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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#251

Post by Copernicron »

cduzz wrote: post #72

An important lesson I've learned is to ask in the interviews "how is employee performance evaluated?" If the response is blather about 360 peer review, be wary. Also scan all available information about if they perform any stack ranking. I worked at a place where managers would bring in other people just so they could meet their "must fire" quotas but keep their existing teams intact. I left shortly thereafter. An or…

360 peer reviews are such bullshit. I've seen it happen where strong developers on a team of strong developers stagnate at the same level for years while mediocre developers surrounded by terrible developers get promoted. It all comes down to who's evaluating you and who you're in good with. It has nothing at all to do with how good you actually are.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#252

Post by pyuser583 »

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?

London School of Economics ;)

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#253

Post by shadowlight »

burlesona wrote: post #106
pc86 wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This isn't specific to Bezos, and it's not specific to any particular class or type of "worker." If Bezos could double his money today with zero work he'd certainly do it. The family business down the road would cut every employees' salary in half tomorrow if it could. It's just the free market, nothing particularly interesting or scary about it. Everyone wants to get the absolute best deal for themselves, and some a…

There are a LOT of small business owners who choose to pay their employees more than they “have” to because they genuinely want to. There are a LOT of entrepreneurs who see “making my company a great place to work” as one of the core values of their job. I don’t think this is so common when you were talking about mega companies, in part because the work of operating a mega company is a lot less fun than a smaller com…

>Remember that the vast majority of capitalism is little businesses like your local veterinarian or florist, not FAANG.

That is the vast minority. Corporations dictate much of the business in the states and the world. It's really easy to see this without resorting to statistics.

What is the ratio of your friends who work for corporations vs. the amount that own/work for small businesses? The anecdotal percentage here is a good indicator of the real percentage of economic output produced by corporations vs. small businesses.

You will find that as how most of your friends direct their own economic output in service of corporations so does most of America.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#254

Post by jwilber »

curation wrote: post #38

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

Oh man, these “I don’t dream of labor” types are so fucking cringe, lol.

Also condescending!

A close friend of mine beat cancer as a child. Ever since then he’s dreamed of working in oncology, and is finishing school just this year. He’s very excited, and I’m happy to see his career goals coming to fruition.

Other examples abound.

I find, in my social circle anyway, the type who ask, “who dreams of careers?” are usually the type to have had cushy upbringings that afford them the ability to ignore dreaming of finding stable, well-paying careers. Let alone the mission-style careers I described earlier. Must be nice.

In any case, I’ve worked on teams in both Amazon and AWS. Have not experienced the described culture. However, I’ve only ever worked in science roles/orgs, and I hear the difference between science and software (particularly product) can be quite stark.

As others have mentioned: most variation is based on your manager and skip-level manager.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#255

Post by zrail »

wiredfool wrote: post #147
zrail wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm a parent to two small children. Sleep is incredibly important but I think I probably have another year at least of seven hours interrupted at least once as my normal. It sucks.

It was an amazing feeling when the interrupted nights stopped, after roughly 9 years over three kids.

Youngest is 2.5. Oldest quit interrupting on a regular basis when she was 3.5. Hoping youngest will follow trend but I have no expectations at this point.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#256

Post by nobleach »

baby wrote: post #241
nobleach wrote: post #215

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.…

I interviewed with google, fb, and amazon and fb really felt like the more human interview of the three. Now, do I like the leetcode/system designs interviews of fb? Nope. But definitely the least bad.

The biggest problem I have with those "canned" systems, is that there's no real conversation. I have a REALLY hard time even understanding what's being asked. In a real environment, I can ask probing questions. I have had to do a TON of HackerRank, LeetCode, and Code Katas to get used to how the questions are framed. But, I definitely enjoy solving those types of puzzles.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#257

Post by itg »

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…

Depends on the team. In my team in AWS, if something was your fault, the manager would call you out in front of the entire team. Then they wondered why attrition was so high.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#258

Post by ucm_edge »

nobleach wrote: post #215

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.…

I had a similar experience at Amazon. About midway through the onsite at Amazon I kind of decided "I don't think I'd like working here and I already have other offers, so my brain will be going into neutral now." and kind of checked out. Felt very much like the interviewers didn't want to be in the room with me and just wanted me to fuck up so they could click "No hire" in the HR app and get out.

Walked out figuring I probably wouldn't get an offer, but given they apparently needed a ton of people maybe they'd down level me and offer (I figured I'd checked out to the point there was no way I'd get that SDE III level offer).

Recruiter actually sent me a very nasty email accusing me of wasting her time, I must be a bad engineer who over sold my experience, blah blah blah. Made it sound like I was blacklist for life. Three weeks later a hiring manager emails me and is like "So I found your interview notes in our internal database, you look like an amazing candidate and I want to fast track your hire onto my team."

I have no idea what is going on Amazon, I mean they built AWS so this must work on some level, but I just have such a bad taste in my mouth from my experience I don't want in on it. Maybe it's working as intended in that they want a process that skews toward hiring certain personality types so having other folks self select out is a win for them. Although I get pinged by them 2x a month and regularly offered fast track hirings based on those notes from that interview I did 14 months ago which is also weird. Which makes me think it's more likely their hiring a mess and they survive via throwing money at the problem and big old RSU offers at candidates.

e: Actually not 14 months, it was pre COVID lockdown, so even further back.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#259

Post by tablespoon »

TedDoesntTalk wrote: post #92
lucasyvas wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!

> Don’t conflate corporate size with engineering competency. It’s counter-intuitive, but oh so common to see this. That’s why so many engineers want to work for start ups!

I thought start ups were all about letting tech debt pile up like there's no tomorrow, since there might literally be no tomorrow for them.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#260

Post by grumple »

nkozyra wrote: post #205
datalus wrote: post #5

Is it ironic that Amazon uses leetcode for their programming screeners?

Maybe in India but I don't recall leetcode being involved at all in my process.

I'm in the US and have been approached by multiple recruiters who explained the the first part of hiring was a leetcode-like online assessment, and a later part of the process was a full day onsite (which I understood to be leetcode-like, or systems design questions, just like other big tech companies). I did not actually go through the process.

They might not be using leetcode.com itself, but they are doing similar things.

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