #17

"Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths" That is a damning statement that unfortunately has the ring of truth to me.

To me this also rings of "I'm too morally superior to engage in corporate politics." Suck it up and kiss ass, suppress information when necessary, make allegiances, and whatever else is if you want to move up in that structure. If all this is beneath you, then time to work for yourself.

If deceit, politics, and treachery are what's required to "get ahead" in a company, it should be no surprise that anybody who has an alternative (e.g., put skill points into engineering instead of sociopath biz bro) will look elsewhere.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#65

Post by dmourati »

buckbova wrote: post #29
dmourati wrote: post #17

"Amazon hires intelligent people, and they retain the sociopaths" That is a damning statement that unfortunately has the ring of truth to me.

To me this also rings of "I'm too morally superior to engage in corporate politics." Suck it up and kiss ass, suppress information when necessary, make allegiances, and whatever else is if you want to move up in that structure. If all this is beneath you, then time to work for yourself.

Agree, ya. I have a hard time kissing ass but I realized what I needed to do to advance was a little different.

In my case, the key was to stop actively pissing people off. Maybe just a change of perspective but it has helped me a good deal.

People who say they don't play politics just reveal themselves as unable to perceive and react to the daily goings on.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#66

Post by therobot24 »

wisty wrote: post #47
therobot24 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> "I accomplished my goals, but I didn't gain peer support...partly because in order to accomplish my yearly goals I had to alienate my peers. I had to tear down their pet projects that were inhibiting progress, I had to inform them of misinterpretations of data that they held dear, and I had to make specific types of failures as obvious and clear as possible, whether that was with a bug report or a published analys…

Without specifics, it's hard to tell. It could be "I was working with dangerously incompetent buffoons, and they got upset when I demonstrated that their projects where bug-ridden / physically impossible". Or the OP is nuts. Or it's somewhere in between, the OP had reasonable points but the managers struggled to understand them (or the OP had trouble getting them across). In this case, there's a fair bit of managemen…

>> Without specifics, it's hard to tell.

I'd agree in most situations, however, given that it's not uncommon for many at Amazon to move to Google, Microsoft, et al. we can make a general assumption that the average engineer isn't a "dangerously incompetent buffoon" (outliers can occur, but a whole team of such is very unlikely).

Also, OP is probably not nuts, more likely a narcissist as other have commented. Of course there's many posts out there stating that management is not functioning as it should - OP paints the same picture, however, the statement provided by the author also tells of continuously combative attitude.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#67

Post by enraged_camel »

calbear81 wrote: post #62
tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

It's surprising that someone who is so smart would be so complacent with accepting slotted into a low rank and accepting of it after two years of that situation not changing.

Not sure why it is surprising. Analytical intelligence (the type that can build systems that save the company hundreds of millions a year) is different from social intelligence.

The author clearly states that their smartness did not extend into the social realm. He cites the friend he referred to Amazon, who got hired and quickly started rising in the ranks by kissing ass, sucking up and going so far as to show fake data in meetings to make his superiors look good.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#68

Post by mildbow »

calbear81 wrote: post #62
tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

It's surprising that someone who is so smart would be so complacent with accepting slotted into a low rank and accepting of it after two years of that situation not changing.

Smart and intelligent are different things. If a person has succeed up until a given point by just being intelligent/workign hard, and relying on higher ups to notice to get promoted, I don't see why s/he wouldn't continue that previously winning strategy a little while longer. It's easy to fall into the trap of "I just need to work harder" when working harder has worked before.

So, either his feedback loop was lengthened because it was input that didn't match his past experience.

Or, maybe he wasn't/isnt that great on picking up social cues (something he eludes to).

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#69

Post by angersock »

richardwhiuk wrote: post #11
x0x0 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

author also wrote I always prioritized my work based on a cost/benefit estimate. Amazon culture always places higher priority on work that direct-line superiors consider higher priority. If I had a billion dollar project in the backlog, I could still have my time redirected towards a Senior Manager's pet project or a Director's pet peeve. [...] I had to directly refuse to work on a VP escalation So basically, (s)he w…

Yeah, that was the bit that struck out for me. Fundamentally, an organization is impossible to manage if everyone thinks that they know best. If you argue to your line that you think that the company should do X (or more precisely, the company should pay you to do X), and lose, then you have three options: a) Do it anyway. The company will judge you as incapable of being managed correctly and will leave you with no r…

So, I'll just put on my angry hat here, and say what a lot of us are probably thinking:

For b, life is too goddamned short to waste hours making other people feel like their fuckups weren't fuckups. Once you get the deep-in-your-bones acceptance that a company doesn't care what you're doing (as is clearly the case if the winning strategy isn't to, you know, do the optimal thing for the product), then it's a question of, "How I can exert minimum effort and get maximum return?".

That's fucking toxic.

Re: My Amazon Burnout Experience

#70

Post by dragontamer »

enraged_camel wrote: post #58
tsunamifury wrote: post #26

It seems obvious that this person is aware they don't work well with others, and actively refuses to try to do better -- while writing a self-aggrandizing story about how he is both the smartest person in the room and most everyone around him was an idiot. He seems to believe there was no one else smart at Amazon either, and all projects that 'got in his way' were created my simple minded peons. This type of retrospe…

Your post is a prime example of what is wrong with Amazon - I'm not sure if you were aware of the irony when you wrote it. If the author is capable of developing systems that save the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year, why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"?

> If the author is capable of developing systems that save the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year, why the fuck does it matter if they are a "great person to work with"?

If the author is a narcissist, they would be mistaken about saving the company hundreds of millions of dollars per year.

Remember, this is from the author's point of view. Allegedly, he was working with PH.Ds and others who disagreed with his metrics. A man who within his own rant claimed to be smarter than everyone else in his team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

Dunning Kruger effect is real. A man who says nothing good about his own team (that he admits has PH.Ds that were disagreeing with him) is hard to believe. The author is probably honest about _believing_ that he was saving millions of dollars per year. But perhaps he was an idiot and his metrics were wrong.

And based on my experience, when a rant begins with: > I love to solve real world problems, and in many ways am the perfect type of person for Amazon's culture

You can almost certainly believe the guy is on the "Illusory superiority" side of the Dunning Kruger effect.

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