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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#101

Post by papito »

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.

For something heavily used, like the EC2 and load-balancing, perhaps, but I am still experiencing PTSD from my last CloudFormation encounter.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#102

Post by markus_zhang »

dgellow wrote: post #4
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.

People have very different metabolisms and lifestyles. I know people who need less than 5h per night and are completely healthy. I myself feel like shit if I wake up before 9am.

Do they take naps during day time? A half-hour nap can "reboot" one's body. But still, even if they do nap, I'm very jealous.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#103

Post by [deleted] »

matz1 wrote: post #59
papito wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do they "only" need 5 hours of sleep or do they say they need it? Are they as productive as they could be when fully rested, or will they "sleep when they are dead". Arianna Huffington also thought she was being greatly productive at no sleep, until her body told her to fuck off and she collapsed in her office from exhaustion.

They only need 5 hours of sleep. Why is it so difficult to understand that not everyone the same ? There are a lot of variability in human.

[deleted]

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#104

Post by ghaff »

papito wrote: post #90
lucasyvas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think you overestimate the appeal of a handful of large companies, taken by itself, on a resume if only because they come with downsides as well.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#105

Post by Frost1x »

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 has the advantage of having so many engineers behind the scenes available for firefighting with a culture of pushing more than is reasonable that as a customer, that would sort of disappear. They simply have to occasionally make trade offs between unrealistic development/feature request goals and firefighting whenever the firefighting is needed. This also acts as another form of pressure to work even more to meet timeline goals.

Don't let your developers know that you're expecting them to always be behind, infinitely queued up with work, and constantly in emergency mode and they won't have much time to think about what's really going on and how efficiency is being pushed at the cost of their sanity.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#106

Post by burlesona »

pc86 wrote: post #50
papito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos wants to pay the least for the most amount of work, and the workers want the most money for the least amount of work. It sounds like both parties should meet themselves half-way as opposed to living in what is effectively modern-day slavery. Suggesting such a thing, however, is "radical" and "communist", and essentially one step away from a dystopian fascism hellscape something something ANTIFA.

This isn't specific to Bezos, and it's not specific to any particular class or type of "worker." If Bezos could double his money today with zero work he'd certainly do it. The family business down the road would cut every employees' salary in half tomorrow if it could. It's just the free market, nothing particularly interesting or scary about it. Everyone wants to get the absolute best deal for themselves, and some a…

There are a LOT of small business owners who choose to pay their employees more than they “have” to because they genuinely want to. There are a LOT of entrepreneurs who see “making my company a great place to work” as one of the core values of their job.

I don’t think this is so common when you were talking about mega companies, in part because the work of operating a mega company is a lot less fun than a smaller company, and so you have this selection pressure where (a) people who pursue that path are more likely to value wealth and growth over quality of life, and (b) ruthlessness seems to usually help companies compete and win in the market. Thus the biggest and most famous companies of the world are more likely to be focused on cutthroat efficiency and, as a result, miserable places to work.

But that’s no more a feature of capitalism than cancer is a feature of DNA. It’s a pervasive malfunction, but I believe it’s treatable, particularly through aggressive anti-trust and wealth taxes.

Remember that the vast majority of capitalism is little businesses like your local veterinarian or florist, not FAANG.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#107

Post by perryizgr8 »

angry_octet wrote: post #91

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…

> in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand.

This might have been true at some point in the past, but it is increasingly changing. In Bangalore, especially in tech companies, it is not a big deal to get fired. You can easily get offers within a week if you are any good.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#108

Post by papito »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #100
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.

Just doing mundane things like decluttering and dishes at night helps relax the brain and wire it into the sleeping habit loop.

Don't start anything major after 6, and definitely not "squeeze in" a movie or a show before midnight. That's how it happens.

It's surprising how fast the time lapses if you do nothing but muck around the house getting ready for bed.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#109

Post by sreque »

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.

It's a very short-sighted view on testing, although I'm not surprised SREs would say it. The biggest problem with software deployment is that it is owned and managed by people who have no vested interest in developer productivity, including devops engineers.

A major goal of any org should be developer productivity; otherwise you are just hemorrhaging money and talent. When I say developer productivity, I mean: How confidently and quickly can I make a shippable, rollback-free change to a unit of software?

If you are the dos equis man of testing, "I don't always test my code, but when I do, I do it in production", then you can't confidently make any change without risking a production outage, so you play lots of games, like you mentioned, around canarying, rolling out to a small percentage of users, etc., but at the end of the day your developer productivity has absolutely tanked.

The goal of any system maintenance should be that a developer can quickly make and test a change locally and be highly confident that the change is correct. The canarying, phased rollouts, and other such systems should not be the primary means of testing code correctness.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#110

Post by whakim »

pc86 wrote: post #50
papito wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jeff Bezos wants to pay the least for the most amount of work, and the workers want the most money for the least amount of work. It sounds like both parties should meet themselves half-way as opposed to living in what is effectively modern-day slavery. Suggesting such a thing, however, is "radical" and "communist", and essentially one step away from a dystopian fascism hellscape something something ANTIFA.

This isn't specific to Bezos, and it's not specific to any particular class or type of "worker." If Bezos could double his money today with zero work he'd certainly do it. The family business down the road would cut every employees' salary in half tomorrow if it could. It's just the free market, nothing particularly interesting or scary about it. Everyone wants to get the absolute best deal for themselves, and some a…

This is a very myopic way of looking at things. There are plenty of family businesses that aren't only interested in capturing an ever greater share of profits.
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