An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015) • Hacker News Board

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#241

Post by ikRwS3Nb6Y » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:03 PM UTC

nanoscopic wrote: post #154

I can chime in that a lot of this rings true for me. I was also an SDE-II ( started as one ). I also was loaned out to other teams. I also suffered the idiocy of being locked into 2 years of work or get saddled with a huge amount of money to pay back. Also, I consider that my child is dead because of what happened. See https://amazonandmykid.com for the full story.

I'm not sure if you're legally bound not to say certain things by the terms of the NDA you signed, or if you've simply chosen not to share some details. But I read that entire page, and who is in the wrong in that story hinges entirely on the exact events of the day you requested to go home, and exactly what you said that was considered a death threat. The extreme vagueness around those details leaves me with no ability to form an opinion on whether your manager is a whip-cracking sociopath, if you have serious anger management issues and are blaming the consequences of them on anyone but yourself, or somewhere in the middle.

Are you willing to give more details?

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#242

Post by ladrien » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:14 PM UTC

notyourwork wrote: post #208

MattGaiser wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Amazon is open about engineers owning their on-call duty. This should not be a surprise to a new hire.

Idiot

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#243

Post by redredrobot » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:38 PM UTC

lowiqengineer wrote: post #163

redredrobot wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I mean in the sense that being customer obsessed should mean you do not evil

I think there is a real tension between customer obsession and 'do no evil'. Serving the individual needs of consumers can come at the expense of the public good. I think example of that are the amount of waste that Amazon packages generate by shipping as fast as possible and the amount of environmental damage AWS can quietly cause via their datacenters.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#244

Post by posix_me_less » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:40 PM UTC

MattGaiser wrote: post #209

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

this is very informative. I wouldn't have believed it, without the first person perspective. Before i read this, it was simply unbelievable to me that people could be that bored without any life outside work. Speaking as someone who really values free time and has tons of hobbies and things to do outside of work, it's just unbelievable.

Most of the people I know are fairly new graduates, so that would skew things. My friends and I spent most of our lives since grade 9 doing school stuff or stuff to get into school stuff. In my case, couple that with introversion and an aversion to most normal activities and the easiest thing to do is be good at the get into school stuff. In university, most of my social activities revolved around the startup world,…

Thank you for sharing. I can hear a shy cry for help. I think it's fine to spend a lot of time with computer, in general, I do it myself. There is so much to do, learn and help others. On the other hand, I think it is good to realize when it eventually becomes a replacement activity for lack of motivation/opportunities to do something harder. Then try to break that, take a challenge, do something new, either with computer (a personal project to make something cool?) or better, without it - for example, try some manual work with wood, do some science project with a friend, or get a pet and teach him tricks or something. Just don't spend yourself fully on the online/academic life, that sounds too ephemeral and can be a bit disappointing later on. I for sure regret spending so much time in academia.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#245

Post by redredrobot » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

AnonWorksAtAWS wrote: post #170

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 need…

Interesting. You're probably right, the experience is different for new grads where the lump sum is really useful.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#246

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:43 PM UTC

Traster wrote: post #81

AnHonestComment wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s worth pointing out why it needs to be “revived”: because the first iteration of the tax would have destroyed grocery stores and was protested by construction unions due to its disastrous policy. This iteration is targeting the 800 largest employers in Seattle, many of whom aren’t currently profitable. “Tax Amazon” is classic dishonesty — neither bill has been focused on Amazon, both would be a disaster for Seatt…

Just ballparking it: Seattle population has grown by around 23% [1] and inflation means $1 in 2010 has the spending power of $1.18 today [2], you'd expect a 45% increase (1.18*1.23) just accounting for population change. According to seattle's open government website, their budget was $6.24Bn in 2020, and $4.13Bn in 2010, a 51% increase. So just ball park spending has grown probably less than 0.5% per annum over infl…

[deleted]

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#247

Post by redredrobot » Thu, May 21, 2020, 10:46 PM UTC

sixstringtheory wrote: post #190

julianlam wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I also thought the on-call/pager thing was a little overblown. It immediately raised a red flag about how wet behind the ears OP is. Not to say that there aren't toxic on-call rotations and such, only that it's a lot more common than you'd think, and is not limited to just doctors eyeroll Any time a business unit needs to be accountable to another party after-hours, some sort of call schedule is created.

