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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#261

Post by epolanski »

muststopmyths wrote: post #159
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…

>but I know of other teams who would have no issues in taking in a fresh college grad, making them do work for 6-12 months and then just randomly putting them on PIP. stack ranking came up in another thread a few days ago and this practice of forced attrition seems like just another way to do the same thing. I thought it was understood that this kind of structure just incentivizes internecine fighting and politics ov…

> It seems like the more employees you have under you, the less you see them as human beings instead of inputs and outputs

I mean, there's a department in most companies called "human *resources*" to give away that employees are still resources, just human ones.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#262

Post by nkozyra »

grumple wrote: post #260
nkozyra wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Well then the point about leetcode doesn't mean much here.

Yes, most companies do coding assessments, but that doesn't mean it's ironic that the comment was posted on leetcode itself.

My experience with Amazon had no self guided coding assessment, it involved a human guiding you through a problem or multiple problems.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#263

Post by lucasyvas »

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.

As someone with one of those two on his resume, I'd say you are not wrong.

That said, it's a bit more nuanced. It still looks good if you can share experiences that prove why it's good.

Ex. "I learned what it's like to be closer to the cutting edge in some respects, but I also learned how that should be secondary to delivering a good product and good customer service due to issues X, Y, Z observed. Also, using technology A is great, but it might not be worth your investment at current stage."

This kind of statement illustrates that you learned multiple things of value, and hopefully avoided bad habits and are pragmatic and worth having. It's possible they can leverage your experience to avoid making mistakes in the next growth stage.

So, yes, it doesn't always look good immediately. It's up to you to prove to a questioner why it was good and hopefully they also agree.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#264

Post by whateveracct »

dustingetz wrote: post #226
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…

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!

I mean you can also ship a lil slower.

Startup founders and management types are obsessed with optimizing dev time at a day/hour granularity though in my personal experience, so it's a lost cause.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#266

Post by angry_octet »

perryizgr8 wrote: post #107
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 might have been true at some point in the past, but it is increasingly changing. In Bangalore, especially in tech companies, it is not a big deal to get fired. You can easily get offers within a week if you are any good.

Yes it is changing fast, but that doesn't mean your parents understand, or mainstream companies.

It's probably better to understand that these jobs are temporary and always be hunting for your next gig, but it is against the cultural norm, where your uncle works at the same PSU he started at after graduation. It probably doesn't help that every IIT graduate is expected to earn 1 Cr.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#267

Post by imwillofficial »

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…

I’m agreeing with the “it’s not us” vibe. I work on a team that has some planet wide scale software pipelines.

I broke it, hard. I’m not a software engineer so I had no idea how to undo what I had done.

People from 3 different teams, two of them experts from other teams who heard my call for help hopped on a call and spent all day helping me fix the issue I made and then some. This was a hard stop on a cortical package pipeline for 24 hours and at no point did I feel like my job was at stake despite it clearly being my fault, and due to me running a command I know I shouldn’t have and cutting corners.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#268

Post by TimPC »

ucm_edge wrote: post #258
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…

If you bombed your interview amazing candidate could be code for they need someone to hire to fire.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#269

Post by DangitBobby »

alisonkisk wrote: post #78

Article does not support headline. Even if you don't stay at Amazon for many years, that doesn't mean your career is over or worse than having not worked there. Also, it's about Amazon India, so take care before generalizing globally.

You're ignoring the part about the impact the psychological toll will have on your ability to perform and the fact that you can't use your manager there as a reference since they've intentionally railroaded you and have fake peer reviews on file that do the same thing.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#270

Post by amazon_throw »

ixaxaar wrote: post #242
hitekker wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This went from "weird, defensive throwaway" to "possible Amazon HR agent" in 5 seconds. I think asking for the name of someone's former manager on a public forum without giving any details in return is pretty suspect. For those who aren't already aware, Amazon has a history of covertly paying its employees to "represent" the company in social media: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26636021

> It sucks that this author had this experience, and I wish they had said which team that was, so that I could use what social cachet I have to steer people clear of it from inside. Nobody should have that experience. "I have soft power". Suspicious indeed.

No, far from it; I'm not HR, nowhere close, but I am senior enough that people sometimes listen to me. I'd like to make things better for people if I can, and part of that is "knowing where the problems are". Believe me or don't, it's no skin off my ass, but that's the opposite of my goal.
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