Hire-to-fire at Amazon India? • Hacker News Board

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#91

Post by angry_octet » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:15 PM UTC

This is a great example of culture clash. In the US, being cut means nothing, you've always got to be ready for another job search. Only a few workplaces (Govt, places with strong unions, full professors) have any protection against retrenchment or arbitrary firing. But in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. The cachet of AMZN is great, until you realize they are going to fire 20% of you every year. People will say "they must have fired him for a reason" because they don't understand it's just about metrics.

It's also common in India to solve problems by throwing people at it (and indeed the US if it involves minimum wage workers) rather than difficult tasks like fixing the root cause or improving the process. It's also super hierarchical (I recall watching the manager watching the engineer, who watched the junior engineer, who watched the tech type at the console, telling him what to do), encouraging lots of butt kissing. So overstaffed teams, 1/3 of whom do not much, 1/3 (with replacement) who suck up ferociously to their manager, plenty of drudge work, and fear of the stigma of being fired. Great combination.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#92

Post by TedDoesntTalk » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

lucasyvas wrote: post #63

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.

Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#93

Post by bradleyjg » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

middleclick wrote: post #32

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…

> 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

In telecom or traditional mainframes, for example, the compute unit itself was expected to be reliable. Individual elements of AWS are not pretty reliable in that context. Check out the single host EC2 SLA.

However, today most large or even medium scale software assumes unreliable individual elements and has redundancy at the program level. For that purpose, AWS core services are pretty reliable.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#94

Post by wpietri » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

ErikVandeWater wrote: post #71

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.

Where did you read this? That's important context.

There were a number of recent articles. Here's one:

https://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-polices-based-jeff-be...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#95

Post by a4isms » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:16 PM UTC

ghaff wrote: post #80

a4isms wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but I’m not comparing a business-class hotel to a B&B, I’m comparing one kind of hotel to another. All the major chains have offerings in both markets I describe: 1. Hotels that appeal to guests who pay their own way, and; 2. Hotels that appeal to companies with business travel needs. The second type of hotel has the massive machine hidden from guests.

Certainly all the business class hotels have the ability to reserve room blocks, cater events, pre-book rooms, etc. But those are essentially additional profit centers. I'm just saying that many/most of us essentially deal with hotels 1:1 even for business travel. But, yes, there are some brands of e.g. Marriott that are in part oriented to corporate events and the like and other that are mostly for individual travel…

Of course we do. I’m just explaining why such a place might have many, many more programmers and other employees than we would guess are needed judging by our experience out at the periphery of their business.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#96

Post by yawaworht1978 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

pc86 wrote: post #42

gogopuppygogo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

"Catching up" on sleep is a myth. If you're getting wildly different amounts of sleep night to night (even on a "schedule" like yours) it's a biological/physiological certainly that you're operating at a deficit. Maybe not cognitive, but there is a deficit there whether you realize it or not.

I am not sure about this, i had periods of 5h a sleep days for a week or two and then slept 12 hours for a day and felt very fresh and carried on with 5h a day. Sometimes it's 7-8 hours a day for couple weeks, sometimes it's 5. Feels about equal to me, maybe it has to do with volatile working hours for me, not sure. All I know the worst is hangover days and on holidays I stay in bed for 10hours only to feel unusually tired. Maybe environment is a bigger factor than genetics.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#97

Post by bradleyjg » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

zorked wrote: post #82

wpietri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Depends on if you are serving ads over cat pictures or routing air traffic. Different solutions for different problems.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#98

Post by jelling » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:17 PM UTC

pram wrote: post #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

My friend works there and said that virtually everyone gets dropped a rank on the way in. It’s so common that people commonly introduce themselves as “I’m an X but pre-Amazon I was an X+1”.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#99

Post by markus_zhang » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

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.

Me too. I need some 6-7 hours in week days and 8 hours in weekends. I'd trade a few years at the end of my life (hope I don't die soon) for 2-2.5 hour reduction of sleep plus still keeping my sanity and productivity. It would be a good trade.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#100

Post by perryizgr8 » Sun, Jun 20, 2021, 2:18 PM UTC

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 usually average 4.5 hours a night. I am still living, but it is not a happy life. I slept 8 hours one night, felt like a new person the next morning. But I fall back into the habit again.