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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#191

Post by delecti »

amazon_throw wrote: post #168
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 e…

Your experience also matches mine from my time in the advertising org. There's no benefit to placing blame, just figure out what went wrong, how to fix it, and how to prevent something like it from happening again. In fact it was one of the few parts of the culture that I tried to take with me after leaving.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#192

Post by ravenstine »

nkozyra wrote: post #173
ravenstine wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I knew a guy who claimed he only ever slept 3 hours a night. :) There was nothing obviously wrong with him at all. Older guy, too. His job was his passion, though, which I imagine helps quite a bit. I doubt he had to drag himself out of bed ever.

Some people have a weird tendency to talk up how little they sleep like it's some point of valor. Some people can do 6 hours a sleep a night for a long time and be fine but I don't think there's much support for maintaining health on 5 or fewer for long periods of time. Sleep is important and people need to find ways to get what they need. Even people with infants need outside support so they can get what they need.…

Another unappreciated aspect of sleep is how much of it one needs depending on their age. As I've gotten older, I've noticed that I need far less sleep. I still try to get 8 hours if I can, but most of the time I get away with 6 or 7 just fine and I get up much earlier in the morning. I think adolescents need more like 9 hours of sleep, but for some reason we (in America anyway) make kids get up earlier than most adults and give them work to do at home so they have less time to get to bed early, giving them all the incentive to stay up later. Adults trivialize sleep, which is funny because in high school and college it seemed agreed upon by everyone that we actually needed that extra hour or two. Teachers and parents would tell us that we were merely "slacking off" if we slept for more than 8 hours and didn't get up at the buttcrack of dawn.

Millennial parents undoubtedly have their own set of problems distinct from past generations, but I hope they've learned by now that their parent's views on sleep don't need to be repeated just as they're not repeating the 9-to-5 butts-in-seats mentality that is no longer a universal.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#193

Post by a4isms »

wdb wrote: post #117
a4isms wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consider this metaphor: You go on vacation. You stay at a hotel, not a “B&B.” Your vacation, your money, so you find a place close to the things you want to see, with plenty of free amenities like free continental breakfast and free WiFi. It’s somewhat reasonably priced, too. Now you go on a business trip financed by your employer, who books you into a “business class” hotel. It’s also close to things you want to see…

I have to meet the first employer that does the hotel bookings for me. I always need to sort it myself and expense back. The only thing the employer did is arranging a discounted room price. Normally, meant that I spend at least one day a month doing my hotel/travel expenses. That's ~40-46 lost working days :)

Pay yourself and expense it back is usually an SMB strategy for keeping costs down by offloading work onto employees. It’s not just your time that’s wasted, but all the work to organize expense reports, make sure you used the right codes, &c.

It’s a headache for you and the folks in accounts, but at small scale, that works. But as the company grows, this becomes harder to justify. At some point they centralize a lot of this stuff, and when they do, many choose to start booking people into hotels that cater to businesses who book people into hotels.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#194

Post by klyrs »

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?…

Do you have data showing that it's "usually a lie or self-delusion"? Because there's a genetic explanation[1] for why folks need less sleep. The only way I can sleep 9 hours in a night is if I work up a sleep debt.

[1] https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/gene-id...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#195

Post by atopuzov »

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, something that has big impact on services.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#196

Post by rantwasp »

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…

It’s a thing. The author was not unlucky. It’s actually a thing (I worked in AWS, I have heard this from several managers, some which actually had trouble struggling with how stupid the system is).

You have a team of X engineers and you want to grow. You hire a couple more. The current engineers have 0 incentives to help the new ones. Most people don’t have the chops (technical or emotional) to go up against a whole team.

Come review time, what do you think is going to happen? As a boss will you let go someone who’s been there for 5 years and knows the service inside out or the new guy who seems to be struggling.

Not all people are jerks, and there are good pockets (but mostly the deck is stacked against you when you join).

Also, IMHO Amazon is going to have a really hard time hiring people with the reputation they created for themselves.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#197

Post by amazon_throw »

HenryKissinger wrote: post #6

What does Amazon need thousands of engineers for, exactly? Amazon.com is a fine website. It is finished. It is complete , perfect as it is. The website could remain the exact same for the next ten decades, with minor adjustments to the product menus to reflect new products, and it would serve its purpose perfectly without risking being dethroned by competitors. Why do millions of lines of code need to be written each…

HAHAHAHHHHa hah... hah. ha hah cough

Oh, wow, what an amazing take. You owe me a new keyboard.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#198

Post by ed_elliott_asc »

notacoward wrote: post #157
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.

That's an overly general statement. Can you do that for front-end code that stores all of its state elsewhere? Sure. Can you do it for a storage system? Absolutely freaking not. If you introduce a bug that loses or corrupts data, there's no going back. You will have committed the worst sin that somebody in that specialty can commit. Better to test as much as you can, at every level. Other kinds of code are often some…

Everyone should be testing in prod, in that you release code and see metrics and monitoring to show that everything is working.

Testing in production is not going “let’s see if this will work” it is “we will release and validate that everything is working as expected”

People need to get over the old school cowboys who jump on prod to see if something works.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#199

Post by aix1 »

jelling wrote: post #98
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”.

If someone was L+1 at a similar-tier company, why would they accept the downlevelling instead of a finding a suitable gig elsewhere? Is Amazon that appealing? Are openings that scarce?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#200

Post by rantwasp »

exikyut wrote: post #169
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 socia…

tell me about a time you delivered awesome results while operating out of a pocket of badness
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