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An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

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Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#161

Post by dudul »

Barrin92 wrote: post #148
dudul wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 thi…

>I'm under the impression that your original comment was really a critic of the practice in general, not just this specific example. It absolutely was criticism of the practise in general. Yes, small companies that can't ensure that there workers aren't overworked don't really make sense with protections like these. But the same is true for environmental protection. Critical infrastructure arguably ought to be handle…

I feel like we're just going in circles because you're not addressing any of the examples I'm providing.

I gave you examples of how to implement on call without overworking your employees and even giving them the option to run a few errands here and there. So what's the problem? You seem to be against the practice just for the principle, not even really for any bad effets due to bad implementations.

As for which products are worth implementing "on call" for, yes I agree, some companies are too quick to think that the world can't function 30 minutes without their product.

Anyways, I've seen it implemented successfully at companies with very low attrition and I do believe it is a necessary tool sometimes for small companies to grow and sign big whale customers.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#162

Post by azuriten »

nordsieck wrote: post #119
azuriten wrote: post #104

GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.

> GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd. IMO it's the lowest effort blogging platform (for people who already know how to use git). You don't have to go to a webpage - just write some text in the editor of your choice. You don't even need to use something like Hugo since Github will render markdown files properly.

If you're just writing some throwaway content then sure, I guess the low effort is worth it. But if you want to write more than a single post it's probably better to spin up either your own blog or somewhere else.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#163

Post by lowiqengineer »

redredrobot wrote: post #105
lowiqengineer wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> '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.

I mean in the sense that being customer obsessed should mean you do not evil. We absolutely are still customer obsessed.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#164

Post by azuriten »

mjayhn wrote: post #143
azuriten wrote: post #104

GitHub and Gists seems to alot of people's go to place for writing these days. I'll take it over Medium but still seems a bit odd.

This is actually from Pastebin which I used to really enjoy finding random anonymous stuff on with the trending filter. It was mostly random logs, stack traces or email dumps but occasionally you'd stumble on an interesting anonymous memo like this. https://pastebin.com/BjD84BQ3

Did they get rid of that feature or was it replaced by Public pastes on the right hand side?

I've only ever used Pastebin for gaming leaks and I don't think the interface leads itself well for long form posts. Probably just me being picky though.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#165

Post by nighthawk454 »

dudul wrote: post #99
nighthawk454 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dystopianism comes in because the vast majority of teams are decidedly _not_ 27/4 critical. Sure, some teams really run the 1-Click Buy button or the S3 API. Most run some DB behind some API behind another 3 APIs behind 5 other teams that run a widget. In practice, your workload may not be reduced during on call because it's "expected" and you still have to meet your normal deliverables while the team isn't staff…

Your "in practice" doesn't match my on call experience over the past 15 years. During "on call" workload is reduced (the author of the post even mentions it). There are ways to implement sane on call policies that benefit everyone. A few I've seen: - use a primary and secondary on call so that the primary can still go get groceries, or play in the yard with their kids, etc - overlap on call and work hours. I did that…

> Like everything else, there are ways to do it right, and way to go complete bananas with it.

Sure, agreed. Sometimes it's implemented well and sometimes it isn't. I've experienced some of both.

When it isn't well-implemented and is particularly non-critical, it can feel a bit dystopian to the engineers. If done well and for a good cause, it should be fine.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#166

Post by hinkley »

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…

I have a suspicion.

If psychologists surveyed one of these companies, like Amazon, to look at the sorts of attachements the employees have now, and had as a child, I think you will find distinct deficit of people who had a happy childhoods with secure attachments sticking around at these companies.

The bravado and masochism so common in such places, in my opinion, is a form of self-bullying. You don't have to look hard to find managers exploiting this characteristic, and I suspect the most of the ones who thrive in such an environment do it. I worked a brief contract there and it was clear that the manager was used to making statements designed to trigger his subordinates' insecurities.

When your self worth is tied to the quality of your work, but your ability to self-evaluate is not solid. you are vulnerable to manipulation. I have that trigger too, it's just harder to hit, especially by some punk who is used to saying 'frog' and having people jump. I felt sometimes like he was waiting for me to react to some subtly passive-aggressive statement he just made and I just shrugged it off and stopped talking or kept going.

A master can be very tied to the quality of their work, and hand you your ass if you try to disagree with them. This doesn't develop overnight, and it's a winding road, but it's very undeveloped in a bunch of 25 year olds with a toxic cocktail of Impostor and Dunning-Kruger, and any 28 year old who spent more time honing their interpersonal skills in college has some ideas how to get what they want out of such people.

And those people think this is okay. Normal. That it's only what they deserve. And then we have a culture of avoiding psychotherapists, who would tell you two sessions in that this is bullshit and you shouldn't have to live this way.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#167

Post by dudul »

sidlls wrote: post #159
dudul wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason companies don't do that is because it doesn't make sense. What are you gonna do with a team that is 3 times the ideal size just to have enough people to cover a 7/24 on call?

It absolutely does make sense if the service is that critical. If it's not that critical, it doesn't need 24/7 on-call. There are some "in between" circumstances, sure, and those might require additional resources or occasionally work outside of normal hours. It doesn't make financial sense because companies can get away with exploitative behavior because software engineers are quite naive (or even actively detriment…

So you have 5 engineers building your product. Now you hire 10 more and organize them in 3 shifts. What work do you give to the 10 new engineers? Are you supposed to now hire 200% more PMs, designers, QA, etc and make up some new projects for these guys?

I see this comment again and again on this thread "if it's really critical spend the money", but the thing is even small companies sometimes have critical systems. Simply because they're trying to compete with bigger ones, or they're partnering with companies that do have critical systems and the SLA gets passed down the chain of dependencies.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#168

Post by fourmyle »

dlp211 wrote: post #72
fourmyle wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The numbers were listed in the next sentence.

They edited their post. Also, numbers don't mean anything without context. Why is that out of control spending?

IMO increased spending that requires a state that has no income tax to add one.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#169

Post by aaomidi »

deminature wrote: post #146
aaomidi wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where does your uncle live? Does he have to pay $3000 for a 2 bedroom rent?

$3000 for 1bd in NYC is pretty common, it can extend to >= $4000 for 5-10 minute walking distance to work. Tech salary can seem much less impressive servicing that kind of recurring cost.

Yeah definitely.

I was specifically talking about the Seattle market for housing since I also live here.

Comparing base compensation without taking into consideration the city the person lives in is useless.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#170

Post by AnonWorksAtAWS »

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…

My signing bonus was structured in 13 separate payments, one attached to my first paycheck roughly equal to half the total bonus, and the other half distributed evenly over each paycheck in my second year of employment. If I had quit in my first year, I would have had to pay back the lump sum payment proportional to how long I had been at the company. The "bonus" paid out over the course of the second year never needs to be paid back under any circumstances.

Relocation bonus would have had to have been repaid in full if I had left during my first year.

From the perspective of not taking advantage of the financial irresponsibility of recent grads, this is an improvement over the structure described in TFA, but the right solution is make sure that recent grads know what compensation agreement they're signing and can resist the urge to spend it all, that can't be left to employers, whose every incentives push against that. Big lump sum payment right out of college are very useful as emergency slush funds even if you can't responsibly do much with them for a few months.

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