> During the hiring process, on-call is not mentioned in any way other than the usual salaried catch-all "are you willing to work nights and/or weekends." It should be very clear what the actual expectation is, though, instead of a nebulous "we may need you to work extra sometimes." It's a guarantee that you will work extra at a fixed interval, and that extra work happens to be psychologically draining. I ask for qui…

I found that weird. On-call is so central to the technical identity of Amazon that I'm surprised you could get through the hiring process without knowing that you'd be on-call.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#248

Post by rantwasp » Thu, May 21, 2020, 11:27 PM UTC

sulam wrote: post #238

rantwasp wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i agree with you that the oncall is not ideal. it is also widespread in the industry. so what’s the point to complain about something that is an essential part of the job? (advertised or not, if you don’t want to do it you will have to look for another job) i also think there is a huge difference between being oncall and having to respond in case something breaks vs mandatory death marches all day, every day.

I guess it depends on your definition of widespread. It is relatively common, but it's also far from universal, and there are companies that use on call which have a vastly different experience that what many people at Amazon report. In fact it seems like even different teams inside of Amazon have drastically different experience of on call. Treating it like a fact of life, like the weather, leaves you in a frame of…

hmm. no. you do have agency. you have agency during writing the code. you have agency during the code review. you have agency during wiring of alerts (if you do stupid shit you will receive a lot of pages. don’t so stupid shit). you have agency during the events. you also have agency after the events when you do a coe/post mortem. you can defined prioritize things to improve the life quality of other developers.

to give you an example. the team i was in at amazon had 3000 tickets in the queue when i started. anything except sev2s were basically ignored. lower severity tickets would escalate when shit hit the fan. i advocated for fixing classes of issues instead of myopically focusing on one-offs. by the time i left the queue was tens tickets and mostly feature request or higher level investigations.

to give you another example: i would basically remove all alerting that was not actionable. the worst possible thing that you can do is wake up in the middle of the night and not be able to do anything. i would ask for runbooks and the test was “if i take a developer from another team and put them oncall can they function independently 95% of the time”. i would think about what the experience of being oncall was (ie you don’t take people and throw them in the deep end of the pool and wonder why they drown)

so i guess what i’m saying is that oncall for me wasn’t that bad or stressful. it sucks having to be near a computer but I was rarely paged for stuff that broke or needed to be fixed right NOW. (once stabilized our team had 1 sev2 every other week)

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#249

Post by lowiqengineer » Thu, May 21, 2020, 11:50 PM UTC

ikRwS3Nb6Y wrote: post #229

lowiqengineer wrote: post #65

A 5 year old gist from 1 employee (out of the current ~70k SWE's employed at the company + all that have come and gone in the last 5 years) just to shit on the quality of Amazon engineering? And folks wonder why I have depression -it's not because i'm burnt out, it's because the HN crowd thinks I'm some sort of cognitive defective for working at Amazon.

Fellow happy Amazon SDE - hopefully you're not being literal saying you have depression from HN type crowds displaying their typical amount of empathy. just in case you are, take this as a friendly reminder that you're not the only person with that experience and it's easy to just stop reading the nonsense

Yeah, I know. But even when talking to friends at top companies it's like a stream of microaggressions when I've worked just as hard as they have to be where I am.

Re: An Amazon programmer’s perspective (2015)

#250

Post by WorkAllDay » Fri, May 22, 2020, 12:44 AM UTC

thorwasdfasdf wrote: post #194

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…

this is very informative. I wouldn't have believed it, without the first person perspective. Before i read this, it was simply unbelievable to me that people could be that bored without any life outside work. Speaking as someone who really values free time and has tons of hobbies and things to do outside of work, it's just unbelievable.

You move across the country to a city you don’t know, you end up there with no social skills and no real entry point it the social scene so you binge watch Netflix enroll in a masters degree and stare out of your condo window.

Then you ssh in and work to fill the hole. Now I don’t even get to see my co-workers.