Amazon is a loose federation of different teams. Some are fine and some are bad.
My counter-anecdote: I worked at Amazon for two years and it was mostly fine. Normal boring job.
Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
81–90 of 589 posts
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 AWS is pretty reliable for the most part so I am pretty surprise that the code quality is that bad.
> AWS is pretty reliable for the most part so I am pretty surprise that the code quality is that bad. I'm not totally surprised because of two factors: very stable product definitions and lots and lots of users. A number of years back, I was talking with people at a famous and popular site with a broad audience. I asked them how much unit testing they did. They said that particular isolated pieces sometimes had tests…
For very, very popular services, a second of being live will exercise more code paths and edge cases than even the most dedicated testing team could ever dream of.
We hear a hell of a lot about testing but the most fundamental piece of software quality nowadays is the release strategy: running on tee'd live production traffic, canarying, metrics and alerting, quick roll backs, etc.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#83“ 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.
I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#84I'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
I think down leveling is quite common, especially at higher levels as the expectations grow quite a bit between senior and staff. Depending on the position, actually filling it with +/-1 of the target level is a win. Interviewing is expensive and if a candidate is good for the role, but perhaps just a bit below the bar, then a recommendation to hire at L-1 tries to keep the candidate and give them a career path.
This is from my perspective at Google, I've never worked at Amazon.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#85Former 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…
I'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with something new but I don't know if it's done now.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#86Current AWS employee. Technical sales side.
I don't disagree with what OP was saying. I have friends who experienced this. But my experience is no way closer to this. Think of this. The company have million+ people working. It got many companies in it (Acquisitions and independent business units). At least 30% are technical side. Out of it around 50% face this issue who are on development side. Which is still significant. Especially on call. other stuff like URA still applies for everyone. Work life balance is upto manager, team, business unit etc. Can't really generalize. You get to work with great companies and build great experience for your career if you got lucky. If someone doing their job,it's really hard to go things wrong way. Managers are always under hiring pressure and they tend to hire wrong folks most times. The interview process have lot of bias baked in. We miss lot of good folks and hire wrong folks too.
But I agree this toxic culture need to change.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#87What 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.
Indeed, a truly remarkable disconnect with reality that honestly makes me question the point of having an account on a site called "Hacker News."
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#88What 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…
They have a big product portfolio, so less than 50 engineers is a big stretch even in the best of circumstances.
But they are clearly in a very deep hole of technical debt that they will never be able to dig themselves out of, so all they can do is throw more people at the problem.
I don’t think this warrants being downvoted to the point of being barely readable. The estimate may be way off, but it’s a perfectly good basis for a discussion. Please don’t do this when you can use words instead.
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think one thing I learned from AWS is that there's so much hidden away from the customer. There definitely were (and probably still are) many issues which the customers won't actively experience. Reliability doesn't necessarily equate to good standards and good practice. But yes, from a customer point of view, AWS is pretty nice.
Reminds me of that old quote by John Godfrey Saxe: ”Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.”
"I just had one for breakfast." -- Jim Hacker
Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?
#90Former 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.
American capitalism is built on employee heroics, but at least you can get the AWS stamp on your resie, which, let's be honest, will make you the "it" girl of job hunting.