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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#221

Post by amazon_throw »

atopuzov wrote: post #216
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.

Like I said, I don't doubt that they happen, but given that you've also left the company and seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself, I'm not surprised you'd think so. Who was your last manager? I'm curious if it's anybody I know?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#222

Post by hinkley »

curation wrote: post #38

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

Despite ballooning tuitions, software development is still a career that people of modest means can aspire to.

That we don’t talk about it more here I think says something about how you only talk about escaping in certain company. You can’t pass for upper class if people know where you come from.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#223

Post by buss »

I worked at Amazon years ago (2010-2012) on the retail website search navigation. I didn't like it, but it was nowhere near as bad as this hyperbolic post.

Joining Amazon was the best thing I could have done with my career at that stage in my life. I learned a ton! But the culture does grind you down, especially when your alternatives are much more cushy.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#224

Post by bpicolo »

rantwasp wrote: post #181
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/experiment…

I use reducing the rate of incoming tickets as the primary OKR for on-call engineers. Has never failed to reduce that burden over time. Just like you say - I'm convinced it's the only correct strategy to make the problem go away.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#225

Post by polotics »

zorked wrote: post #82
wpietri wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AWS is pretty reliable for the most part so I am pretty surprise that the code quality is that bad. I'm not totally surprised because of two factors: very stable product definitions and lots and lots of users. A number of years back, I was talking with people at a famous and popular site with a broad audience. I asked them how much unit testing they did. They said that particular isolated pieces sometimes had tests…

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.

Tell that to the millisecond of testing in production that makes the MRI fry the patient's brain, to the one that trades one trillion instead of one thousand naked puts, to the nuclear armaggedon launch check that canaries humanity...

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#226

Post by dustingetz »

nobleach wrote: post #179
markus_zhang wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm always surprised why industry leads (like Amazon) sometimes treat their products as an amateur treats his/her weekend projects. This is definitely not the worst as I know one of the leading options marketmaker has been using a giant shit mountain of MS Access/Excel VBA code to run their system since the 90s. Last time I heard about it (a few years ago) they are planning to replace that shit mountain with somethin…

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…

Shipping tech debt should be compared to the realistic alternative which is never shipping at all. The solution is not to ship slower, but to attract a better team and then retain them. They say the CEO's #1 job is recruiting and this is why. Actually more important is growing your revenue faster, if revenue compounds faster than debt then you're good!

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#227

Post by VRay »

lumost wrote: post #207
papito wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

American capitalism is built on employee heroics, but at least you can get the AWS stamp on your resie, which, let's be honest, will make you the "it" girl of job hunting.

This works when the company is hot, but eventually it's not. When the last time you saw HP, or IBM positively on a resume? Big companies breed big company problems that can leave engineers poorly equipped for the rapid delivery world of startups/scaleups.

"HP" or "IBM" carry a lot more weight on a resume than something like "BF Consulting Ltd"

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#228

Post by alwayshasbeen »

I was contacted by an Amazon recruiter some month back. The experience was so unpersonal, I felt like a soulless robot: I just got a link to a HackerRank test and solved some automated puzzles with no one but me and the clock ticking. How I understand coding tests is that there should be a human being that evaluates how you approach a problem, not a fully automated assignment.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#230

Post by cduzz »

ghaff wrote: post #80
a4isms wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All true, but I’m not comparing a business-class hotel to a B&B, I’m comparing one kind of hotel to another. All the major chains have offerings in both markets I describe: 1. Hotels that appeal to guests who pay their own way, and; 2. Hotels that appeal to companies with business travel needs. The second type of hotel has the massive machine hidden from guests.

Certainly all the business class hotels have the ability to reserve room blocks, cater events, pre-book rooms, etc. But those are essentially additional profit centers. I'm just saying that many/most of us essentially deal with hotels 1:1 even for business travel. But, yes, there are some brands of e.g. Marriott that are in part oriented to corporate events and the like and other that are mostly for individual travel…

My wife and I were recently escorted from a Ritz (a sub-brand of Marriot);

We were paying in points (a lot of points), they checked us in but still couldn't figure out their back-office payment processing or something because they confronted us at 9:00pm and asked us to swipe a card because "they couldn't verify the certificate"

After much back and forth between us and the front office and a customer support rep on the phone (who repeatedly suggested that the "certificate" was there and valid), we decided we didn't really want to deal with the hassle of staying where we were being treated like criminals.

I went up to get our stuff from our room and my card had been deactivated; I had be escorted to the room by a member of the Ritz security staff to get our luggage.

So, you're not really assured a good experience no matter where you stay.

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