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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#161

Post by Ozzie_osman »

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 was the same then I had kids and now I probably get 6-7 hours per night, and they're fragmented. Your body adjusts. You use caffeine more effectively. One big learning for me is that i blamed a lot of being tired on lack of sleep, when in reality there are other causes (ie a big or greasy mid-day meal, sugar/caffeine crashes, etc).

That said, i'm sure it has long term health consequences though.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#162

Post by sombremesa »

mattacular wrote: post #156

Amazon has had this reputation for as long as I can remember. Sounds like they treat their employees like shit at every level and in every country. When I was looking for a new job it was not even a consideration to apply. The only defense of the company seems to be "well maybe you'll get lucky and work for one of the good managers who will treat you with a modicum of respect and they'll stay good as long as you're t…

When I was at Amazon the org structure at my org changed about six times in half as many years. I’d say your chances of having the same manager for a while are not great.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#163

Post by laegooose »

awscurrentdev wrote: post #121
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, a…

What is LSE?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#164

Post by cuu508 »

ixaxaar wrote: post #116
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…

> But in India, jobs are careers for life, and your employer is part of your personal brand. In the last decade, I might have very rarely seen a resume with more than say 10 years of experience at a single place. The average would be somewhere in the range of 1-4 years.

Makes sense, people with 10+ years at one place are looking for a new job less often ;-)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#166

Post by amazon_throw »

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind.

While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations within the company, that I am pretty confident that this experience isn't universal.

It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#167

Post by azemetre »

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.

Because these people are exceedingly rare. I get 5 hours of sleep a night because I have some pretty bad lifestyle choices. The few weeks where I have a normal sleep schedule I am absolutely a different person.

I mean I can function on 5-hours, I'm able to hold a job and live a life; but my well being could be so much better if I got a normal nights sleep everyday.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#168

Post by amazon_throw »

PragmaticPulp wrote: post #124

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…

That "CYA" response really doesn't feel like "us" to me, at least not the AWS side. I can't speak to the experiences on the store side, nor on the devices side. Over in AWS, we practice the "blameless postmortem" model you'll read about from time to time, and it is very rare to see any professional or personal consequences beyond some light joking come about from "breaking prod"

To that point, I know personally the engineers who triggered several of the AWS outages you will have read about in the news over the last decade and more. Some of them are still with us, some have been promoted since then.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#169

Post by exikyut »

amazon_throw wrote: post #166

Current (long tenured, moderately senior) AWS engineer here. I've been at the company long enough it's pretty clear that I'm a "good culture fit", so take what I'm saying with that in mind. While I absolutely believe that there are pockets of the company that work this way, more because of sheer scale than anything systemic, I have sat in the annual ratings meeting for engineers enough times, in enough organizations…

> steer people clear of it from inside

What's really needed here is a way to maintain super-scale in a way that is, shall we say, "eventually morally consistent". Applying selection theory, if you create a pocket of badness wrapped in a function that reliably extracts all the good out of it... well all you'll be left with is a local maximum of even more suffering. Yeow.

Of course, designing and maintaining such social structures seems close to P=NP in complexity...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#170

Post by amazon_throw »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #149
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…

"million+ people working". Yeah, most of them are filling and taping boxes in warehouses. I think people are discussing software engineers which might only be 20K or so. I cringe when I see similar comments about Apple. The vast majority of their staff are not highly paid engineers that roam HN. Instead, they are Apple Store staff or phone technicians (is that still a thing in 2021?).

Our technical staff is probably closer to 100k than it is to 20k. It was 20k when I started over 10 years ago.
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