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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

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Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#101

Post by bananamerica »

MattGaiser wrote: post #57
samirillian wrote: post #4

This is what I don't understand. When Tbray left, he said he was doing so in solidarity with the distribution center types, but he held to the line that AWS was great. This despite nightmare stories like this one regularly bubbling up, and I've heard similar from friends. What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? Is it that they w…

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…

Maybe they need hobbies that are actually relaxing and not side projects.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#102

Post by MattGaiser »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #91
MattGaiser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…

Maybe it's just the type of people amazon hires? I've been programming for 5+ years. Know what I'm doing today at 5 pm? Headed over to Lake Michigan with the fiance. Yesterday I went on a 4 mile run. Personally I never check things outside of 8-5 and my employer is A-OK with that. The biggest problem is when people like this article's author get a job and the HR people never make it clear that they may need to have "…

> never make it clear that they may need to have "pager duty" or otherwise work outside of 8-5.

Yes, these expectations should be made clear from the beginning.

I suspect they don't as they would be even more desperate to hire.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#103

Post by jetti »

Barrin92 wrote: post #18

The on call stuff sounds outright dystopian to me, it's not even legal in my country. More places should think about adopting something akin to France's El Khomri law's ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_disconnect ) and ensure that every citizen has enough time to recuperate from work and isn't pestered by their employer 24/7.

Where I'm at we have an on-call schedule like the one mentioned in the post. It isn't too bad, and we rarely ever get paged. Most of the issues that the on-call person has to deal with, at least on my team, will come up during the normal working hours.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#105

Post by redredrobot »

lowiqengineer wrote: post #36
redredrobot wrote: post #15

I appreciate this being shared, but I have some qualms. I think talking about the Leadership Principles as a 'typical corporate motto' is unfair. Amazon lives their leadership principles far more than the other companies I've seen. They don't include things they don't actually care about, like most corporate mottos do (you'll notice the lack of 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs). At least in my experi…

> 'we care about our employees' or 'do no evil' LPs). Customer Obsession is "do no evil".

How so? Google is facing employee issues and protests because they sold the 'do no evil' ideal, but the employees don't think some of their projects follow that. I think you would struggle to find an equivalent portion of Amazon employees who think Amazon isn't customer obsessed.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#106

Post by dlp211 »

jedberg wrote: post #51
dlp211 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Payroll taxes may or may not be borne by the worker. Oversimplifying tax burden is a dishonest argument that is consistently perpetuated.

Payroll taxes are always borne by the worker. They may not make the payments, but when I hire people, I set aside an all-in budget, and their salary is whatever is left after benefits and taxes. If the payroll tax goes up, it means their raise is smaller. That's how every business works. All per employee costs are borne by the employee one way or another.

This is not evidence that payroll taxes are borne solely by the worker. I'm not claiming that workers don't bear any of the burden. Just that they don't bear all of the burden. this would be especially true in an asymmetrical payroll tax system in competitive labor markets like the Seattle Software Developer market.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#107

Post by dfgdghdf »

Based on my experience with the various AWS SDK libraries, I don't think Amazon has very good developers, or perhaps they have good developers but a poor development culture. The architecture is convoluted, heavily OOP and just generally reminds me of Java in the early 2000s.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#108

Post by ex_amazon_sde »

thor24 wrote: post #97
ex_amazon_sde wrote: post #85

Ex Amazon here. > SDE II basically means a software developer with at least 2–3 years of industry experience If this is true, the hiring bar has been lowered incredibly.

Most of the campus hires that I know or have seen in the last 5 years became SDE2 is 1.5/2 years.

It's quite shocking compared to how it was 10 years ago.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#109

Post by ebg13 »

bananamerica wrote: post #101
MattGaiser wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What is it about tech culture that people within it refuse to admit the level of abuse-by-design that happens at these companies? The Amazon example is extreme, but a lot of tech workers fit the stereotype of people who don't have a lot else to do. I spend 100+ hours at my computer a week, so if you want long hours, I can live with that. I am up at 1AM anyway, so if you need something done at that time, sure. I jus…

Maybe they need hobbies that are actually relaxing and not side projects.

They can't because of hustle culture.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#110

Post by dudul »

Barrin92 wrote: post #95
dudul wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't make sense financially. You're gonna triple the size of your team, just to make sure that this one time of the week someone will restart the DB? I would much rather bite the bullet, be on call a week a month or so and use the budget for something else.

This is a law to protect the mental and physical well being of citizens and workers, obviously not Amazon's bottom line, that's literally the point. If you treat people like disposable commodities then yes this does not make any sense.

You know what impact the mental and physical well being of workers? Have their company go under because they had to triple the size of the team just to implement an on call policy.

And I'm not talking about Amazon here. Of course Amazon can afford to hire everybody and their mom to cover 24 hours in a day. I'm under the impression that your original comment was really a critic of the practice in general, not just this specific example.

Some small companies build products they try to sell to bigger companies. These bigger companies have SLAs, so they need SLAs from their providers to sign a contract. Even at a small startup on call may be necessary to get customers.

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