361–370 of 525 posts
I had a manager that took over from a previous person when I was working remote. There were a few issues, but the one that stands out is they flew me down to London for a week, set me up in a hotel, and had me take taxis back and fourth to the office and expense food etc. After returning home, he rejected my expenses because of variance of costs of the taxis, despite me pointing out that I was using the stipulated ve…
Amazon is a great company as consumer very shitty company to work as an employee. Source: Ex-Amazon employee.
as long as you love monopolies and anti-competitive behavior.
If my manager asked me to come to office at 7am, I would ask for 6am instead, so that I could be gone at 2pm and have a life, with a bonus of avoiding traffic jams. Choose your punishments carefully, aspiring middle manager!
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I am also an Amazon employee (and also do not speak for the company), and I agree with this assessment. My manager has told me and my teammates on multiple occasions to take care of family stuff first, to make sure we're working sustainably (i.e., not super late all the time) and so on. I also have scored some questions low on the same survey and not suffered retribution. I don't want to claim that anyone's experienc…
The thing is, your manager is from a decent background as a human, they probably aren't going to do otherwise no matter where they work!
Remember, your boss is ultimately not your friend, certainly not in a professional setting. An individual contributor/manager relationship fundamentally must be adversarial, because one side holds all the power, and even if the manager breaks trust the worst thing that will happen is the IC's replacement will be less productive for a few months.
When managers have this much power over their reports and there's no way for someone to fight back against their manager, it's no wonder that shitty managers are so common. It's a situation ripe for abuse.
The author of the article posted their Amazon user name, so I decided to look them up. I'll start with raw data, and then inject my own thoughts: * The author is the bottom contributor on his team by a large margin. Their few contributions are primarily configuration changes and pixel pushes. * The author hasn't made any contributions since last August, likely due to a leave of absence * The author's manager has rece…
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That's because Amazon doesn't work like a cohesive monolithic organization. Two teams that seat next to each other may have complete different cultures and ways of working. By design, Amazon is an aggregator of many small "startups" with different budgets, different issues, different approaches to solving problems. The connecting tissues are the leadership principles, the infrastructure, the resources, the mobility a…
Exactly. I work at a very similar place on the East Coast -- very startup like culture unified by leadership principles. I had one so-so experience, followed by an absolutely horrible experience, followed by two terrific experiences. For the bad experience, I worked weeks on end, lots of times throughout the night trying to deliever, in many cases, unreasonable feature requests all while trying to maintain production…
That's some sanctimonious bullshit.
There is zero public information indicating any cheating. We know that there was a trial separation. We don't know what agreements there were. We do know that the divorce is being presented as being amiable.
My attitude is that if his soon to be ex wife is not upset, then random strangers like yourself have zero business being upset on her behalf. You aren't part of or privy to his relationships or agreements. It is none of your business.
Unless you have non-public information indicating that he violated any agreement with MacKezie, the best information available to you is information in places like https://www.tmz.com/2019/01/09/jeff-bezos-lauren-sanchez-div... - which indicates that the relationship began after both couples separated, and was known by both ex partners.
Which would indicate that this isn't cheating. No matter how much it offends your sensibilities.
Mgrs treat engs like puppets and engs are okay with it cause the pay rise and sometimes even the job is at stake through this dreadful OLR process. Folks who readily sacrifice their work life harmony are the ones that get the plaudits. This is unsustainable long term, but Amazon doesn't care abt your long term, ironically. It isn't uncommon for "top tier" and "least effective" talent to work for their mgrs on weekends, late nights, be involved in important meetings in different timezones. On several occasions, I've seen engs work on vacations because there was an emergent issue, or because they were due a promotion and couldn't say no.
Mgrs have their favourites and shower them with best possible work, best possible compensation, best perks (like overseas travel to attend conferences, attend re:invent, fly for recruitment drives). In one instance, I saw the pay gap was 3x between equally tenured folks at the same job level. You'd usually find these "top tier" engs defending their mgrs, the work culture, the processes, the policies to death.
The HR department is the worst and complicit in all of this. The new peer feedback system is a hog wash and isn't even considered for OLRs. The promotion process is now less bureaucratic but puts too much power in the hands of the mgrs who decide who should get good enough work and just enough responsibilities to get promoted. OLR process and promotion alike is basically 'how to lie with statistics (only when your mgr allows it)' if you get what I mean. Mgrs can lie or argue either way depending whether they like you or not. I've seen mgrs reject negative feedbacks for engs they are looking to promote. The reason usually is a terse 'Inappropraite' with no further explanation. The mgrs are known to seek negative and positive feedback depending on how they want to build a case for or against you from their "yes men" who are usually the "top tier" engs.
God help if you've got personal or health issues. At least on one occasion, one of my friends was told by his mgr to be worried abt their performance since they've got mortgage to pay. And on several occasions, employees asked to leave because they broke some Amazon code of conduct or policy, but the actual reason to put them to sword in the first place could have been anything, ranging from personal prejudice to revengeful mindset to "let me show you who's the boss"
Multiple mgrs doing 'amazon things' can mean only one thing: It isn't because of a few bad apples... The whole basket is rotten.
Despite all of this, it's amazing so many good engs I know work there. But I also know that they'd give up that job at Amazon for Googles of this world in a heartbeat.
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How about because Amazon develops some of the most interesting and innovative products out there? AWS, Alexa, Go Store, to name a few? I've worked on several AWS services, and I'm very proud of being a part of them and of AWS in general. I bet there are very few other places where I would find problems this interesting or of this scale. If you have some experience, you probably know better than just look for a job at…
There are plenty of companies that have interesting projects and don't have such a toxic culture. GCP and Azure are the exact same technical challenge as AWS without all the Amazon BS.
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The thing is, your manager is from a decent background as a human, they probably aren't going to do otherwise no matter where they work!
At any reasonably sized company individual managers are going to have a lot of control over their subordinates, and their underlings aren't going to have any say pretty much at all. What are they going to do, complain to HR? HR at any large company isn't in the business of keeping people employed, it's in the business of keeping the company safe. If you rock the boat, you are now the problem. It's no wonder that all…
I couldn't be the only one who found some irony in this statement.