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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#121

Post by awscurrentdev »

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…

Current AWS engineer here, can confirm. I'm absolutely broken. I'd second the point about the manager and pre-existing conditions making up the job. It's not clear to me if it's endemic, these are big orgs with teams run very differently.

That being said, the on-call sucks. It's really awful, and something I've never seen before. It's also typically the primary cause of team churn for people in my org. This varies, as I've seen other teams stacked with L6 engineers with very little churn (4-8 years of tenure each). This is very much a pit of despair of our own making, but I still haven't figured out how teams like mine get out of it. My own view is that normalization of deviance means that engineers who've only worked at AWS just accept that getting paged many times in a week at awful hours for false positives is OK.

There's certainly a view that the only way to get promoted (which is incredibly difficult) is to create new features or products. You read this of many orgs though, not just AWS. I'm not convinced it's fair to single out AWS. It can be endemic in some teams, and I've certainly worked with engineers who are clearly only focused on shining for promotion.

The worst I've seen was a team go from 8 engineers with > 2+ yrs tenure down to 4 people with AWS does handle operations failure incredibly well. If you've hopped on a LSE call before, the execution to identify, mitigate and review correction of error (COE) is world class. Doc / design review is also very thorough.

There's ample opportunity to learn a lot during your time at AWS, and many engineers have carved out incredible careers in this place. Just go in with your eyes wide open.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#122

Post by ixaxaar »

earth2mars wrote: post #86

Current 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 signifi…

Ground reality in all big tech seems to be pretty much the same? Like 1% of the people hoard 99% of the good work?

[Technically I imply a heavily skewed exponential distribution, maybe not exact numbers].

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#123

Post by benrbray »

curation wrote: post #38

Who are the people who still dream of careers? I don't know any.

For me, I'm not quite ready to give up on the dream having a job that I actually enjoy. I'm still young, so effort I put into my career now will pay dividends for the rest of my life. Giving up the most productive hours of my day to a company is a big deal, and I'd at least like the job to be intellectually stimulating, if not financially rewarding. At this stage in my life, showing up at work just for the paychecks seems like giving up on a brighter future.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#124

Post by PragmaticPulp »

I worked at a company that hired several people out of Amazon. Amazon is a big company, so there is significant variation from team to team.

However, several of the ex-Amazon employees were clearly scarred from their time working at Amazon. Whenever something went wrong (delays, outages, missed deadlines) one of them went so far as to spend hours or days preparing documents showing how it was actually someone else's fault, not his, because he thought it was necessary to avoid being fired. He said his experience at Amazon was basically one large game of "not it" whenever it came time to assign blame for the latest issue, and everyone had to become very good at blaming someone else. The worst was when he was actual at fault for something, because he would panic and scramble to distract from the issue he caused by raising concerns about everyone else around him. Easily the most toxic person I've worked with in the past few years.

On the other hand, I've known other ex-Amazon people who said their work was nothing like this, so YMMV

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#125

Post by [deleted] »

sreque wrote: post #109
zorked wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 co…

[deleted]

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#126

Post by kottapar »

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…

> 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.

wow, honestly this is surprising. For me as an end customer I was always impressed with the way the services are engineered. Kudos to people like you for making this happen. But then I was also under the impression that AWS has very good best practices to take care of repeating issues.

Wouldn't interim patch-ups cause stability issues in the long term?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#127

Post by asdev »

At some point you need to weigh work life balance, career fulfillment, responsibility(more at a startup) vs a FANG salary. Some people don't mind either working their ass off for a large salary or being a cog in a machine. But for most, the idealization of FANG is not what it's cracked up to be

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#128

Post by bruce343434 »

adrianN wrote: post #12
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”.

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

like?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#129

Post by PragmaticPulp »

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 may get used to it, but that doesn't mean the negative effects disappear. 3.5 hours of sleep is well into the territory of chronic sleep deprivation, regardless of your genetic makeup.

There is no known combination of genes that makes 3.5 hours of sleep acceptable. The "short sleep" genes don't shrink the sleep need window that much.

We obviously can't know your personal circumstances, but I would caution that according to everything we know you are likely to pay a price for this chronic sleep deprivation, especially if it continues.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#130

Post by Barrin92 »

papito wrote: post #35
dgellow wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "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.

I personally don't need much more than five hours. As in, even when I'm completely on my own free time and I don't set an alarm I'll go to bed at 24:00 - 1:00 and wake up at about 5:30 - 6:30. My father is the same, he even often sleeps only four hours, I guess it's genetic.
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