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Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

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Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#291

Post by SheinhardtWigCo »

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…

I don’t get this. In this market, if you’re good, why take a job with any on-call work? It’s thankless, shitty work. If you can deliver features, that’s good enough to get paid extremely well at other Amazon-scale companies with dedicated SRE teams. What’s making you stay?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#292

Post by hintymad »

tylersmith wrote: post #287
hintymad wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What I don’t get about Amazon is that AWS customers have way less oncall load, particularly Netflix, whose engineers could afford oncall 24x7 for weeks or months with perfectly normal work-life balance. Why can’t Amazon, the pioneer of cloud computing, achieve the same level of effectiveness?

Maybe I'm misunderstanding you but AWS customer's eningeers have less oncall load because the AWS engineers are doing so much of the difficult and failure-prone work. That's largely what you're buying when paying for cloud services.

What I meant was that Netflix built their platforms and services on top of AWS services, just like AWS teams. Yet AWS teams have brutal oncalls, while Netflix teams enjoy great work-life balance.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#293

Post by AgoRapide »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #140
martindbp wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The vast majority of people would be under performing without even noticing at 4.5 hrs. Yet somehow, everyone thinks they're part of the 1% that has some magic genetic fix for this. Sort of like how 80% of people think they're above average at driving.

The last sentence is brilliant! Sometimes, I feel I am the only person that I know who admits to being a terrible driver. I am so easily distracted by beautiful nature, construction sites, other car crashes, whatever... Thank goodness I never had an accident, but many close calls. As a result, I try to drive as little as possible.

Average is not the same as mode. 99.9% of people (at least) have more arms than the average for instance.

So yes, theoretically 80% may be better at driving than the average, it is just so that the other 20% are even worse at it.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#294

Post by pc86 »

martindbp wrote: post #11
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I started today with 4.5 hours of sleep and I’ll do just great with that. Once a week my body grabs 10-14 hours in a single night to “catch up”.

The vast majority of people would be under performing without even noticing at 4.5 hrs. Yet somehow, everyone thinks they're part of the 1% that has some magic genetic fix for this. Sort of like how 80% of people think they're above average at driving.

Given the average driver, imagine how bad that other 20% must be.

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#295

Post by visarga »

varispeed wrote: post #272
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…

The problem is that this is a "factory worker" mindset applied to creative and IP based work. When a factory worker makes a chair, company does not profit from it indefinitely. When a developer creates code he or she gets paid once, but company profits forever. So even if they fire a developer, they still are profiting the from work they did. Question is, why developers sign IP transfer and royalty waiver in their co…

> When a developer creates code he or she gets paid once, but company profits forever.

Forever usually being 1-5 years?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#296

Post by SilurianWenlock »

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.

"Big companies breed big company problems that can leave engineers poorly equipped for the rapid delivery world of startups/scaleups. "

Why are big company employees not suited (or trained for?) to startup like environments?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#297

Post by chewzerita »

steelframe wrote: post #143
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

I'm at the point of my career where it's all about the manager, the hours, the comp, and the kind of work I'll be doing. I no longer care as much about the title or level. In fact if the level is lower, great -- I'll have an even easier time getting high perf scores. These days, when I negotiate for a new job in Big Tech, I first and foremost maximize base pay. That's [1] immediate (no waiting for vest or anything),…

> After that, I make sure I won't be carrying a pager that can ever "go off" in the middle of the night. That's a non-negotiable for me at this point in my career.

I'm currently in undergrad so starting my actual "career" still seems far enough off for me, but serious question how do people actually accept that? Will I have to accept that when I apply for junior/entry level positions? I don't think I'm asking too much if I want to have a full night sleep and a strong work/life divide. I might be a bit young and naive, but I hope I won't get comfortable with living at the beck and call of my employer. People are more than just their individual contribution to lining the pockets of their bosses, no?

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#298

Post by irateswami »

amazon_throw wrote: post #271
tmarthal wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> seem to have hit one of these areas of toxicity yourself Have you considered that the original poster's experience is actually the norm and that your experience is the one that is the anomaly? I was 1 for 2 in organizations with shitty leadership, and the organization that was run properly had zero open headcount. Everywhere people are hiring into is not one of the "good ones". Check out the old-fart tool, 85% of t…

I have considered it. I don't see the pattern widely, and I'm watching for it. I've seen teams implode because of it, and other toxic patterns, so it's not that they're not there... they just seem to be in the minority. There are teams I won't send friends to work for, for sure.

Found Bezo's account

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#299

Post by FredPret »

f6v wrote: post #60
pc86 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This might be a dumb question but if it's standard to drop everyone a level (I've heard this too) is it possible to interview for Principal or something where they would drop you back to Staff?

I’d interview for CEO instead and see where that lands me.

Funny but also not a bad approach to life

Re: Hire-to-fire at Amazon India?

#300

Post by jjtheblunt »

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…

Current Amazon engineer: it's far and away the most incompetently run bureaucracy with self-defeating dysfunctions forced on the huge number of layers. The recent "leaks" to Business Insider, pointed out to me by coworkers, are exactly what we see.

Everything the parent comment mentioned is exactly what we see. Laughably, our middle manager berates us as incapable noobs, entirely unaware that some of us at least actually have been very valued and trusted and dependable hard core results driven engineers for decades. It's like a failed brainwashing attempt, and it's embarrassing to be associated with such idiocy.

I contrast it with excellent experiences at Sun, Motorola, Apple and others over the past 20+ years, where in some cases I had very high engineering ranks with fabulous results, in very well run and just healthy orgs.

I do believe there's intentional treatment of engineers as fungible assets, because the engineering quality is so shoddy and the business plan prioritizes maintaining system uptime, with no true priority given to tech debt removal, which actually would in short order surface measurable benefits.

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