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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#11

“ If you're someone who likes your 7 hours of sleep a day, stay away.” how do people function long-term with so little sleep? I need at least 9 hours to not be a useless husk the next day.

I started today with 4.5 hours of sleep and I’ll do just great with that. Once a week my body grabs 10-14 hours in a single night to “catch up”.

The vast majority of people would be under performing without even noticing at 4.5 hrs. Yet somehow, everyone thinks they're part of the 1% that has some magic genetic fix for this. Sort of like how 80% of people think they're above average at driving.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#12

“ If you're someone who likes your 7 hours of sleep a day, stay away.” how do people function long-term with so little sleep? I need at least 9 hours to not be a useless husk the next day.

I started today with 4.5 hours of sleep and I’ll do just great with that. Once a week my body grabs 10-14 hours in a single night to “catch up”.

Unless you're a genetic outlier it is likely that you're doing long-term damage to your health.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#13

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

AWS is a money printing machine in a very dynamic market. They need to keep the pace or MS will eat their lunch.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#14

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

Amazon also sells hardware (kindles, echo, sidewalk), has a media platform through Prime, has logistics software for vendor and order fulfillment, in addition you are underestimating the cost of running a global e-commerce site (legal complicance, security, privacy, accessibility, etc. are constant technical draws on even established products)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#15

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

Amazon web services runs a fair share of the internet. Around 33% as of Sept 2020 according to Forbes [^1].

[^1]: https://www.forbes.com/sites/danrunkevicius/2020/09/03/how-a...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#16

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

>AWS, which could be run by less than 50 engineers)?

What the...

> (Not a software engineer

Ah, yes.

It shows.

50 engineers is probably less than the size of some support teams within Amazon that handle a single large corporate AWS customer.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#17

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

How do you know it's "finished"? You could have said the same thing in 2006 and been completely wrong. What makes you think the customer front end of Amazon is where the bulk of the engineering is?

Edit: engineering and maintaining the infrastructure of Amazon compared Vs cracking a code in world war two seems like a strange comparison.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#18
Former AWS engineer here.

I worked on a pretty critical product in AWS (big AWS service with lots of traffic) and I can safely say that it's totally up to your manager and pre-existing conditions which make up the job. My manager was great as a person but would always lack in my career-oriented goals (bigger projects, promotions, etc)

But what really sucked for me was the pre-existing conditions. Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. We had a lot of little scripts here and there which would solve extremely specific situations but no focus was ever put on in building a general framework or trying to reduce the ticket count. This often led to engineers taking the day off after their on-call due to the load and honestly it made people quite grumpy. And upper management was always much more interested in feature delivery since the focus was always on promotions and the more you delivered the better it looked for your manager. So now you have engineers with such a terrible on-call load along with pressure to deliver new features and projects within the atrocious tight deadlines that would be set. It was, to be blunt, a shit show.

Code quality was atrocious. We had one enormous Java method (>1000 lines) which would take care of nearly every single request coming into our service... With only about 7-8 unit tests. It was so difficult to get even basic things done to the point where any ticket that needed to be done would take a minimum of 4-5 days regardless of complexity. And of course managers and senior engineers would estimate small tickets to take around 1-2 days and then be shocked when 2 days later it's not even close to being finished. I will give Amazon credit that they do grill design reviews pretty harshly so those are done well in general. But code reviewers didn't care about quality or best practice. If it works then ship it.

I'm just not 100% sure about the whole PIP scene. Our service was extremely critical and we were extremely understaffed. So I don't think it applied to anyone in our org but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP. Sad but I've seen it happen a few times in my time there.

I'm glad I got the Amazon stamp on my resume and left. When I left, more than half my team and my manager quit around the same time too. It was definitely a wild experience.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#19

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

AWS alone requires thousands of software engineers. And there is Amazon Echo, Twitch, Prime Video, a lot of software for warehouses and logistics, their autonomous stores, game studios, Kindle, Amazon Fire devices, their app store, Audible and I barely scratched the surface.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#20
I've had two job offers from AWS for SA and TAM and I turned both down. The actual position was always lower than what I was originally interviewing for (Senior instead of Staff)

Literally the only company I've seen that does that. It's like a bait and switch. If I'm not actually qualified just say no lol

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