Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

leetcode.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 589 posts

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#181

Post by rantwasp »

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…

worked in AWS for a while, but it was 5 years ago.

you’re right that your manager can make or break your experience.

For the first couple of years there it kinda sucked, mostly due to oncall (our ticket queue was at 3000 tickets at some point) and constantly being yelled at when things broke. We would basically only work on sev2s. Having the pager was super-stressful. We “owned” so much cruft/dead projects/experiments that a couple of time we were paged for something that we didn’t know existed.

After I build a little bit of leverage / gathered some political capital I somehow ended up in the position of “team lead” with I guess management’s intent to move me to be a full time manager (after the team’s manager was PIPed).

I made a good case that half the team is going to leave, me included, if we don’t do anything (6 people team).

So what did we do? I introduced a “secondary” oncall. After you were oncall for a week, you were secondary for a week. While secondary you got the chance to try fixing some shit without worrying about being paged every hour. You were also motivated because you just got offcall. People went for annoyances that would generate a lot of busywork or for… fixing the alerting and monitoring (a lot of autocuts due to wrongly setup alerting thresholds or even alerts that should not have been alerts in the first place). After we exhausted the low hanging fruit, we put some effort into automating some tedious task that would take a lot of time but understood and never meant to be done manually at the scale we did them.

Towards the end of the journey we aggressively deprecated/migrated the shit that was not used. By the end of this (took more than one year) we had an empty-ish oncall queue and for the first time in ages people coupd breathe (we now got a sev2 every other week - which in Amazon terms is freaking awesome).

I wish this story had a happy ending. There was close to zero recognition for what happened there and most of the team migrated together, internally, to another opportunity after. I left Amazon 6 months after this migration. From what I hear from the people that stayed there, entropy took over and in another 2 years they were roughly in the same shitty place as far as oncall goes.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#182

Post by __derek__ »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #47

I’m guessing another lousy side of this is the toxic HR as mentioned in the post. Let’s say you lasted a year and left. Now you can put Amazon on your resume. However, HR is so toxic that they’ll never give you a good reference if someone calls in. Now all that work and effort was really for nothing. Edit: I meant if someone calls into HR to verify employment. You run the risk of HR secretly bad mouthing you. Yes, it…

> I meant if someone calls into HR to verify employment. You run the risk of HR secretly bad mouthing you. Yes, it’s probably illegal, but if they are doing all this other stuff, then would you be confident what they say or don’t say?

Employment/salary verification is outsourced to The Work Number (an Equifax product). Nobody at Amazon is involved.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#183

Post by matz1 »

nzmsv wrote: post #176
matz1 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 this kind of reply gets posted every single time sleep deprivation is brought up. Needing this little sleep is usually a lie or a self-delusion. Perpetuating it has negative consequences for the rest of us. Do some of these unicorns exist? Sure. But they are nowhere near as common as this type of comment suggests. Most of the people in question would be better off with more sleep. Can they survive on 5 hours?…

How are you sure its a lie ?

Not common? How do you know?

Eating nothing but pizza is not healthy? I disagree, Pizza has carbohydrates, protein, vegetables, vitamin, etc. Not always but it can be healthy.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#184

Post by klyrs »

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 used to get by on about 5-6 hours. If I slept early, I'd wake up long before my alarm feeling well rested, alert, and ready to go. Something changed when I was around 30, and it took a few years to figure out that I wasn't getting enough sleep. But even so, it's rare that I sleep more than 7 hours.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#185

Post by awsthro00945 »

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 very big, culturally, on making sure that all the bugginess from shitty code is not shown externally to the customer. Externally it might look like everything is fine to you, but internally AWS is a massive, leaky cargo ship with thousands of engineers running around 24/7 with duct tape and band-aids to plug the leaks.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#186

Post by kablow »

laegooose wrote: post #163
awscurrentdev wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

"large scale event" or something to that affect - these issues are visible to everyone company-wide

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#187

Post by pram »

__derek__ wrote: post #175
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

AFAIK, there is no Staff designation. On the IC track, L6 is Senior, L7 is Principal, and L8 is Senior Principal.

Yes whatever is above Senior, I don't have every corporations IC structure memorized

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#188

Post by oceanplexian »

bradleyjg wrote: post #93
middleclick wrote: post #32

Earlier 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 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 service…

Way back I used to work in telecommunications at a place that provided POTS service. They are two very completely different worlds. Software engineers act as if 5 9's is a badge of honor, when really it isn't. When you are responsible for something that people use to dial 911 and can make the difference between life and death a few minutes of downtime doesn't cut it.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#189

Post by kablow »

awsthro00945 wrote: post #180
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…

>Our on-call was pretty bad (40-60 tickets a week) and there was very little investment being put in to improve it. 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. AWS engineer here and I confirm everything you say, but this quote really struck home with me. The thing I've n…

> The thing I've noticed at Amazon is that not only are the pre-existing conditions awful, but nobody has any interest or willpower to fix it. Everyone will happily vent to you and tell you how awful things are, but any suggestions to fix it or make things more efficient (even if the fix is very simple and requires low effort) will be met with hostility. And I'm not just talking tech issues, but also process/workload issues.

In my case, direct management seems interested in these issues and understand there are problems we need to fix, but ultimately the feature/product launches always make it into the sprint and the larger bug fixes never do. It's very much "actions speak louder than words".

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#190

Post by nobleach »

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.

Having worked in an environment where there was a constant onslaught of customer issues. I can tell you that even though I was offered more than 7 hours of sleep, my days were absolutely terrible. Fire-fighting all day, and never getting to work on the features that we promised to deliver led to me lying in bed awake. My mental health was extremely fragile. My physical health was worse. The promise of "Work/Life Balance" needs to be clarified. Does the "work" part bleed into your "life" part? Does the job make it possible to truly disconnect? Some of that is based on personality (I aim to provide value, and am truly jazzed when I know people are pleased with my performance), but some of that is based on what your daily grind looks like. If you are constantly dealing with a nightmare for even 8 hours of your day, it doesn't matter what the rest of your day is like.
Post reply on HN