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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#211

Post by rantwasp »

midhhhthrow wrote: post #158

I can’t possibly imagine why anyone would ever go work at Amazon. How low would your prospects have to sink in order to make someone do that to themselves? I suppose if you’re completely homeless and in danger of starvation. Personally, I’d rather eat the weeds that form on the sidewalk or probably go dumpster diving. That’s much more dignified than working at amazon. Just imagine the damage you’re doing to your resu…

well… you’re being downvoted.

first: if you were truly homeless and in danger if starvation you’d work there. it’s also not cool to diminish people because they’re homeless.

second: having Amazon on your resume is not bad. It shows that you can work hard and if you managed to survive in there you’re probably thrive in other environments.

third: overall I agree with the sentiment you are expressing

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#212

Post by pnutjam »

lucasyvas wrote: post #63
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…

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.

I think this is because Amazon loves to churn teams.

My team, not Amazon, had alot of churn when I joined. Basically a full turn over within a year. We lost alot of institutional knowledge and had to reverse engineer stuff all over the place.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#214

Post by notacoward »

ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #198
notacoward wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes, everyone should release code and watch metrics etc. but I think that's at the very edge of what "testing" encompasses. Between model checking, traditional forms of testing, and shadow-traffic testing (which can test higher per-server load than prod), finding something after deploy should be like a parachute failure. Yes those happen, yes there should be a reserve, but if it happens more than once in a blue moon you have a process problem somewhere (quite likely between teams/services but still).

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#215

Post by nobleach »

I interviewed with Amazon and Facebook in the Spring/Summer of 2020. The difference was night and day. Amazon felt like I was part of a huge cattle herd. The recruiter contacted me and told me they needed to hire a bunch of people in my area. I was immediately given a course of study, link to common LeetCode questions and told I had a couple of weeks. That fine. I enjoy solving puzzles. Facebook felt VERY different. The recruiter had a conversation about career goals, told me how wonderful it is to work at FB, and then quizzed me on some basic CS concepts. The ensuing rounds for each got even more divergent. The Facebook interviewers constantly made me feel like my success was a "win" for them. It felt like a team! Amazon felt like they were waiting for me to screw up so they could disqualify me. In the end, I dropped out of Amazon because it felt disgusting. And I could tell, if this is how they bring me in, I can't see any reason why it'll magically get any better once I was "in".

My feeling on those who use LeetCode as some sort of indicator. Great. You've found the people that do the brain-teaser puzzles at Cracker-Barrel. I'm one of those people. Some of the best people I've worked with, would fail those tests immediately... yet, they've built scalable, performant enterprise software. I now see those tests as nothing more than a way to reduce the number of applicants.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#216

Post by atopuzov »

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…

I'll tell you mine, L7. Seen and experienced personally things the author describes.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#217

Post by nonamechicken »

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 has not been the case for at least the last 10+ years. I cant speak of the 'product' companies such as Microsoft, Google etc. But for anyone working in the WITCH like companies, only way to get your salary changed is to switch companies. People change their jobs every 2 years or so, especially in their first 10 years. After that, it becomes less, probably because WITCHes feast on the young ones more, making more money from them. Openings for 10+ years are very less in these companies. WITCHes hire fresh graduates and pay them very less, hardly enough to survive as a bachelor in a big city like Bengaluru. So the only way to get your salary changed is by finding another job. When a person with 2 years experience change job, they often get double of what they were getting earlier. And every job change from then on comes with a 20-40% increase. Loyalty penalty is a very real thing in these companies.

I don't think anyone in the Indian IT industry thinks jobs are careers for life. I feel like our shelf life is around 40 years of age. Only a few survive the industry after that. Sad thing is there is no social security like in US, so we are completely on our own. I was pleasantly surprised to find out that there were so many senior engineers working in US companies. In WITCH like companies, every single team I have seen are structured mostly with 0-3 years, a few 4-8 years. People with more experience expect more salary. Clients want cheap 'resources'. So, these companies hire mostly the cheaper ones.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#218

Post by Popegaf »

rantwasp wrote: post #196
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…

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

The majority cares about money and convenience. If people really cared about reputation then Riot Games, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, that big ride sharing company whose name slipped my mind, Shell, and lots of other companies, would be struggling to hire.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#219

Post by nobleach »

markus_zhang wrote: post #201
nobleach wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's built into the culture to ship, ship, ship. Shipped code is better than good code, or clean code, or fast code. At my last job, the C-level was fascinated by Amazon success stories. They wanted to achieve the same success, so they urged us to ship, ship, ship. Unfortunately, we were all very seasoned engineers, and we knew the nightmare that would ensue if we purposely piled on the tech debt. The part of this ar…

I think this culture is OK or even good to a company in start-up because you have to be quick. Once it grow into maturity those rules should be abandonned.

There are a few problems with that approach. One is that there is rarely a good time to say, "ok, we've proven that this idea works, let's now go back and do it correctly". It's a constant stream of fixes on a system that "already works". Secondly, telling management that a team was able to go fast previously, but is now going to start being slow so that things can be done correctly, is a quick way to be shown the door. This is evidenced by Amazon and that thousand line Java method that's probably existed for 10 years. Finding that time where you're mature enough to switch gears never seems to happen in practice.

I now advocate a "cut corners, cut scope, but do NOT cut quality" approach. Unit tests do not take much longer to write - but they pay dividends when it's time to refactor. I'm now back in a startup where the code was written with that "just ship it" attitude. The code is so terrible that it can take days to fix a bug. I can rewrite entire features (correctly) in that amount of time.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#220

Post by rantwasp »

Popegaf wrote: post #218
rantwasp wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Also, IMHO Amazon is going to have a really hard time hiring people with the reputation they created for themselves. The majority cares about money and convenience. If people really cared about reputation then Riot Games, Microsoft, Tesla, Facebook, that big ride sharing company whose name slipped my mind, Shell, and lots of other companies, would be struggling to hire.

hmm. Do Microsoft or Tesla pay well? Last time I interviewed at M$ I had to turn down their offer because of how bad the comp was.
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