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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#61

Post by padastra »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #6

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…

You should ask yourself how you can be so self-assured yet wrong by several orders of magnitude. I'm not saying that as an insult -- it's probably worth re-evaluating your confidence : accuracy relationship.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#62

Post by alisonkisk »

bsenftner wrote: post #10

I read a telling point about Jeff Bezos yesterday, he believes people, all people, are inherently lazy and will work to avoid work. The description seemed to be trying to say, without saying, he's an Ayn Rand disciple, meaning he drunk the Kool-Aid to believe he's a John Gault or an Roark and we're just the peons preventing him from greatness and his destiny.

Amazon is unapologetically Randian, and many senior people are proud of that. That doesn't have anything to do with the rest of your comment though.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#63

Post by lucasyvas »

salil999 wrote: post #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 pret…

Yeah there's no way I'd put up with this. Trillion dollar company and still operating like it's amateur hour on many teams it seems.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#64

Post by oschvr »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #6

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…

Imagine being this delusional

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#66

Post by pureliquidhw »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #47

I’m guessing another lousy side of this is the toxic HR as mentioned in the post. Let’s say you lasted a year and left. Now you can put Amazon on your resume. However, HR is so toxic that they’ll never give you a good reference if someone calls in. Now all that work and effort was really for nothing. Edit: I meant if someone calls into HR to verify employment. You run the risk of HR secretly bad mouthing you. Yes, it…

Amazon HR won't give a reference, period. They'll verify employment dates, and I bet that's handled by a third party. I haven't had a reference check in the past 3 jobs over 5 years.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#68

Post by igetspam »

63 wrote: post #44
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #3

“ 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 knew someone who went years with 5 hours a night. He was notoriously quick to anger and tended to over react to everything. Toward the end of my knowing him he started to take better care of himself and suddenly he was the nicest man I'd ever met. Sleep matters.

This is me, in waves. When I become conscious of my crappy behavior, I take care to course correct. It's doesn't last though and I start to get burned out and stubborn and unpleasant. It's not a thing of pride. It's a known issue that I've only ever avoided while unemployed.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#69

Post by wpietri »

snarfy wrote: post #51
loloquwowndueo wrote: post #3

“ 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've been functioning on ~3.5 hours sleep per night for about 5 years now. You get used to it.

You might consider the concept of "Normalization of Deviance": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Normalization_of_deviance

I agree people can get used to almost anything. We've all been living through a pandemic. Society made it through the black plague. But part of "functioning" through bad conditions is losing touch with the the possibility of something better.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#70

Post by ghaff »

middleclick wrote: post #23
brazzy wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

This is a peak HN comment (the one you are replying to)! The other day on the Wikipedia thread, there was a data scientist who said he could run a website like Wikipedia all by himself. "How hard it is?". And here we have the same thing for Amazon..

Admittedly I've even heard senior executives rhetorically ask "What do all those people at $LOCATION even do?" At scale, you need a lot to sell, support customers, put marketing programs in place, do developer outreach, test, be on call, etc. etc. But, yeah, you'd think it would obvious that even just talking about straight engineering, you need more than a fraction of a person to develop and enhance each AWS service.
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